This is not my recipe; it comes from a Pillsbury cookbook that belonged to my mother, and it was transcribed by me into my cookbook on March 7, 1986.

Banana Bread

makes one loaf

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 mashed bananas (overripe)
1/4 cup butter
2 tablespoons orange juice
1/4 teaspoon lemon juice (optional)
1 egg
1/4 to 1/2 cup raisins

Heat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour the bottom of a 9″x5″ or 8″x4″ pan. In a large bowl, blend all ingredients. Beat 3 minutes at medium speed. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake for 60 to 70 minutes. Toothpick check.

Four miniature loaves can be made by using 5″ x 1 1/2″ pans or soup cans. Bake 35 to 40 minutes.

I have never made miniature loaves. Also, I usually use less salt, and I never, ever (unless I’m making it for my mom) add raisins. No no no.

As for the version I made on Sunday:

I used very, very overripe bananas, as I usually do. In fact, they were bananas I had put in the fridge thinking I’d make banana bread really soon and thus chose the fridge over the freezer. I did not make banana bread soon, so these were the ultimate in slimey and unappetizing. It is fine. You can use the worst bananas in the world.

In this case, I actually only had 2 bananas, so I threw in some unsweetened applesauce that I happened to have in order to add the extra moisture. I also did not have orange juice, so I threw in a little lemon juice (I didn’t measure) and added some more sweetener. I was just going to add more sugar, but I’d put the sugar away, and the maple syrup was right there, so I added maybe a teaspoon of that. Again, I didn’t measure.

I usually use my handmixer, but I don’t bother to time things. When I lived with my mother, I used her KitchenAid mixer. I’ve also made it entirely by beating by hand, with a spoon or an egg beater. This works better if your bananas are, as above, seriously soft, and if you melt the butter first, or at least soften it quite a bit. I have never noticed any great difference resulting from softening or melting the butter, if that is your concern. This is a forgiving sort of recipe. I have been making it now for almost 25 years, which is rather astounding.

Enjoy!

As it happens, I’d been thinking just the other day about how grateful I am that I have never been pregnant and thus have never needed to get an abortion. And that got me thinking about what I would do in such a situation now that I live in the boonies. I grew up in Iowa City, home of the fabulous Emma Goldman Clinic, which currently makes its home in the building once inhabited by my pediatrician’s office. My sophomore year of high school, I joined 400 or so other Iowa Citians outside the clinic when 40 members of Operation Rescue came to town to protest. Someone across the street put Madonna on their boom box and aimed it out the window, and a bunch of us went over to dance to “Papa Don’t Preach,” an odd choice, I suppose, in the circumstances, except that it does contain the line, which we all yelled loudly, “I made my CHOICE!” There’s a newspaper photo of me standing at a Roe v. Wade anniversary rally on the history wall there, and when I used to go there for an annual exam, they’d all say how much they’d liked my most recent column.

Well. I do not live a few blocks away from Emma anymore. In fact, as it turns out, in order to get an abortion, I’d have to go to Billings, two and a half hours away and in another state. I’d have to take a day off work, and get someone to drive me up there, and come up with the money (given that my health insurance won’t pay for psychiatric care, I can’t imagine that it would cover abortion). It would be a pain, but I could do all that. I have money, and friends, and sick leave. Not everyone is so lucky.

Shortly after the passage of Roe v. Wade, my great-grandmother, Harriette Glasner, had a similar realization, and she started Emergency Medical Assistance, a fund that still helps poor women in Florida get abortions. It is one of many such funds around the country, many of them small and local, dedicated to trying to provide the kind of options that I have always taken for granted to women who have never had those options.

So this year for Mother’s Day, with their approval, I made a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds in honor of my mother and grandmother, and in memory of my great-grandmother. These are the women who raised me, a child who was very much wanted and who was loved and helped out at every turn. My wish for Mother’s Day is that every woman be able to make the choice to become a mother, and that every child be wanted as I was, and have mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers like mine.

me & Bill Ayers

To Laura —
With hope — wounded but alive — for a world at peace and in balance.
Best,
Bill Ayers

Ayers’s memoir is only in part an account of his fugitive days. The rest of it is a political autobiography — the story of a person who was born into enormous wealth and privilege after World War II and who went from rather pedestrian boyhood concerns to being concerned with, and appalled by, his country’s involvement in a place called Vietnam, and its callous disregard for those who lived in poverty, those who were born with the wrong color of skin, those who lived and died for his country’s mistakes.

Some readers of this blog will know of Bill Ayers from back when this memoir was published; others from even before that, but most Americans know who he is because his name came up so frequently in the 2008 election. He’s the terrorist Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of palling around with. He was a founding member of the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground (whoo hoo feminism!), which is what part of Students for a Democratic Society became after its disastrous 1969 convention in Chicago.* The Weather people were responsible for a string of bombings of various targets, including the United States Capitol, although the only lives they ever destroyed were there own, in a botched bomb-making attempt in a New York City townhouse. They were, as terrorist organizations go, actually extremely careful not to take lives with their bombs, although it’s not entirely clear that that was the original intent. The bomb that killed three of their members in that townhouse was packed with nails — it was their imitation of the same kind of anti-personnel bomb that the United States was using in Vietnam.

Ayers’s book was published on September 11, 2001. I interviewed him, by phone, for what had been planned as a simple review of his memoir for a local alternative paper, a day or two later. The first thing I remember doing, after learning about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, is making a peace sign in the window of my apartment out of masking tape. It stayed there for the next two years. The next things I remember are lying on my futon sofa, listening to NPR and realizing that any chance for peace was far flimsier than my improvised sign. I remember sitting on that same sofa and talking on the phone to Bill Ayers about what a terrible, terrible time it was.

Last Wednesday, April 28, Bill Ayers spoke on the campus of the University of Wyoming, on what would have been my father’s eighty-seventh birthday. Few people are in a position to realize both the irony of that coincidence and its deep appropriateness.

Ayers had been invited to speak earlier in the month by the Social Justice Research Center at the University of Wyoming. Protests poured in — to the University, to sundry officials, even to the governor, and as a result, the Center’s director withdrew the invitation. Shortly thereafter, a University of Wyoming student invited Ayers back to speak on campus. The University of Wyoming said they would not allow him to speak. The student booked an alternative venue, just in case, and Ayers and the student sued the University. The Casper Star Tribune has a collection of articles on the controversy; WyoFile has a more succinct account with links to the final decision by Chief Wyoming US District Judge William F. Downes, a decision which will cheer you greatly and give you hope for the future if, like me, you are a fan of the First Amendment. “When the Weather Underground was bombing the Capitol of the United States in 1971,” Judge Downes writes,

I served in the uniform of my country. Like many of my fellow veterans of that era, even to this day, when I hear the name of that organization, I can scarcely swallow the bile of my contempt for it. The fact remains Mr. Ayers is a citizen of the United States who wishes to speak. He need not offer any more justification than that. The controversy surrounding the past life of Professor Ayers and the widely held public perception of his past conduct cannot serve as a justification to defrock him of the guarantees of the First Amendment.The Bill of Rights is a document for all seasons. We don’t just display it when the weather is fair and put it away when the storm is tempest. To be a free people, we must have the courage to exercise our constitutional rights. To be a prudent people, we have to protect the rights of others, recognizing that that is the best guarantor of our own rights.

In April 1969, when the Weathermen were not yet a fully formed idea, some students at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa, decided to turn the American flag upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War. The move, in the context of that time, was not even that radical. The Iowa Young Democrats — Democrats! — had passed a resolution at their convention earlier that year stating that all schools should be encouraged to fly the flag upside down, at half staff — the signal for a ship in distress — for the duration of the war as a symbol of a country in distress. The Grinnell chief of police, however, did see it as a radical act, and he, along with the Poweshiek County sheriff and two sheriff’s deputies came to campus to confiscate the flag. Students organized quickly, with one group going to talk to the President of the college, one group going to write, print, and distribute flyers explaining their action in the community, and one group going to law enforcement headquarters to recapture the flag.

The flag did arrive back on campus, only to be turned upside down and then righted again. My father spent the next two days, from dawn to dusk, standing vigil next to that flag to ensure that no one could turn it upside down again. Some of his students came to stand with him, and eventually convinced him to let them take turns so he could get food, or at least use the bathroom.

My father is generally described as “making the John Birch Society look a little pink around the edges,” and while he did not live long enough for me to solicit his opinions on the Weather Underground, I can guess with great assurance that his opinion would be, if possible, lower than that of Judge Downes. But I like to think that he would have agreed with Downes in another way: I like to think that he would have agreed that Ayers should be allowed to speak, and I like to think that he would, as an academic, shared my disgust with the University of Wyoming for refusing to allow the speech.

I am an odd case for a radical. I was raised on dead white men, and I chose to study them when I got to college. I read the same texts my father did — sometimes from the same books he read — but I came to utterly different conclusions about the world. When I was little, I liked to imagine that heaven was a sort of endless tea/cocktail party, set in brownstone buildings on cobblestone streets, where like minded — and un-like-minded — people would gather to converse and argue. I always liked to imagine my father hanging out with Plato and Aristotle and Samuel Johnson and Thoreau. This is a vision of heaven that I think could only be dreamt up by a faculty brat, and I’m sure it’s far from many people’s ideal. I like to think that someday, though, I may sit around a coffee table with my father and Judge Downes and Bill Ayers and hash over all these things.

In the meantime, I, too, wish for a world at peace and in balance.

*The Weathermen are often blamed for the downfall of SDS, but they don’t deserve all of the credit. I’ve read far more history of student activism in the 1960s than any sane person should, and it’s evident from many accounts that the tactics of the Progressive Labor Party were at least as destructive as the Weathermen were at that convention. As it so happens, I watched the same group use exactly the same tactics to attempt to derail the national convention of United Students Against Sweatshops in the same city thirty-two years later.

This morning’s fumble was that the person appointed to do the first reading inadvertently read the second reading, so when it came time for me to do that, I figured I’d better read the first one, and I’m glad that I did, because it might have passed over me otherwise. The sermon dealt almost exclusively with the Gospel, which was the story of Doubting Thomas, but it was the first lesson, from Acts, that caught me.

When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

We are witnesses to these things. That was the line that struck me: We are witnesses to these things, and we must teach about them.

This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the Students Against Sweatshops sit in at the University of Iowa, in which I participated and about which I wrote at great length at the time; the week was covered much more succinctly by the UE News (I am third from the left in the photo). Many of us who were involved did a little reminiscing about it on Facebook on Thursday, the anniversary of the arrests.* Several days later, I am still thinking about it.

The sit-in did not mark the end of the struggle, which continued for more than a year and, which continues today. A few weeks after the sit-in, we held a silent protest in front of Jessup Hall every day at noon for a week or two. We each wore taped to us a sign identifying a worker who had been abused in a sweatshop, and we wore red tape over our mouths to signify the various ways in which we, and they, had been silenced. I have a picture from one of those days, May 4, 2000, which was also the thirtieth anniversary of the killings at Kent State, and one of our number had made a sign commemorating those students, and the ones killed at Jackson State a few days later who are so often forgotten.

Today’s Gospel lesson is perhaps more relevant than I had first thought. Most of us had not seen sweatshop labor firsthand, and yet we believed. We were trying to stand as witnesses, that others might believe.

Mostly they didn’t, or rather they did but they didn’t think our solutions were the right ones, or they thought our solutions would cost the University a lot of money. At that time, the head basketball coach, Steve Alford, had a contract with the University and Nike guaranteeing him a base salary of $900,000 a year, a third of which was to be paid by Nike — unless for any reason Nike did not feel like paying, in which case the University had to make up the different. Kirk Ferentz had a similar contract with Reebok. We wanted the University to hold the people who made Hawkeye apparel (there are, or were, even Hawkeye coffins!) to certain basic standards: people who made the stuff should be paid a living wage and allowed to take bathroom breaks and not forced to take pregnancy tests and allowed to form unions and not have to work twelve hour shifts or work in buildings without proper fire exits. All of that and more still goes on, and we never thought we would end the practices single-handedly. The anti-sweatshop movement targeted collegiate apparel for strategic reasons — it’s a huge market, and the people who produce it are licensed to do so by schools, schools that frequently have human rights policies and thus a sort of lever that we could push. Of course, as you’ve seen, they also have hundred thousand dollar contracts with companies who are very interested in the status quo. The battle at the University of Oregon, alma mater of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, was particularly wrought: Phil Knight pulled a planned $30 million donation to renovate a stadium because of the University followed through with one of the protesters’ demands.

I was explaining the whole situation, or as much of it as could be explained during idle post-church coffee hour chat, to some people today, and they asked if we got what we wanted. That’s a hard question to answer. We had three demands; the administration gave in to the first one during the sit in. Over the course of the next year they gave in to the next one, sort of. (It dealt with drafting a specific Code of Conduct for licensees; the Code was written, but six companies (including Nike) were allowed to sign a “clarified” Code, one with modifications that stripped it completely of its purpose.** Our actions, and those of the many other students at many other schools, and our many allies, eventually resulted in changes at one factory in Mexico. It’s not much.

But, as the song goes, I think many of us got what we needed. We were fighting not for ourselves but for others, for people we had never met and never would, and I would like to think our efforts had some effect, and that our movement was one of solidarity and not simply of privileged white kids play-acting at revolution, although there was inevitably a certain amount of that. If you asked the administration or the jury that convicted us, that was all there was.

As I wrote way back then, though, that movement, and the ones that followed, and that follow to this day, gave us back tenfold what we gave to it. My work in SAS is part of who I am; in many ways it made me who I am. My understanding of bureaucracy comes from that movement, but also my understanding of courage, of camaraderie, of solidarity, and of hope.

Those of us who participated in the events of ten years ago aren’t currently occupying any buildings, at least not that I know of. But many of us are still working on the same things that led up to that occupation and that followed it — the bitter, hard, day-to-day work of teaching people and talking to people and being witnesses to these things, to poverty and exploitation, to intransigence and willful ignorance. We are witnesses to these things in a figurative sense, as we were then: we know they exist even if we have not stood on those factory floors. But we were witnesses literally to our own experience at that sit-in, to our own calling to obey an authority we considered greater than that of the building we sat in. We were witnesses to these things, and we are still here.

*Among other things, we were reminiscing about what changes technology has wrought. Back then, we had a borrowed cell phone, and to send out email updates, I had to unplug a phone in order to connect my 28.8 modem.

*I can provide documentation about the “clarified” code, but at present it would require going through some boxes and doing some scanning, as the newspapers that covered it don’t seem to have archives of the events online. (Some smart librarian will probably prove me wrong; please do post a link in the comments if you find one.)

The dorm I lived in my first few years of college had a number of what were called triples, inhabited almost exclusively by freshmen — one long room divided into two small rooms by a large wardrobe; one small room, and one larger common room. The three small rooms were bedrooms, although two of them had windows that opened into the hallway. The common room was unfurnished. I heard rumors of people who had living room sets in their common rooms, although I was not friends with any of them. I also heard that the inhabitants of one particular triple routinely “borrowed” furniture from the Rose Parlor, which was this fancy large room with ornate Victorian furniture and a baby grand piano where they served tea every afternoon and champagne to graduating seniors after spring convocation.

Our common room had no such amenities. It had a spare mattress, which we got from our student fellow (my college liked to rename everything — student fellows were what other people would call RAs, although they were assigned pretty much just to freshmen). Eventually it also had an Archie Bunker chair, brought by the father of one of my roommates, and a blue wool rug that had belonged to my mother when she was in college, which she mailed to me. My trunk sat by the window as a sort of table for my coffee pot, and tucked in one corner were two plastic crates that held my boombox on top of them and our combined music collections underneath. It was through that slightly tinny but functional boombox (a sixteenth birthday present from my mother) that I first heard Ani Difranco.

A friend of one of my roommates had loaned her a CD of Out of Range and a cassette of Imperfectly. We had them on constant repeat until the friend wanted them back, and then we made dubs of them and played those on constant repeat. I still have mine — I believe it’s in my car, which still has a tape deck. The next summer we all saw her play at the Newport Folk Festival, and we all got, or dubbed from someone who got, Not a Pretty Girl when it came out, and later Dilate and Living in Clip and Little Plastic Castle. And after that album, I must admit, my interest in her newer music waned. I don’t listen to her old music as much any more, but when I do, it is so good and so poignant, and so much the more so for having been the sound track of my first dorm room, and later my first apartment, and of the sit-in, and of so many other moments.

And sure, every young generation thinks they are different, and thinks they invented sex, and thinks all the other things you have to think before you move on to thinking about how juvenile you were when you thought those things. But they matter, and this is why Ani mattered — and still matters — to me.

I lucked out in many ways. I was born in 1975. I am in various ways a miracle of modern medicine. I got to wear pants (jeans,even!) to school, and I grew up with Free to Be. . . You and Me in a progressive college town. When I was in high school, I saw C. Everett Koop speak and I performed in an educational improv drama group that dealt with teen issues. And what I learned from all that, and from Take Back the Night and the Rape Victim Advocacy Program and the Domestic Violence Intervention Program and the Women’s Resource and Action Center was that it was okay to say no. And that is a good and important lesson, one I feel grateful for to this day.

But Ani — Ani taught me that it was also okay to say yes. Ani sang love triangle songs, and tortured artist songs, and saying no songs, and songs about things that happen when you try to say no and no one listens, and those are all good and important songs. But she also sang

the door opens, the room winces
the housekeeper comes in without a warning
i squint at the muscular motel light
and say, hey good morning
as she jumps, her keys jingle
and she leaves as quickly as she came in
i roll over and taste the pillow with my grin

and she sang

we’re in a room without a door
and i am sure without a doubt
they’re gonna wanna know
how we got in here
and they’re gonna wanna know
how we plan to get out
we better have a good explanation
for all the fun that we had
‘cuz they are coming for us, babe
and they are going to be mad
yeah they’re going to be mad at us

and she sang

‘cuz i don’t care if they eat me alive
i’ve got better things to do than survive
i’ve got a memory of your warm skin in my hand
and i’ve got a vision of blue sky and dry land

and she sang

and maybe you can keep me
from ever being happy
but you’re not going to stop me
from having fun

[lyrics from danah boyd's excellent collection]

If you are a woman in a 19th century novel, I was telling my book discussion group the other day, if you have sex out of wedlock, you get pregnant, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Sometimes you also die, like Tess, or you have to suffer the twin humiliations of wearing a scarlet A and having hundreds of terrible papers written about you.

In the 20th century, that started to change, although it has never gone away entirely. And Ani acknowledges that. If you have sex in an Ani song, you might get pregnant, you might get hurt, the guy might dump you, even later that same night, you might have to have an abortion. And she’s perfectly clear that you can say no. But what Ani made clear was that when you said yes, it was you doing it, and you still were a you — not a plot device, not that blonde who appears in the preview but doesn’t get any credits, not a symbol or an object lesson.

Ani is the person who made me think it might be okay to grow up.

tonight's dinner

I have never come close to this feat myself, although to be fair, I never try, since I usually give up and gnaw on my chicken leg about halfway through the process of eating it. I did that tonight, in fact, with the chicken leg you see pictured above.

Every few months, I buy a chicken from Cody Meat Country Store. Their meat meat all comes from within an hour radius, and I choose to believe that their chickens do, too, and that said chickens lead happy and fulfilled chicken lives before they find their way to my roasting pan. I could, of course, ask about the chickens, but that would involve me talking to people, which I generally don’t like to do, and there’s the slim possibility that it might lead me to finding out things about the chickens that I don’t want to know, and so I remain blissfully ignorant.

Nine times out of ten, I roast the chicken, which is to say that I throw it in a pan (I use a glass pan, because that is what I have), stick it in a very hot oven for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then turn the heat down and leave the thing there for another hour or so. I do not truss, because Laurie Colwin said that you do not have to. On some occasions I throw your typical roasting vegetables into the pan — some carrots, some onions, some whatever else I have that grows underground. On this occasion, I cut up a lemon and stuffed it inside the bird and sprinkled a little rosemary on top and, at some point, brushed some olive oil on the skin and then poured some mediocre white wine over the whole thing. Tonight was my second night of chicken leg-mashed potatoes-peas-carrot and beet salad. The carcass is simmering in a stock pot; the rest of the meat will most likely get used for sandwiches or some sort of chicken salad (recipe suggestions are accepted!), since I may not be quite up to making seventeen meals out of one chicken. (Or at any rate I am not up to counting them — it’s hard to say how far the chicken stock will take me.)

I derive what is perhaps an excessive amount of pleasure from food. Breakfast is probably my favorite meal of the day, and knowing I get to have breakfast when I get up is one of the only things that sometimes gets me out of bed in the morning. I used to be not really a fan of lunch, but lately I’ve been trying go with a sort of bento model, wherein I get lots of different things — this week it’s been beans and rice and salsa, jicama and orange salad, a pear, and sometimes some nuts — and that seems to improve my take on it. (That, and more or less giving up on the letters to the editor in the Casper Star-Tribune. I used to find them very entertaining (people not infrequently get called Communists), but, as is often the case, I find myself in some odd way less happy with politics when my supposed party is no longer the underdog. Now I stick to the local police reports and things are much, much happier.) And dinner! The best thing about a bad day is that dinner can still be really good. I try not to start thinking about it until after lunch, but I don’t always make it. I look forward to dinner in the way that I used to look forward to the X-Files, or Thursday nights on NBC, back in the days when I watched television. Only dinner, of course, is every night.

My grandmother once told me that after she and my grandfather got divorced, someone — a doctor, I think — told her that she had to find other things to be interested in. “And the only thing I was ever really interested in was food,” she said. That’s not true — she’s also interested in local and national politics and books and people’s wildly inaccurate ideas about the Bible (as with many agnostics I know, she knows the book quite well) and paint colors and furniture arrangement and what her family members are up to and what her imaginary cat is up to and what our ancestors were up to when they were alive and old movies and new movies and. . . I could go on. But food is one of our common bonds.

When I was very, very little, I ate almost anything put in front of me, but as I got older I began to observe my father, who was a man of extremely limited tastes. He would eat most meat, provided it wasn’t too flavorful, and he would eat potatoes and spaghetti and bread, though only if it was homemade. He liked breakfast, and he liked cheese and crackers, but the only vegetables he would eat were French cut green beans and carrot sticks, but only if they had been sitting in a little dish of water in the refrigerator for half an hour. He believed that all mushrooms were poisonous. I strove to be like my father in all things, and so gradually I stopped eating all the foods that he didn’t eat, or as many of them as my mother would let me get away with (peas, as I recall, were never optional).

My grandmother had a theory that a child would eat almost anything if it were presented in a small bite on a toothpick, and she had a box of plastic toothpicks in assorted colors for just this purpose. One year, when I was perhaps seven, and my father had been dead for two years, my grandmother was sauteeing mushrooms in butter one evening. There are few smells that rival that of mushrooms sauteeing in butter (when they first get to Narnia in The Horse and His Boy, Lewis describes the smell coming from a cabin of dwarves, the smell of eggs and sausage and mushrooms all frying together in the same pan, and, he says, in perfect Lewis fashion, “if you have not smelled that smell — and I very much hope that you have”), but there are not many. I was sniffing, somewhat conspicuously, and my grandmother asked if I might like to try just a small piece of mushroom, on a toothpick. I loved my grandmother, too, and they smelled so good, and so of course I said yes, and I was a convert from that moment on. Offer me a new food and I’ll taste it; give me a bad day and I’ll go melt some butter or some olive oil in a pot and see what I can find to add to it.

Last night I attended, in its entirety, a nearly four-hour special school board meeting to which the public was invited and encouraged to give feedback. The public showed up, in force. Our official town population is 342; our town plus the outlying areas that make up our school district brings us up to perhaps 600, and there were, I would guess, fifty or so people at last night’s meeting.

Our school, which is a K-12 school that is also its own school district (and thus we have, for our 109 students, a superintendent, a principal, a business secretary, and three other secretarial staff, which seems somewhat insane but which is apparently not the cause of the current problems), is in the same uncomfortable position as a lot of other entities in the country these days. They either have to spend $374,000 out of their reserve fund or cut 4.17 positions — or some combination of those — in order to keep going next year.

The school, like the state of Wyoming, is of course much more fortunate than many other entities. The school has a reserve fund, which many places do not. People are tearing their hair out over the idea of the University of Wyoming raising tuition this year, the first in-state tuition increase the state has seen in some time (I’d look for the numbers, but I have to head back to the school shortly for, believe it or not, another meeting). During the five years I lived in Iowa after I finished college, tuition went up by double digits every year. In many ways, I am tempted, for perhaps the first time in my life, to quote my fathers most obnoxious line: “I understand, but I don’t sympathize.”

But what I want to talk about here is not the rightness or wrongness of any particular plan of action. What I want to talk about is democracy.

Last night’s meeting was full of misunderstandings, of ancient grudges, of personal agendas — of all sorts of things that tend to derail our political discourse. But it was, for all that, remarkably free of what we now refer to, disparagingly, as rhetoric. In actuality, of course, there was lots of rhetoric, but it was rhetoric in the non-derogatory sense: it was speech that was both considered and impassioned, both personal and political. It was speech that, on more than one occasion, resulted in applause.

One of the teachers in attendance told me today that her husband said, “Gee, I’m glad we got rid of cable — this is way more entertaining!” I’m not sure that he really wants to do this sort of thing every night, but in it was entertaining. And it was important. And despite being kind of sick of four hour extensions to my 8.5 hour work day, I am glad I went.

I’ve been attending meetings of various sorts for almost twenty years now, and I am almost as fascinated by the process and organization of meetings as I am by the content of the meetings themselves. One thing I like about living here in my insanely small town is how personal a view I get of the meetings I attend here, and the way they end up emphasizing just how much I am an insider as well as just how much I am an outsider. I can’t say much more specifically about that without impugning people’s privacy in a way I don’t want to do, and so perhaps this won’t mean much at all to the people reading this. But I am, in some weird way, looking forward to heading out to tonight’s meeting, because it’s not very often that you get to see the cogs of democracy quite this close, and even though they’re a tremendous mess, they’re also, to me, an irresistible puzzle.

What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum –
Now I’m borrowed.
Now I’m numb.

–Anne Sexton, “The Addict”

I have been taking pills every day–usually twice a day, though sometimes more and sometimes less–for twenty-six years. Theophylline, the first medicine I ever took regularly, came in capsules, white on one end and clear on the other, with small white spheres inside. When I was very little, I couldn’t swallow pills, and so I mixed the contents of the capsule into yogurt, which was the only food strong enough to mask the flavor. At that time in my life, I only liked vanilla and lemon yogurt (and coffee, but I wasn’t allowed to have that), and I ate a bowl of yogurt every morning and every night. That I still like yogurt is, I think, somewhat astonishing.

I’ve since taken many other pills — and been glad, on many occasions, that they’ve developed better treatments for asthma than those old theophylline capsules, which made my heart race and my hands shake, and which my body metabolized with remarkable rapidity, so that the pills I’d taken in the morning almost never showed up in blood tests done by the allergist in the afternoon. Antihistamines, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds; brief outings with mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics, standing dates with antibiotics about once a year and over-the-counter painkillers once a month, and all manner of inhalers. My favorite pills of all time, aesthetically speaking, were some that I took only for a few short times when I was young. I don’t remember what they were for, but they were so very pretty: tiny capsules that were a translucent blue green at one end and clear on the other, with tiny pellets inside that were red and white and pink.

I think of pill-taking as a normal part of living, and I’m always slightly shocked when I hear someone complain about having to take pills. Mostly I think (and try not to say), “Oh honey, you don’t know the half of it,” because for all that smugness is an ugly emotion, the alternative is worse. The alternative is that I start thinking about how tethered I am to these pills, and to all the things that they require. It’s a bad idea to go anywhere without an inhaler, even these days, when my asthma is generally better. I try to keep a dose or two of all my medication with me at all times, too, in case I get stuck somewhere. I have to remember to get my prescriptions refilled in time, and I have to remember to arrange to pick them up in time, which is somewhat more complicated now that I live thirty miles from a pharmacy. And I have to have health insurance to help me pay for all the pills and all the visits to doctors that they require, and that in turn requires that I have a certain kind of job, and that I keep on having those kinds of jobs, lest I have a period of no coverage and thus never again get covered for those wretched “pre-exisiting conditions.”

There are a lot of reasons that I won’t ever get to go build a cabin in the woods, not the least of which is my total almost lack of practical skills, but I always blame my inability to imitate Thoreau, or to follow the leaves of grass, or what have you, on the need to have health insurance, and then I hate the people who are naturally healthy, because I imagine (quite probably incorrectly) that they do not have these problems.

Anne Sexton’s poem is about being addicted to the drugs she’s prescribed, and to death, which she feels she’s also been prescribed. I’ve been fortunate enough to escape both those fates. I often think, though, about something my mother once said — that several hundred years ago, living with depression would have been more akin to living with poor eyesight. There would be things you couldn’t do, or couldn’t do as well, with depression or myopia back then, but they would pale in comparison to the things that the modern world requires that you cannot do with untreated depression or uncorrected vision. And so I wonder, then, if all my tethers to modernity are really addictions of a sort, and if the need for the pills — or at least some of the pills — would begin to disappear if I lived a different sort of life — if I really did get to go camping and never come back, which is what I always wish at the end of a camping trip.

As I said, I try not to head down this particular path. I try to take my pills and not think about addiction and society and healthy people. That way lies madness — and I do not know if beyond the madness lies any sanity, and so far, at least, I am afraid to find out.

This week will find me spending a great deal of time hanging out at rehearsals. Every other year, the Park County Arts Council brings the Missoula Children’s Theatre to Meeteetse. Two twenty-something MCT employees sweep into town, and, in the course of four hours a day, get 35-40 kids to put on a performance by the week’s end. The plays themselves are a bit hokey — they’re all sort of funny, musical takes on fairy tales and classics. Two years ago we had Robinson Crusoe; this year it’s Pinocchio. But for one week, instead of the all sports and FFA all the time programming we normally get in this tiny town, we get theatre rehearsals, and I get to hang out on the sidelines. Officially I’m there as a representative of the Arts Council to help the MCT folks out with whatever they need, but really I’m there to experience, albeit vicariously, my very favorite feeling in the whole world: being in a show.

I was never a particularly successsful theatre geek, but I got enough roles in school and at camp over the years that I still have theatre nightmares, dreams where I’m backstage and I know I’m on in the next scene and I don’t know my lines and I don’t have my script, and I”m running around desperately trying to find a script I can look at to save myself from terminal embarrassment. I always wake up from those dreams greatly relieved, but secretly I love them, because secretly, deep down inside, I keep hoping that one day I’ll wake up as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney will be there, quivering with excitement, and saying to me, “We could get a barn and put on a show!”

I loved being in plays, even terrible plays. I loved it even though the roles I got were almost always what my college friend and I referred to as MANGAS parts — mothers and nurses, governesses and servants. The exception was camp, where I got to play men’s parts. But I didn’t care, even when I knew I’d gotten chosen for a part more for my dumpy looks than for my acting ability. I loved the feeling of creating something from nothing, of watching the people you saw every day turn into other people, and of watching how suddenly all your interactions were different. I loved it because I thrive on adrenaline and crisis, and theatre is full of both. I loved that I suddenly had a relationship with the other people in the play: I wasn’t just some girl they went to school with, or who lived in their cabin: I was a cast member.

I don’t get to do theatre any more, although in a particularly grandiose mood I’m prone to fantasize about putting on a production of Our Town here in my tiny town. But this week, the week of the Missoula Children’s Theatre residency, I get to hang out and watch it all happen in front of me, and it’s almost as good, I’m happy to say, as having it happen to me.

When I was in fifth grade, I was subjected, among other things, to a sex ed film in which the narrator informed us that if we just ate right and exercised, we wouldn’t have cramps! In class the next day, one girl noted that her mother said that was not true. I don’t remember who it was, but I would like to give her mother a placard that says No Fucking Shit. Today, despite my three days in a row of vigorous exercise and my diet of whole grains and vegetables and all that other stuff they say you should eat, was spent largely cursing God (when not cursing the county and the state legislature, but that’s another topic best saved, as JD Salinger once wrote, for when we’re both blind and drunk) and counting the minutes till I could go home and nap with a cat for a heating pad.

And this, as you may guess, is all by way of saying that, in addition to failing to exercise today, I have not much to say in general. The school here is on what I guess amounts to a basketball break — our high school girls team is at the state championship in Casper — so things are very quiet at the library. I am getting rid of some more old and decripit books. If you’d like a copy of a book about the history of manned space flight from 1981, just let me know. (People are often horrified by the idea that libraries get rid of books, but really, if you saw what I’m getting rid of, I think you’d be okay with it. Also, this is a small public library, not a major research institution. We are interested in having a) books people want to read and b) books that tell them how to do things. I am fairly sure that the Encyclopedia of Associations from 1996 and a dictionary of abbreviations from the 1980s do neither of these things.)

Pet your animals, if you have any, and they are the sort that take to petting, and stay tuned for more tomorrow.