Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.

I Peter 4:12-13

Peter Malcolm Keene Crossett

born 22 January 2012

Iowa City, Iowa

If my father were still alive, and still running the Virgil Press, his hobby letterpress in Vermont, that is the announcement I would have him print of my son’s birth. Peter was born at 6:49 pm at the same hospital where I was born just a little over thirty-six years ago. He weighed 7 lbs. 10 oz. and was 20 inches long at birth, and he emerged with a full head of silky dark hair and dark blue eyes and just a slight bruise on top of his head where they had to use a vacuum extractor to help me get him the last tiny bit of the way out. My mother, his father, and my doula, Melissa, were there to help welcome him into the world, and my friend Caitrin was with me throughout labor.

As I write this, Peter is four days old. He moves his head of his own accord, looks at things with his big eyes, eats heartily, and sleeps peacefully. He seems to be one of those mythical good babies that people talk about but almost no one has, but apparently I lucked out. Of course, I would think that no matter what, I think. We had a very long road from a strange conception to a difficult pregnancy to a very, very long labor and delivery, but we are here now, and well, and that is what matters.

The passage from the first epistle of Peter at the top was one of the readings on the Sunday before Pentecost this past year. I was five weeks pregnant and more terrified than I have ever been in my life. Peter, of course, wasn’t talking about pregnancy but rather the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the beginnings of Christian life, and other such weighty concepts. But I am hardly the first person to hear in a Bible verse what I want or need to hear, and what I needed at that time was the assurance that this strange thing that was happening to me was in fact the harbinger of a miracle. I have never been so happy to be proved right.

I first heard the album in its entirety sometime between my sophomore and junior years of college. Sophomore year is when the Indigo Girls’ live album 1200 Curfews came out. I got a copy for my birthday, and we all listened to it incessantly on my hall and argued late into the night about just what Italian poet was being referenced in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which they cover on that album. At some point, it must have dawned on me that I needed to hear the real thing, and so on some trip home to Iowa City, I picked up cassettes (yes, I still bought cassettes in those days — my car then had a tape deck — as, for that matter, does my car now) of Blood on the Tracks as well as Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.

(It should be noted here for those who are unaware that I was raised almost entirely without popular music. I did not hear the Beatles until I was a teenager. I knew “Blowin’ in the Wind” from singing it at camp, but Dylan was as unfamiliar to me growing up as I suspect Bach’s collected organ works are to most people.)

I don’t believe that my repeated listenings to all three albums that fall actually precipitated my first major depressive episode, although I suppose there are those who would argue that repeated exposure to “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” not to mention “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello,” are not really good for anyone suffering from unrequited love, perceived poverty, and ensuing clinical depression. But so it goes. Along with Elizabeth Wurtzel, I’ve always believed that the sound of Dylan’s “ragged, edgy vocal cords” is actually the sound of redemption.

I also spent a lot of time that fall sitting at a table at Chan’s, a Chinese place a few blocks from campus, eating chicken fried rice (I never ordered anything else) and reading exclusively books not actually assigned for any of my classes. I had gone that fall from seeing the cafeteria as a wondrous place wherein food appeared magically and dishes were swept away on a conveyor belt to seeing it as a place of overcooked pasta, stale cigarette smoke, putrid cooking smells, and social isolation. My best friends were living abroad or off campus or had become biochemistry majors and chained themselves to their desks, and so I mostly ate alone. Doing so at Chan’s, with the neon lights and the rain and the company of some Beatnik tome seemed infinitely preferable to doing so at the cafeteria. I worked more hours at patrol to make up for the expense.

I’ve always credited another Romantic poet — Coleridge — with saving my life that semester, later that December, when I was alone in my dorm room with nothing but some clothes and a handful of books I needed for my last finals (everything else was packed and stored for a month for my impending move off campus). Among those books was an anthology of the Romantic poets, and one night I opened it to “Frost at Midnight,” and somehow it had on me the same effect that the music William Styron describes listening to in Darkness Visible had on him: I decided to live.

But that was just one moment, one little, though crucial time. Dylan was a constant, and if he didn’t make me happy, exactly, he sustained me in some way, much the way those plates of chicken fried rice did. And now, tonight, with the rain coming down outside, that’s what I remember.

The steps [of Sproul Hall] are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time … when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

The speech continues — although this part, apparently, they haven’t seen fit to emblazon

And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

That’s the idea of nonviolent protest. It’s the idea of strikes and sit-ins and of linked arms and of destroying draft files with homemade napalm. The idea is to keep the machine from working at all. But it turns out that in a lot of situations, that’s very hard to do.

When I was involved, in my own small way, in a sit-in at the University of Iowa in 2000, our idea was that we would keep the machine of the administration from working by occupying their main building. We ended up occupying their hallway for a week, and while we certainly inconvenienced them somewhat (I’ll never forget the woman who came out to spray air freshener over us every morning), we could not, as it turns out, stop the machine. We never even saw then UI President Mary Sue Coleman. She had, we assumed, some sort of bathole entrance to the building, because we were there round the clock and we never saw her enter or leave. She never once spoke to us.

And so our fight, like those of many of the Occupy movements now, became not against the machine itself but against its minions. We were lucky: when the cops came to get us, they acted nonviolently. No one was sprayed with pepper spray or dragged or beaten. Others, as anyone who watches YouTube knows, have not been so fortunate at late.

Most of the people who are involved with Occupy movements didn’t set out to treat the police as the enemy. Sure, police brutality is a problem, but I think for the most part we recognize it as a symptom, not a root cause. It’s true that the actions of the Chicago Police Department at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 were officially deemed a riot, but it was Mayor Richard Daley who gave the “shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . . and . . . to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city” order to the police some months prior to that in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

It was ordinary soldiers who carried out torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but it was officials of our country at the highest levels of power who endorsed waterboarding.

It was campus police who pepper-sprayed students at UC Davis, but it was Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi who issued their orders.

And while it is local police who have done the dirty work of cracking down on Occupations in Oakland, Portland, New York City, and elsewhere, it is the mayors of those places — acting, apparently, not only with each other but also under the advisement of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security — who have issued those orders.

It’s damned hard to get to the chancellor of a university. It’s hard to shut down the machine of Wall Street. Even throwing money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange only interrupted things for a little bit. It’s hard. You throw your body up against the machine, and fifty years later, they put your words in a coffee shop.

I understand that people are disappointed in those occupiers who have turned their attention to battling the cops. It saddens me, too. I’d rather be talking about economic inequality and the Supercommittee and the latest appalling contract between the University of Iowa and a multinational sweatshop and the work that Shelter House and the Free Mental Health Clinic have to do because we don’t actually bother to take care of people in this country and the staggering numbers of people who are out of work or on the verge of losing their homes and — well, I could go on. But how do you get people to talk about these things, or more importantly, to do something about them? And why, when people do try to dramatize them, do we insist they be “cleaned up?”

If you have an answer, I would love to hear it.

My father never made it to the war. Like many in his generation — he was born in 1923 — he wanted badly to fight in World War II. Having learned there were only two standard eye charts used in induction exams, he memorized both, figuring he could read enough of the first row to figure out which one it was. The ruse worked. He joined the army, but he was honorably discharged partway through basic training and told “not to come back even if we are invaded.”

The exact events leading up to his discharge are lost to his memory and to a fire that destroyed a great many military records in Kansas in the 1970s. But he was not forgotten: at his funeral in 1981, some forty years after his short tenure in the Army, two military officials showed up with an American flag, a headstone and a hundred dollars. The oldest local living veteran came to the burial to read “In Flanders Field.” He was even offered burial in a national cemetery and the American Legion in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, where he is buried, still keeps a fresh flag at his grave, along with those of all the other veterans buried in that tiny town.

The military does a much better job than most of us at remembering and honoring the people who served, even those, like my father, who gave nothing more than a few weeks of their lives. As a society, we do not do so well. This month we have Veterans Day. Some of us will get the day off work. Most of us will notice that no mail is delivered that day. My grandmother will tell me about observing a minute of silence in her grade school classroom at 11:11 on November 11 for Armistice Day, as it was originally called. But even though we are fighting two wars, Americans won’t take more than that moment or two to remember, perhaps only noticing when they go to the bank or the post office or the library and find it closed.

This year, however, Iowa City area residents have a chance to do much more: They have a chance to hear from veterans themselves at Working Group Theatre’s latest production, called Telling: Iowa City. Nine actors, all of them veterans, will put on a performance based on the stories of many more Iowa veterans from World War II through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This past August, Working Group Theatre and the UI Veterans Association interviewed dozens of veterans from Iowa. Working from those stories, playwrights Jennifer Fawcett and Jonathan Wei crafted the script of this production. Wei is a founder of The Telling Project, which has produced shows in Eugene and Portland, OR, Sacramento, CA, Starkville, MS, Washington, D.C., Seattle, WA and Baltimore, MD.

Whether or not you know someone in the service personally, you owe it to yourself to go and hear some of these stories. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 8-10 in Theatre B at The University of Iowa’s Theatre Building and Dec. 2-4 at Riverside Theatre.

Working Group Theatre is also soliciting more stories from veterans. To submit yours, or to read more, visit workinggrouptheatre.org and look for the links for Telling: Iowa City.

Five months ago I nearly killed the thing that will become my baby. Technically again I would not have killed it. And they don’t call it killing, not unless they are the sort of people who hold signs outside of clinics with bloody fetuses. They call it abortion, or D&C, or, most euphemistically, termination. I decided not to kill the six-week old collection of cells, though. I decided to keep them and let them grow. This week I read that they now weigh two and a half pounds and have five senses and a full complement of body parts. This seems rather impossible, but apparently it is true.

Nobody ever criticizes you for putting your cat down. Even the most rabid anti-abortion people I know are okay with, as they say, putting an animal out of its suffering. Of course, no one says it’s easy, either. Go out and tell people that you had to put your cat or dog to sleep, and you will gain instant sympathy. Post it on a social network and people you barely even know will offer hugs and condolences.

Nobody posts on the internet that she put her embryo down. Many of us, of course, would support her, would offer her strength, would recognize that this, too, may have been a hard decision, or it may have been an easy one, but that the telling of it would not be easy. Because of course many people would not offer such support. They would tell her that she was wrong, that such decisions were not hers to make, that they should be beyond her control.

If you believe that God gave man dominion over all the animals, I suppose it stands to reason that you also feel no particular qualms about having control over their life and death. I never thought I had any particular qualms about it myself. It’s true that I don’t hunt, but it’s also true that I’m not a vegetarian. I kill flies and mosquitoes with impunity, and I feel little regret when I step on ants. Two of my cats died at home, before I had to make any decisions about whether to excercise my control over their lives, or at least over their death. I exercise control over my cats’ lives every day: I decide when to feed them; I tell them where they can and cannot go; I clip their claws and give them drugs when the vet prescribes them. But I’d never exercised this particular kind of control before: not the saying yes to the large does of anesthesia, not the petting and holding the cat for the last time while the vet left me alone in the room with him, not the praying that the baby inside me wouldn’t choose that moment, the moment when the syringe hit the cat’s leg, as a moment to kick or turn a somersault. That life and death intersect is something I know. But I didn’t want them to right then.

A great many people believe that you should not have control over human life, and in some instances, I am one of them — your typical pro-choice, anti-death penalty tax and spend bleeding heart liberal pacifist. No one — least of all the state — should be able to control the ending of another person’s life. But the beginning of life — that’s where everyone gets hung up.

The issue is often framed as that of who controls a woman’s body — the woman, her doctor, the church, the state? The belief, among those I consort with, is that the woman should be in charge. I believe that still, and I will continue to fight for it, but the past six months have led me to understand how little control one actually has.

I used birth control, but it did not work. As a friend of mine says, birth control is a misnomer. You’re not really in control of the situaiton. Contraception is better — you are trying to prevent something from happening, but it may or may not actually work. To be in the tiny, tiny percentage for whom it does not work is an odd experience, especially at age thirty-five, when you have a professional job and a savings account and are about to become a homeowner. But there you have it: you’re not in control. And if you decide, as I did, not to take a certain kind of control at that point, you lose control completely, not only of your body but also of yourself.

I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant. I weigh thirty-six pounds more than I did six months ago. In those six months, I have been nauseated, fatigued, and dehydrated. My blood sugar has dropped to the point that I’ve fainted. My whole body has at one or another time hurt, often several parts of it at once. I cannot remember the last time I woke up and felt good, or the last time I leaned over to pick something up or got up from sitting on the floor with anything resembling grace or ease. One goes in that time from pregnancy being a secret that nobody knows — at first, not even you — to a fact on display for everyone, a thing everyone sees and comments on. The baby — and it is a baby now — swims around and kicks and punches, and it is supposed to. At the hospital they lecture you: if the baby doesn’t move ten times every two hours, something is wrong. That is but one of a long list of things you are instructed to watch out for. If you get a headache or a fever, if you bleed or have stomach pain, if you vomit: all these things are out of your control, and all of them mean you must call the hospital, go in and be put under the control of the machines, the blood pressure cuff, the fetal heart monitor, the ultrasound, the people in scrubs and the people in white coats.

When I fainted, they took me away in an ambulance and put a needle in my arm. Around the other arm they put a blood pressure cuff, and it inflated and deflated every ten minutes. Around my wrist they put a band with my name and hospital number, the same one that was given to me when I was born. Somewhere the very first band with that number is in a baby book my mother made. Eventually, only when they knew that someone was coming to pick me up, they unhooked me and let me go, let me put my own clothes on and walk out the door.

I live now in a house that I bought myself, with money I earned. My old cat is buried here between two trees, where I imagine he watches the birds and feels the squirrels and chipmunks and gazes West toward the sunset, toward the place he came from, where I used to live, and where my other cat is buried. This past week I got two new cats to share my house with me. They have taken control. They jump on tables and counters, investigate behind and underneath the furniture. They run and jump and pounce, sometimes on each other and sometimes on things only they can see. They are, at times, even more active than my baby, who rarely stops moving in my womb. I do not bother to count his kicks — I can tell he is there and doing well.

In twelve more weeks, give or take, I’ll be back at the hospital, and my son will be born and get a number of his own. I will not control when that happens, although I hope to control a little bit how it happens: I hope to be there at the hospital with my mother and my doula and some friends. I hope not to be hooked up to machines the whole time, or to be made to lie flat on a bed. I hope to be able to see my son as soon as he is born, perhaps in a fog of pain, but not a fog of painkillers. I hope that my body will perform the way it was made to do, making milk for my baby to drink, but many years ago now I decided to exercise another sort of control: I had a breast reduction to ease the strain on my back, and to have the body that was more like the one I imagined and less like the one I was given. So I don’t know yet if the ducts that need to be there for the milk to come have managed to regrow from their severing, or if that particular control I tried to exercise so long ago will mean giving up another thing now.

Let go and let God, say the twelve-step people, whose Serenity Prayer is perhaps the clearest distillation of control that we have. They pray for the strength to change the things one cannot accept and to accept the things they cannot change, and they pray for the wisdom to know the difference.

I walk through life now wondering if there is a difference, or if the surest form of control is simply to accept change. I pray for my son and for myself, for my family and for my friends, but I rarely know any more what to ask for. Peace, I say. Change. Something. Whatever it is we need, if only we could know.

If you’ve ever been a part of consensus decision-making, especially in a group of 200 people, you’ll know that two statements in two hours is actually kind of a record. As I was telling a friend, it’s always instructive to remember the story of the SDS chapter in New Jersey that once spent 24 hours trying to decide if they could take a day off to go to the beach.

Decision-making of the sort being practiced at College Green Park and in public spaces all over the country is not something a lot of people are really willing to do. Even those of us who participate in such things are likely occasionally to say Dude, let’s just pick a word already. But that, of course, spins off into a debate about whether and how words matter.

Regular life affords few opportunities for such debate. Oh, sure, advertisers and politicians argue about wording all the time. But advertisers and politicians have a mission that’s about convincing other people, not about satisfying them. Wording a statement as an activist is about convincing other people, sure, but it’s also about defining yourself. It’s about defining and creating the kind of world and society that you want. In the beginning was the Word, and in some sense even atheists function that way.

I loved being at the park last night not because I really love sitting on the ground for two hours and repeating everything everyone says in phrases and twinkling with my hands to show approval. What I love is seeing people engaged in the process of creating something, watching them get to feel — for some for the first time — that they are making something that is real and true.

When I got home last night, I listened to the Friday installment of Planet Money. I have a perverse love of economic news and analysis (I lay it entirely at the feet of Louis Rukeyser for being so funny and dapper), even though it routinely pisses me off. Despite what the right wing seems to think, NPR, especially in the form of Planet Money, is not even remotely left-wing. It’s taken as a default position that capitalism is good, that the democratic process as displayed in the United States works, that growth is good. I disagree with almost everything they say. On last night’s show, they decided to visit Occupy Wall Street. I was immediately worried. It’s going to be like the time they interviewed “a socialist,” I thought (although to be fair, they poked no more fun at him than they did at the folks at libertarian summer camp, who were checking the price of gold on their smartphones in order to calculate how much gold to offer for goods at the camp). But it was actually pretty good: they are the first media people I’ve heard to understand that the part of the point of the protest is the protest. What we want for the larger world is what we are creating for ourselves. If hundreds of people living rather uncomfortably in a public place and sleeping on the ground can come to consensus, why the hell can’t the grown ups?

I don’t speak for anyone else at any Occupy event. But for me, at least, it’s true. The means is the end. Or, as one of my favorite bits of writing from another era put it,

We conducted a long struggle, assuming responsibilities we should not have been made to assume, heartbreakingly alone until the end, taking time out from our studies and our lives to do a job that should not have needed to be done. And we comported ourselves with dignity and grace, on the whole unexpectedly so, and with good hearts and kindness for each other. Confronting an institution apparently and frustratingly designed to depersonalize and block communication, neither humane nor graceful nor responsive, we found flowering within ourselves the presence whose absence we were at heart protesting.

(excerpt from a letter sent by a Berkeley Free Speech Movement participant to the judge in their case, quoted in Michael Rossman’s The Wedding Within the War)

Of course, pregnancy may well explain that response, as well as my getting teary looking at BoingBoing just now (and damn, that was some fast CSS work on someone’s part) and reading my all the nostalgic Apple posts stream by on FriendFeed and Facebook.

But I didn’t set out, actually, to whine about pregnancy or reminisce about Macs (I’ve done that before) but rather to comment a bit on one of the other events of this apparently tumultuous week, the Occupy This, That, and the Other Place movement that started with Occupy Wall Street. Before the Steve Jobs encomiums started rolling in, most of the posts I saw online this week were either repostings of assorted Occupy signs (hell, I posted a few of them myself) or people complaining about the ways in which the movement, or the people involved, lacked focus, or direction, or goals, or objectives. Frequently these went together — Gosh, I love this sign! I sure wish they had a program!

Watching activism take place on the internet makes me feel very, very old, and weirdly nostalgic for the days when I was handing out flyers that said, “meet on the Pentacrest at noon and the Ped Mall at 5 the day the war breaks out!”, because of course we didn’t know when the war was going to start (this would be the “first” Gulf War), and we wanted to have a plan, and we couldn’t email everyone, much less invite them all to a Facebook event.

The group that made those flyers was called Operation US Out, and I attended its very first meeting, when I was fourteen. We had a program, or at any rate we had five Points of Unity, the idea being that if you agreed with these, you were part of the coalition, regardless of your position on, say, abortion or Israel. The only ones I remember now (1990 was some time ago, and I’d have to look the rest up) were “Troops Out Now” and “End the Poverty Draft,” but the idea was to create some simple demands we could all get behind and rally around, so that we could build a broad-based coalition and gather the maximum possible resistance.

That worked, to a point, the point in question being when a group of mostly women decided that OUSO was being dominated by either men or International Socialist Organization members, or ISO members who were men, and they thus decided to form a separate group called Women Against War. I stuck with the original group, as that’s where my friends were. I knew the people on the steering committee. Of course, they mostly were ISO members, as tends to happen with new activist groups on college campuses with active ISO chapters, if Chicago decides that’s where ISO members should focus their energies. The idea of a Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist group is, at least in part, that you’re creating a vanguard for the revolution, because when the time comes, you’ll need to have people who are organized and know how to get shit done. Consequently, ISO people tend to be very organized and know how to get shit done, and while everyone else is sitting around and dithering about whether the group is anti-war or pro-peace, or whether or not to include demands about Palestine, or what have you, the ISO folks are going around and booking meeting rooms and getting march permits and making and copying flyers and generally, well, organizing. But I digress.

The Points of Unity weren’t, as it turned out, enough to preserve a unified group, and I’m not sure at all that they were ever mentioned or covered in any newspaper story about our actions. As my friend Meg says, you can be sure that at a rally of a thousand normal looking people, the newspaper photographer will find the one guy on stilts, and that will be what shows up on the front page of the paper. I love the guys on stilts, and the people with the giant puppets, and the Radical Cheerleaders, and the people who go around doing guerilla plantings of organic pumpkin seeds, and all the other forms of spectacle we have on the Left, but I do acknowledge there’s a certain problem of media representation.

I’ve since been involved in various other struggles that had programs and demands. Students Against Sweatshops had three very specific demands, all of which had been endorsed by a remarkable list of groups and people and institutions (shouts out, Tom Harkin!). To this day, eleven years later, the University of Iowa has still only met two of them (joining the WRC and drafting a licensee code of conduct — they have yet to drop out of the FLA). The sit-in and its associated spectacle, and the years that followed, were specifically designed in an attempt to bring attention to these specific and particular demands, and they were covered, to some extent, in the stories told about us. But of course they were very complicated and involved understanding things about factory monitoring and labor standards and the right to organize and a great many other things that don’t make a good caption on a picture of a bunch of unwashed college students.

And yet we did accomplish some of our goals. There have been improvements. Mostly those were the result of a lot of grueling, irksome, behind the scenes work. But you know what happened that first day of the sit in? The administration joined the WRC, something they’d refused to do for months. I don’t think they did that due to reasoned demands. We’d already made those. I think they did it because there were a bunch of grubby college kids bike-locked together in their offices. (Well. People weren’t grubby yet. It was the first day, before we started camping out in the hallway.)

I’ve long been a fan of Frances Fox Piven’s Poor People’s Movements. If you’ve heard of Piven, you’re probably either an old lefty or a fan of Glenn Beck. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m betting on the former, although you never know. I’d like to think my father would read my blog if he were alive, and after agreeing that “main ideas belong in main clauses and subordinate ideas belong in subordinate clauses” and that bourbon is preferable to Scotch, I’m not sure he and I would see eye to eye on anything. Piven’s book is about various mass uprisings of the poor, some of them organized somewhat but most of them simply the result of huge numbers of people reaching a breaking point.

The folks occupying Wall Street do not have a great deal in common with the tenement dwellers who went on rent strikes in Piven’s book, but there’s a quality of unrest that I think they share, and a quality of demanding something – even if it’s an inarticulate, intangible something — but something different from what they have.

I remember way back at one of those early OUSO meetings someone was trying to get people to pin down exactly what our solution to — oh, I don’t know, the global oil market? the problems of capitalism? — was. Another member stood up to speak and said, “You know, I don’t know. But you know, we elect this huge bureaucracy. We elect these people who are supposed to figure out how to make the things we want work. Isn’t that, like, their job?”

And to a great extent, I think that’s what the Occupy movement is saying. No, we don’t have a solution to the global debt crisis or the student loan scam or the unemployment rate or anything else. But dude, people in government, captains of industry, leaders of the free world — isn’t that your job? To which I can only say yes, yes it is.

People often ask me if I like children. The question always cracks me up. “Sure,” I say. “I like some children.” I mean, really. Would you say to someone, “Do you like people in their 40s?” I like some children just the way I like some people. I don’t really see them as a separate category.

I also like some poetry although, as a matter of shorthand, I am often apt to say simply that I like poetry. But that’s untrue as a whole.

I do not like Wordsworth.

I do not like Robert Frost or Robert Lowell or A.E. Housman or W.H. Auden very much.

I do not like Jorie Graham, though God knows I tried to for a long time.

There are a ton of poets I have never read and whose work I thus can’t comment on at all. And my like or dislike has nothing to do with whether or not the poet in question is any good. I have very little notion of what that means, and one of the beauties of giving up writing for librarianship is that I no longer have to know what it means, or get into arguments with people about it. My job is (among other things) to find books that people like, books they are in the mood for, books that work in some way for them. I’ve always loved Sam Johnson’s line that a man ought to read just as his inclination leads him, for what he reads as a duty will do him little good. I just didn’t realize until I got to library school how closely Johnson’s views mirrored the second and third laws of library science:

Every reader his or her book.

Every book its reader.

And there’s the wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis in which he talks about how if someone goes back again and again to the same book, no matter how terrible you may think it, you may be sure that for him “it contains a kind of poetry.”

I’ve been unpacking my books in my new house, but I’m not done. Yesterday I was hit by a sudden and intense desire to reread some of Diving into the Wreck, which I own but can’t currently find. A normal person, I suppose, would see this as a good reason to unpack some more boxes, but of course I am not a normal person, and I work in the library, so my first inclination was to see what all we had by Adrienne Rich (and thank you, library selectors of years past — there was The Fact of a Doorframe just sitting there waiting for me to check it out).

I regard a sudden and intense desire to read a particular bit of poetry — or to read poetry at all — as highly peculiar, but perhaps it is no more peculiar than pregnancy cravings. (I don’t have cravings, just aversions. Please, whatever you do, don’t offer me chocolate.) And as things go, there are certainly worse vices, and things that are much harder to obtain.

I read poems, but I never write them. I thus blame the following entirely on my friend Aliki, who convinced me this weekend to play something called The Poetry Game*. I should know better than to fall for such traps. Make of it what you will.

Range

Crow, titmouse, lilac, blossom:
the hillside in spring as you ride
up the cablecar
and see the things that are there
and the things you only imagine
ephemera
the canon of spring
the shoots that rise from underground
as the creek rises
the engines starting,
John, Jennifer
the speed of approaching summer
when everything will bloom
when love will run out of control
everything quicker and quicker
the green overwhelming.

It is early spring.
The worlds now hover in your throat.
You cannot speak, only wail
cry,
climb as the cablecar climbs
to reach an altitude where you may
look at the hillside below
as down at an auditorium
empty
afraid only of what might come.

*The game, should you want to play it, involves taking turns naming a list of words. Then everyone has to write a poem (see, I didn’t realize this part before we started) using some, all, or none of the words. We had 30 words total, and I think I used 23 of them.

Those things were my father’s death, which I don’t remember the date and time of — I wasn’t there when it happened, and I was only five years old — but which I have a visceral reaction to every year on that date — and watching the vote on the “first” Gulf War come in on January 15, 1991. I was fifteen years old and sitting in a mess of sleeping bags and blankets on my best friend’s living room floor, and we were watching the vote on the tiny television we’d dragged in there to watch movies the night before. We had been organizing against the coming war, which we knew would happen but still believed, maybe, that somehow we could stop. But that January day, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we sat there and watched senator after senator vote to authorize the use of force in the Gulf. The air war started a few days later; the ground war began on my best friend’s birthday. The only dissenting vote from a Republican in either house came from our own Senator Chuck Grassley. I’m fairly sure it’s the only vote of his I’ve ever agreed with. He spoke at my high school when I was a senior, and I asked him about it, and he said that he simply felt that not every other avenue had been tried, and I respect him for that still, although I wasted no time at that event lambasting him with the rest of my classmates over gays in the military.

The war started for me that day, and it never really ended. We were bombing Iraq with some regularity all through the 1990s. Economic sanctions imposed on Iraq resulted in the deaths of thousands there during that decade. The Iraq war that started in 2003 seemed to me just a continuation, not a new event, and the war in Afghanistan that started a month after 9/11 seemed all just another part of what George Bush the first called the “new world order.” That’s what changed things for me.

My mother graduated from college in the spring of 1968. At one point in grad school round one, I was immersed in reading about that period as part of the research for a book I was then trying to write. I asked her one day what that was like. I couldn’t imagine the experience of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy being shot within weeks of each other. I thought it must have felt as though the whole world was falling apart. What did she remember about it, I wanted to know.

She thought about it awhile. “I was very absorbed with your father, and with worrying about getting into graduate school,” she said. (This was around the time she was also applying to secretarial school programs in case her PhD plans didn’t work out.) Finally she came up with something. After Dr. King’s assassination, Cornell University sent a letter to my godmother, my mother’s best friend, who had applied to graduate school there, saying they were establishing a scholarship for minorities, and did she belong to any minority group? Elizabeth, who is smart alecky as well as smart, wrote back and said yes, she was Phi Beta Kappa and a church-going Christian.

You can’t predict what will change your life. I’ve spent twenty years getting told I’m unamerican, that I should move to Canada or Russia or China. I’ve seen institutions I thought well of disappointment me again and again. It doesn’t particularly faze me anymore. The first cut is the deepest, and that’s as true of political betrayal as it is of romantic loss.

A lot of people will spend today in remembrance, and an equal number will spend the day trying not to remember. I think surviving is always a balancing act between the two. I’ll never forget my father; I’ll never stop trying to change the world, but I can’t spend my whole life on either one. Among other things, I’m going to have this kid to raise and take care of, and he will someday have to encounter his own losses. I don’t know what one does about that, except to keep on living.

Somewhere out there, perhaps, are still the three installments of The New Rambler I wrote in the weeks after 9/11. That was back in the days before blogs, when The New Rambler went out as an email, and I got around to putting it up on the website when I had the time. I never got around to it with those issues, and they were lost when the computer I wrote them on died. If anyone reading this happens still to have copies, I’d be grateful if you could send them to me, for the sake of the historical record.

It was the year my best friend showed up at Lincoln, because the alternative school she’d been going to closed. I had an excellent homeroom teacher, and Dan and Tim and Aaron all sat behind me, and one day I figured out one of Aaron’s puzzle tricks faster than he did. All of us were terrible at remembering to bring things for Show and Tell, and so we resorted each week to our pockets. In those years, I always kept things in the pockets of my windbreaker — stones and pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and my first jackknife and the acorn caps that we colored in with pencils until we’d worn the pencil lead down to a nub and the inside of the acorn cap looked like dark pewter. And of course marbles. That was the year we played marbles. Every day at recess we were up in the corner of the field, where no grass grew, drawing circles in the dirt and explaining the rules to newcomers: two in the game to shoot, and you got to keep any you shot out. I lost a great many marbles. But it was worth it, even when Dan showed up with his cheater marbles — miniscule white things that were impossible to move. He never lost any of them.

It was one of the years another friend and I went creeking after school. I still always wore dresses in those days, and we were convinced creeking was probably illegal in some fashion, and so whenever a car passed by us on River Street, we’d duck down to avoid being seen, me with my legs spread in a wide squat to keep my skirts out of the water. It was also the year we decided to go as Little Women for Halloween. We both checked the book out of the library in September, and every night we’d call each other up. “I’m on chapter five — what chapter are you on?” I got to be Jo, of course, because I had the brown hair. My mother sewed a dress for me — red calico with green ribbon and off-white plain eyelet trim, which came out less Christmasy than it sounds. (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!” I practiced my lines a lot.)

I kept D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths in my desk that year and read bits of it every day during silent reading. My mother still read to me every night. I’d settled in well at our new house, and I no longer got lost walking home. Walking to school in the morning still involved the shortcut past the pipe that was, according to my friend, actually a Civil War cannon, and through several backyards, whose owners had thoughtfully provided us with stepping stones, and through the valley that, in the spring, was nothing but violets. It was a good year.

That’s what I say about it now, anyway. Those are the parts I like to remember.

It’s also the year I started getting dragged to therapists once a week. I was a bad liar and never knew what to say every week when the same kid asked me why I got to leave school early that day. It was the year someone first called me fat. It was the year I began to have doubts about that Civil War cannon and the year I started to perceive, more than ever, that class divisions were something that some people actually cared about, and that those people were going to make my friends’ lives miserable as a result.

I always think of myself as having had a happy childhood. My grandmother always says I was miserable as a child. It’s hard to know whose sets of memories to believe, or even which ones of one’s own to choose. But this autumn, back in the city of my childhood, I’m going to cling to pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and go looking for some acorn caps.