Journal of the Plague No. 1

The influenza ward of the Walter Reed hospital in Washington, November 1918. (Harris Ewing/Library of Congress via AP)

I feel we should all be draping ourselves in white sheets at my house, but instead most of us are draping ourselves in wool, or at least I am, because I am freezing all the time, except of course when I’m boiling up, which usually happens in the middle of the night. Hot flash? Fever? Who can say?

My mother returned from a conference in Florida Sunday night sicker than I’ve ever seen her—quite literally delirious from fever at times, coughing, barely able to cross the room much less carry on a conversation. By the time she was strong enough to get to the doctor, it was Tuesday, and she tested positive for influenza A, but it was too late to start Tamiflu, so she was sent home with a raft of other drugs of the sort one generally only throws at the truly ill—prednisone, Zpac, and so on.

Wednesday morning I woke up feeling not too hot. I’d had a cough for several days but, but I often have a cough in the winter. By the time I’d gotten to work and finished emptying the cash drawers, I felt much worse and went home to discover that I, too, had a fever. That was the first day of the virtual appointments the UIHC was offering, and I got one with ease and got to talk to a doctor at length. She told me I was “the muddiest case” she’d seen all day, but we decided flu A was the most likely and to throw some Tamiflu at it in case we’d caught it in time. It’s Monday now, and I’m still home with a fever that comes and goes.

In my waking hours, in addition to trying to keep my child entertained, I’ve done very little but follow library Twitter for news of library closings. When this crowd-sourced document of public library closures started, it had only 29 listed. It’s up to 772 now, as I just submitted my library, which just decided to close tomorrow earlier today. I also added the library in the town where I live, which closed Sunday, so who knows how many more there are that haven’t been reported. But there are about 35,000 public libraries total in the United States, so even this is just a fraction.

Tonight will be the last Monday night (or any night) my library is open to the public for the foreseeable future, and I’m sad not to be there. Monday have been my night at the library for seven years now. In those seven years there have been only a handful of times that I haven’t made the final announcement: “The time is 8:30 and the Coralville Public Library is now closed for the night. We will reopen tomorrow at 10:00 am. Thank you for your patronage, and have a good night.”

And she remembered to feed me, or why I love Warren

Series of photos white couple in academic regalia with a toddler.
My mom, my dad, and me at her English PhD graduation. Shortly thereafter, she started premed classes, because, she said, “I wanted to do something your father didn’t know anything about.”

I didn’t make any big endorsements this election cycle because I’m a 44 year old woman and I’m pretty sure nobody cares what I think, and I didn’get to caucus anyway, as I had to work, and I doubt it would have made a difference if I had: I correctly predicted the exact number of delegates from my precinct (4 Sanders, 4 Warren, 1 Buttigieg). But I have of course been thinking about it a lot.

Many months ago a friend of the family asked who I was backing, and I said Elizabeth Warren, in part because she is smart and thoughtful and hardworking and has sound ideas, but really also because she tells this story about how she had to potty train her daughter in five days in order to be able to go to law school, because the only daycare she could find required that children be potty trained, and, I said, that resonated with me, because it reminded me so much of what my mother had to do in order to go to medical school—she started when she was 32 and I was 3.5. Two years later my father died, and thus to continue she had to find not only childcare but overnight childcare, sometimes every fourth night for months running. And it made me think of what I’ve had to do (on a much smaller scale) to go on having a professional job a kid.

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said, and I thought of course. I’d like to say I just thought that and that I didn’t yell at him about how he didn’t get what a privilege it was to be able to go to medical school and not have to do anything else, but of course I did, because I’m me.

I love Bernie Sanders and have for many years, and I love my dad, who, like Sanders, had ties to Vermont, though their similarities end there, at least politically. My mother once described my father as “making the John Birch Society look a little pink around the edges,” and I’d be hard pressed to think of a thing he and Bernie would agree on. But like Sanders, my father was beloved by many people. Even now, 39 years after his death, I hear from his former students about what an impact he had on their lives, regardless of what they want on to do, from going back to work at their family business to winning a Nobel Prize. His tough-mindedness mixed with kindness, generosity, and ongoing support is legendary. Even though he notoriously believed men were intellectually superior to women, he encouraged one former student to keep her babysitter and finish her dissertation because, he said, she was the most brilliant student he’d ever had.

That generosity of spirit, however, did not extend to his own family, or at any rate it did not extend to my mother. Once, when asked to get me up, get me dressed, get me breakfast, and get me to preschool, he did—or rather he did except for the breakfast part, which he forgot, but that was my mother’s fault. If she hadn’t been pursuing this silly medical school thing, she would have been there to give me breakfast.

I love Bernie Sanders, but I often wonder if he ever had to find childcare, and how his life and his career might have been different if he had.

Sometimes, when Sanders and Warren supporters were fighting on the internet, I’d want to go hide in my room because it felt like Mom and Dad were fighting, and indeed, I can’t think of any more apt metaphor. My father dealt with big important things in life, and they were things I care about deeply. But my mom cared about those things too and remembered to feed me.

Aside from my family, the major influence on my political upbringing were the socialists I hung out with in high school, whom I met first through the anti-war movement against the “first” Gulf War. Identity politics were one of the things they railed against the most: you should never pick someone because they were like you. And to a large extent I agree with them. I didn’t caucus for Hillary Clinton in 2008 (in Wyoming, where she and Obama were the only candidates left) or in 2016 (when I was proud to be a Bernie person). I would be thrilled to get rid of my female governor and senator in favor of just about any Democrat. But I don’t think that means you can never be for a person because they also happen to be somewhat like you.

I’m glad I was mostly distracted by digital file formats (and, of course, my kid) last night, because when I did finally look at the news, it was like watching my mom get beat up over and over and over again.

I’m mindful that the majority of white women (although none I know) voted for Trump. I don’t think I’m the only—much less most important—demographic, operating as I do from a position of great socioeconomic and white privilege. But I do mourn the losses of the only politician I’ve ever heard talk about childcare in a way that suggested she had actually experienced the difficulties of childcare, and of the way that the lack of it keeps women out of the workforce and out of public life. I have lost track of how many times I have said, “I’m sorry I can’t come to your thing because I have my kid” in the past eight years, but it might be almost as many times as I’ve said “your books are good for three weeks; your DVDs are good for one.” If I am not with my kid, it is because I am paying someone or someone is doing me a favor. And that, more than anything, is why I was a Warren person, because I think she gets that. Maybe that’s selfish of me, but surely it’s no more selfish than the billionaires for Trump.

And now I have to stop this so I can do some work for my job before I pass out, and before my kid wakes me up at 4:30 am.

A Mom

A black and white cutout of a mother and child under a flowering tree

There’s a photograph that High Country News published when Charles Bowden died of Bowden talking to Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and the reason so many of us fell in love with the West, and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!. There they are: three men of the West, champions of its wild spaces and untamed, unknown, untrammeled (in the lovely word from the Wilderness Act) places through their writing and their activism. Those three are in the foreground, named. But there are three other people in the picture, though you won’t see them unless you take a long glance down Abbey’s porch from the place where the three men are standing, a long glance all the way down to the end, where a woman sits on a porch swing with a baby in her lap and a toddler next to her in a stroller. The unnamed woman is Clarke Cartwright, Abbey’s fifth and final wife, and the baby and the toddler are their children, children who won’t grow up to know their father very well, for he is old already in this photo and doesn’t have many more years of his hard living life left to live. One Life at a Time, Please, one of his books is titled, but he tried to cram fifty into one.

The last time I was in Moab I saw Clarke Cartwright listed in the phone book, and when I saw the piece on Bowden and this photo, I almost looked her up and called to ask what she thought, but I didn’t, because I figure she must get nothing but phone calls about Abbey. I was surprised to see she was even in the phone book, but then everyone I have ever looked up in the phone book in Moab has been there, and I’ve never called any of them. It’s that kind of place.

A year or so later I tried to do an interview with a man who had written a book about searching for Abbey’s grave. I never did anything with it because I wasn’t happy with how it went. I asked why he hadn’t talked to any women, and he said (as I recall) that he’d talked to everyone he could find who would talk to him. That made sense and yet I was still pissed off, and I couldn’t figure out why, and because I couldn’t work out what I was angry about, I just shoved the interview transcript aside and never did anything more with it, and I started trying to write about the picture of Abbey and Bowden and Foreman and Clarke Cartwright instead.

* * *

The other day (or night—I don’t really sleep anymore) a local acquaintance posted to ask if anyone wanted to start a book club for working moms about advancing their careers. Right after that—or right before it—she posted yet another link to that book about why women my age can’t sleep, and I wanted to ask if this book club for working moms would be meeting at 3 am when we all can’ sleep because of fucking perimenopause, or whatever pop psychology reasons lie behind the idea that somehow women of my generation are the first in history to have trouble sleeping at night.

That same day a local friend said his Facebook was all Bernie and he wanted some other perspectives, and could anyone offer any? It was late at night, but I typed this up on my phone:

Okay, here’s the deal. I love Bernie. But some days I wonder if Bernie has ever had to find a babysitter. I often reflect on a time when I was having a meeting with you and another friend and I had to go to make daycare pickup and you guys both said “oh, we’d better go so our wives don’t get mad at us.” And I thought of what a different life that would be if I could be marginally irresponsible and the consequence would just be a spouse being mad at me versus my whole good standing in society.

That was just one day, and I don’t want to act like I think it’s every day of your lives. But I think it is every day in the lives of male politicians, and thus as much as I dislike identity politics, hearing Elizabeth Warren talk about having to potty train her daughter in five days so she could go to law school reminds me so much of what my mom had to do (find not just childcare but overnight childcare every fourth night for months running) to go to medical school. (And we are all of us privileged white women—and it’s still hard.)

I’ll still take Bernie over Klobuchar because I agree with him far more. But it’s not as enthusiastic a take as it was four years ago.

The result was exactly the sort of argument that makes me never want to write anything or post anything on the internet (even though I’ve been doing so publicly under my own name for twenty-one years), the sort of argument that makes me want to apologize to everyone, delete everything I’ve ever posted, and hide under my bed—or run away to Utah—until everyone has forgotten who I am or that I ever lived. But of course I can’t run away to Utah, because I am a mom.

I hate being a mom.

I hate that someone posted a “Valentine’s candy for moms” meme today and lots of people liked it and shared it, and all the candy hearts said things like “put your socks on.” I hate that I am for some reason part of a group called BAD MOMS where (get this) I was once called a bad mom. I hate Mothers Day, even when people nobly try to reclaim it for the anti-war movement (a lost cause if there ever was one), and I hate all the nouns acting as adjectives that have been applied to the word mom. Soccer mom. Helicopter mom. Tiger mom.

I want to be in the foreground in that picture, not the background. I want my name in the bold face type. I want to have (as an old Scott Carrier monologue put it) no interest in taking part in the market economy or the democratic process.

But I can’t. And I’m afraid even to type the whole sentence here that I had planned for fear of what readers may think of me and the choices I’ve made, but I will: But I can’t, because I’m a mom.

Why I’m (Still) Not Sorry I Voted For Nader

A beat up Nader for President 2000 sticker on a bike
The Nader 2000 campaign had bicycle stickers because of course they did.

This piece was first published as one of my “Girl Next Door” columns in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids ICON, 23 November 2000. While many things I’ve written in the past twenty years make me cringe, I stand by this one.

I was thirteen years old when I first heard the song “Masters of War,” penned by Bob Dylan and sung, in the rendition I found in our record cabinet, by a young, short-haired, blue-eye-shadowed Judy Collins. I had not, at this point in life, acquired the accoutrements of the “me against the world” mentality I was already starting to form, but even Judy’s rendition couldn’t hide the bite in the lines “How much do I know to talk out of turn?/You might say that I’m young, you might say I’m unlearned/But there’s one thing I know, though I’m younger than you. . . .” Ah yes–youth to itself rebels, and all that. But I’d like to suggest that there’s a little more to it than that.

Last week, Gary Sanders (for whom I have a great deal of respect) published a guest opinion in this paper accusing young Nader supporters (such as myself, I can only assume) of being True Believers. Sanders introduced the charge by acknowledging that he himself had once been a True Believer, hitchhiking to New Hampshire to volunteer for George McGovern. Nowadays, being older and wiser, or at any rate crankier, Sanders sees this as folly. As he sees it, working for McGovern eventually helped Richard Nixon, working for Nader just helped George W. Bush.

I’m not here to quibble with Sanders’s numbers or with his reasoning. Rather, I’d like to point out what I feel is a flaw in the idea that elections are solely about policy (as Sanders and Gore supporters would have it) or all about character (as the Republicans would like us to believe). At the risk of pissing off fellow activists, and to invert the old feminist saying, I’d like to suggest that, when it comes to campaigns, the political is the personal. Working on a campaign is not simply a way of getting a candidate elected to office; it is a way of making your own story. It’s a way of acting upon belief and a form of empowerment. If you get one person to change her vote because of you, youve accomplished something. And if you’re working on a major party campaign, that’s really all they want you to accomplish. Just get out the vote, and make sure they know how to mark the ballot.

But working on a campaign like Nader’s–or, I would imagine, McGovern’s–gives you a lot more than that. You know you aren’t going to win–not in the numerical sense, that is. But you might win in other ways. When I talk to people about Nader, or sweatshops, or why there shouldn’t be a new jail, I am doing so only partially in the hope that they will change their votes. What I am really hoping is that they will start to think differently.

If you think a little harder about why it is that the average CEO in the United States now makes 475 times as much as his lowest paid employee or why African-Americans make up 26% of Iowa’s prison population but only 2% of its overall population or why Steve Alford gets a $25,000 bonus if 70% of his team graduates in four years, I regard that as a victory.

Sanders may wish, in retrospect, that he hadn’t volunteered for McGovern because he think that it ended up helping Nixon win the election. But I wonder, would he really have wanted to miss the experience? I imagine that in a way it must have been pretty great–hitching a ride to New Hampshire, knocking on doors with groups of other kids, talking about things they believed in and about a man whom they felt stood for those things. I imagine that there are victories that come from that experience that are more important than where McGovern placed in the primary, victories that continue to fuel Sanders’s indefatigable work on local and national progressive causes and which make him proud to be a member of “the party not only of Al Gore, but of Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Jesse Jackson.” Are those experiences which Sanders really wants to deny the next generation?

In 1994, when I was graduating from high school, what I mostly heard about people my age was that we were apathetic and uneducated. We mourned the death of Kurt Cobain, not JFK; we were unqualified to do anything but flip burgers and unmotivated to do anything else; we’d rather change the channel than rock the vote.

Now that the public has begun to take note of some of the things we do care about, largely because of the Nader campaign, we’re being characterized as hopelessly misguided idealists instead of hopelessly lazy cynics. Either way, though, we’re supposedly ruining the future of America.

Well, I never felt America had much of a future to be certain about, but I’ve been working for some kind of future since about a year after I first heard that Bob Dylan song, and for me, and many others, I suspect, the political continues to be personal. We work because it gives us not only a sense of political power but also one of personal authenticity. The movement gives back to you tenfold what you give to it. It gives you camaraderie, education, experience, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of hope. And there’s one thing I know, though I’m younger than you: I know that that hope is crucial.

Little Women

A brown haired girl dressed as Jo March.
Me in my Jo dress, age ten.

Yesterday Steve posted that he’d seen the new Little Women movie and liked it, and I wrote that I had too much to say to respond on my phone.

Reader, I hated it. I hated it so much I almost walked out, but I’ve never done that, even when I should have (I’m looking at you, The Godfather, and Empire of the Sun–both are, I understand, great movies, but I didn’t understand the former and I had a terrible, terrible cold with a runny nose and a total of three tissues during the latter). As mine is a minority report, I feel I owe you some explanation for my dislike, but indulge me while I report a bit on my Louisa May Alcott background first.

When I was in third grade and my friend in second, we decided in September to go as Little Women for Halloween. We both got the book from the library, and every night we’d call each other. “I’m on chapter five. What chapter are you on?” (It will surprise no one that I was a competitive reader as a child.) In one of the few times in my life that brown hair has really paid off, I got to be Jo. My friend fluctuated between Amy and Beth, and her mother found some teenaged girl to be Meg and escort us around.

I’ve since read Little Women many times. I’ve read most, though not all, of Alcott’s other books, including all her children’s books (my favorite is an Old-Fashioned Girl, though Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom are also good–the Little Women sequels are dull, and Jack and Jill and Under the Lilacs are nearly unbearable). I’ve read some of her blood and thunder stories (as she called them) and an unintentionally hilarious novel called Moods in which the heroine is deciding between marrying a character based on Emerson and a character based on Thoreau. She chooses the former and is miserable, but it’s clear that marrying the Thoreau guy would have been miserable, too. I have toured Orchard House, where she spent most of her life, first growing up and and later taking care of her parents, for the real-life Jo never married. Alcott spent most of her adult life supporting her family, including her parents, as her father was, well, misguided would be the kind way to put it.

I’ve also seen four the the five film adaptations of Little Women, missing only the miniseries.

My grandmother used to tell me that whenever her mother, my great-grandmother Hazel, saw her reading Alcott, she’d say, “I don’t know how you can stand all that moralizing.” It’s a good question. Moralizing is, on the whole, not what we call in librarianship an appeal factor for most people. I find it unbearable in other books, although in the 21st century, it rarely shows up in any genre outside Christian fiction. But for those of us who love Alcott, the moralizing is integral: it is part of the appeal. There is a scene early on in Little Women where Marmee gives each of the girls a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, each bound in a different color of leather. Who would not want such a thing?

“Girls,” said Meg seriously, looking from the tumbled head beside her to the two little nightcapped ones in the room beyond, “mother wants us to read and love and mind these books, and we must begin at once. We used to be faithful about it; but since father went away, and all this war trouble unsettled us, we have neglected many things. You can do as you please; but I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do do me good, and help me through the day.

Modern film adaptations, knowing how poorly this sort of thing goes over, tend to replace the moralizing with political speeches. That’s not historically inaccurate–the Alcotts were abolitionists, and they hung out with a crowd that was fighting for the progressive and civil rights issues of its day. Thus in the 1995 adaptation with Winona Ryder, you get Marmee (as portrayed by Susan Sarandon, surely a political choice if there ever was one) discussing the evils of corsets, and in the current version, Laura Dern’s Marmee speechifies from time to time on the evils of slavery and the rights of women (and gets schooled briefly by a black woman in a scene I’m still trying to decide if I find token or not not). And Amy–in perhaps the most unbelievable scene in the movie–delivers a lecture on women and property.

I don’t think you could do a completely faithful film adaptation of Little Women that anyone would want to watch, and so my issue with the current version isn’t its diversions from the text. Nobody, but nobody, ever represents Professor Bhaer as he is in the book–much older and much more German, in what I suspect are horrifically stereotypical ways. The book has never done a good job of convincing anyone that Jo marrying him is a good idea, but, as my mother once said, Alcott doubtless had to make character she herself could imagine leaving her father for–in other words, someone as similar to him as she could imagine.

What bothers me about the new movie (you were wondering if I would ever get there, I know) is the lack of chronological order. As a general rule, I’m not a fan of chronology–while we are all forced to live that way, few of us think about our lives that way, drawn back ceaselessly into the past as we are. But Little Women is nothing so much as a coming-of-age story: when it starts, the girls are girls. By the end, they are little women. The effect of the flash backs and flash forwards is to rob many of the most poignant scenes of their poignancy and to rob us of our understanding of the shifting alliances among the sisters.

Would a viewer who had never read the book fully understand the drama of the pickled limes, as portrayed in the book, or the betrayal Jo feels when Aunt March chooses Amy over her? The advantage to chronological order is that you see growth over time: you age as the character does, whether over the course of seven Harry Potter novels, 500 pages of Little Women, or two hours of a film. To disrupt that growth deprives the viewer of the chance to watch a life unfold in real time.

Most people I know loved this Little Women, so clearly there’s much to be said in its favor. But I’ll let others do that, and let this minority report stand as is.

Dear Elizabeth Wurtzel

Where and when I read Prozac Nation

I’m so sorry I never got to write to you. I thought about it a million times. I wrote about you (or rather about your work) in one of the earliest posts on this site, back when it was just a website where I hand-coded html files and then ftped them to my site, hosted by my local ISP, via a 28.8 modem.

It was about Bitch, a book I still love, despite its messiness. It occurred to me the other night that you were quite possibly the first person to say that Hillary Clinton should have said, back in the day, “yes, I am a bitch, so what?”, thus predicting a debate we’re still having about how angry women are allowed to be.

I quoted you on Bob Dylan and the sound of redemption back when I was pregnant, an assessment I have always agreed with.

I once stayed a night or two in an apartment building on the Upper West Side that I am almost certain was the one you grew up in, but I didn’t ring what I thought was your mother’s buzzer to find out because I’m not a jerk.

I bought More, Now, Again on my next trip to New York a couple of years later, just after it came out, because I saw it in a display in a bookstore I walked into, and I hadn’t seen it here yet at home.

I thought about writing you so many times to say what Prozac Nation meant to me, to tell you it was the first thing I read about depression that reflected how it truly felt to live inside my head, to say how it allowed me to be depressed and angry and love rock and roll and be all the things William Styron wasn’t, because though Darkness Visible was a beautiful book, he was an old man whose life I couldn’t imagine, whereas you were like someone’s cool older sister, just six years older than I am, the kind of person who’d be home from college on winter break when you were over at your friend’s house and who might magically talk to you or play you some music or tell you what to do with your hair. But then I didn’t, because I didn’t get around to it, and because I figured you got a million letters like this a day, and who needed one more?

Then you wrote that piece about copyright for the Wall Street Journal and I thought about writing you to tell you how wrong you were, because I’m a librarian and I have opinions about copyright. But I didn’t get around to it, and then months had passed, and I had a little kid by then, and what was the point.

Earlier this week I learned that you’d died. I was looking at the books session of the New York Times online because I have to give a talk about the best books of 2019 and I figured I’d kill some time on the desk by looking at their lists, and there it was — Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘Prozac Nation’ author, is dead at 52. It was so stark. I told myself not to cry. I read the Times obituary, and then I read all the other remembrances and obituaries I could find, and then I came home and got out my copy of Prozac Nation, which I stole from my mom’s house one summer because I liked the cover image, and I looked inside the cover, because I used to have this thing of writing down where and when I’d read and reread a book, and I saw the first entry: On the road, August 1996. A few months later I’d slide into my first major depressive episode, or at least the first one that was identified as such to me. How did I know?

I wish I could write to you now just to tell you of that discovery. I started rereading it that night, and on almost every page there was a sentence that made me wish I could write to you about something. Yes, yes, me too, me too, me too. And God, yes, what a beautiful sentence that is.

I’m sorry I never got to do that.

Love,

Laura

The Rev. Dr. Dr. Judith Crossett, Professor Emeritus

Edited and slightly expanded, these are the extemporaneous remarks I made about my mother at the 2019 University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry retirement party last month.

My mother was working on her dissertation for a PhD in English when I was born but was already casting about for something else to do. At her postpartum exam, she decided to become a doctor. How she came to that decision is her story to tell, but after she had me she finished her dissertation, got her PhD, and then she went back and took all the pre-med requirements she’d missed as an English major. She started medical school when she was 32 and I was three-and-a-half. She became a single mother halfway through med school when my dad died by suicide when I was five-and-a-half, but she finished, did her residency, and went on to the career you’ve heard about.

There were not a lot of female medical students in the early 1980s, when my mother was in medical school. I believe her class was only about 30% female. As you know, med school classes are now routinely over 50% female. There were even fewer mothers, if any, and I would warrant she was the only single mother in her medical school class. As a child I knew many people whose parents were doctors, but I knew only one other doctor mother.

And yet it was a cool way to grow up. I got to spend a lot of time at the hospital and check out all the nifty equipment. Once I volunteered to let everyone look in my ears through a new machine that required you to lie on a table while they lowered a giant piece of machinery down on you—all the medical students were too scared to try it out.

One Thanksgiving when I was six or seven my mother was on call, so we spent Thanksgiving at the hospital. That meant I got to eat at the hospital cafeteria—which, as you may know, means you get to choose your dessert first, and you get the mashed potatoes that come out in a perfect circle from an ice cream scoop. The nurses let me draw on the white board, which was a novelty back then, and type a story on the computer, another novelty in the mid-1980s, and they made me popcorn. I got to sleep on a Murphy bed, which I am afraid means my mother, whose bed it was supposed to be, got no sleep at all, as I was a restless sleeper and kicked in my sleep, but I had never slept in a bed that folded out of a wall.

I could tell many more stories like that, but I didn’t just come here to talk about being the daughter of a psychiatrist: I also came because I am a psychiatric patient and have been for twenty-two years. I have what we now call treatment resistant depression. But I have been lucky, as all your family members have been and will be lucky. When I was twenty years old and it was 8 pm on Christmas Eve and I needed to talk to a psychiatrist, my mother was able to get Dr. Barbara Struss on the phone to talk to me, and she was able to get me an appointment with her for the morning of the day after Christmas. Because of my mother’s connections (and income), I have been able to see, often on short notice, such amazing practitioners as Dr. Struss, Dr. Sharon Koele, Dr. Peggy Baker, Dr. Laurie Kenfield, and many others.

But not everyone has those advantages—in fact, most people don’t. And some people don’t have any access to those doctors and services at all. I know that because I work at a public library, and I see those people every day. We had a patron who was terrified she was going to look up child pornography. She would call us multiple times a day asking if this or that site contained child porn. She lost her job at a big box store—unsurprisingly—for obsessing over this question. We see paranoia, depression, obsession and compulsion, anxiety, and other hallmarks of psychiatric illness from people who don’t have jobs, much less health insurance or connections, every day. While it’s true that the Free Mental Health Clinic may help provide excellent training to medical students and residents on helping just such patients, its real purpose is to help those patients: those patients that we—or our insurance industry—have decided are not worthy of our help. I’m very proud that my mother had a role not only in founding it but in ensuring its success over the years.

In addition to being a very privileged psychiatric outpatient, I’ve also on two occasions been a psychiatric inpatient. Now I know from talking to my mother that in reality your psychiatrist spends more than five minutes a day on your case: in addition to talking to you, they talk to members of your treatment team, write daily progress notes, and keep a close eye on what is happening to you. But what it feels like when you’re an inpatient is that your doctor talks to you for five minutes a day and that’s it.

But your nurses! Your nurses are there when you wake up in the morning. They are there when you go to bed. They’re there when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. They—[interruption due to applause, so I’m not sure what I was going to say next]. Basically, the less money you make on the psych ward and the more time you spend with patients, the more respect you get from those patients.

My mother started her speech by quoting the maxim that every encounter is therapeutic. It can be, and it should be, if you choose to make it so. I know that she’s been making that the case for patients here for decades, for, as I always tell her, whatever she felt she may have lacked as a medical student and a resident by not having started out life wanting to be a doctor, by not having majored in biology or chemistry, I think that she more than made up for for her patients by having lived and experienced life. She has been a better doctor because of being a single mother, not despite it. I’m very proud of her today and always.

Statement to the Iowa City Community School District Board

Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening, and for the hard and unglamorous work that you all do as school board members. My name is Laura Crossett, and I’m a 1988 graduate of Lincoln Elementary, a 1994 graduate of West High School, and a librarian at the Coralville Public Library. I live in Iowa City, and my son attends kindergarten at Mark Twain Elementary.

Every morning when we get to school he goes over and rings the buzzer and says “Hi, it’s me, Peter,” and every morning, Whitney Wessling, the amazing secretary at Twain says “Hello, Peter.” He’s an anxious kid, and this is one ritual that helps him know it’s okay to go into school every day.

I have seen Whitney show that same level of individual care for all the students at Twain. In the midst of handling phone calls and incoming messages from parents, teachers, and staff, she still knows which kids might not have gotten breakfast if they’re late, and she always knows who needs a hug.

Secretaries, janitors, physical plant workers, groundskeepers, and food service workers aren’t just automatons making a machine work: they are human beings doing difficult, demanding, essential work for which they are rarely recognized, and as such they deserve a say not only in their wages but also in the conditions of their employment, including sick leave, vacation, grievance procedures, and all the other so-called “permissive” topics in collective bargaining agreements — topics that have historically been bargained in good faith for the past 40 years.

Saturday you released a statement noting that “the board and administrative team’s intent to protect and preserve prohibited and permissive items was not conveyed clearly” in meeting with the secretaries’ union. I would call that a drastic understatement: a document that reads “[t]he District proposes to remove the following articles from the negotiated agreement: payroll deductions, union rights, employee hours, seniority, discipline and discharge, sick leave, leaves of absence, vacation, health provisions, safety provisions, grievance procedures, wages and salaries” could hardly be clearer in its intent to strip these employees of everything but a pennies per hour pay raise.

You have apologized for your error. I hope that means you plan to return to the bargaining table ready and willing to include those items in the next collective bargaining agreement and that you will soon come to the table with the janitors’ and food service workers’ unions with that same good faith. The people who make our schools run deserve no less.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018

I organized the second annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at my library. You can see some video of the whole thing, thanks to participant Meghann Foster. Here are my opening remarks.

We are about to hear again the words of one of the most famous speeches in American history, a speech given on a hot August day more than fifty years ago. We often think of this speech as a culmination, but in fact it was merely a milestone along the way to a goal we have not yet achieved.

A year after Dr. King’s speech, over a thousand northern college students, including University of Iowa student Steve Smith and Shel Stromquist, who is here today, went down to Mississippi to try to register black voters. You can read more about the intimidation and harassment they faced — harassment that black Mississippians faced every day — in our display about Freedom Summer.

The voting rights for which those young people fought in the summer of 1964 would not be codified into law for another year, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today we see everywhere attempts to roll back the rights that law won.

The struggle for civl rights is not over: black people today are still disproportionately poor and disproportionately in prison; people with disabilities still too often do not receive the accommodations due to them by law; LGBT people are still too often the recipients of harassment and violence; immigrants and refugees face a precarious situation when they reach our shores.

Today is a day to celebrate but it is also a day to renew our commitment to a more just world. I hope you will share your dreams with us on the paper provided on our craft table. I hope you will take pride in our diverse community by welcoming as a neighbor someone who may not look like you or live like you. I invite you to share with us how you define yourself, where you come from, what languages you speak, and what religion you practice on our poster boards. And I invite you to check out the work of the many organizations represented here today who continue in Martin Luther King’s work for peace, for the poor, and for a world free from prejudice and discrimination.

I’d like to thank the many people who made this day possible: all our readers, David McCartney at the University of Iowa Special Collections and Shel Stromquist for loaning us items for the Freedom Summer display, and many library staff members, especially Kate Dale for creating the demographic posters and Erika Binegar for helping plan the event and finding the quotations. Kate and Erika also organized our displays of diverse books for readers of all ages.

One final note before we begin: Dr. King’s speech was made many years ago, and some of its language now sounds dated to our ears. Dr. King uses Negro where we would say black or African-American; he speaks of men where we would say people and of Christianity and Judaism where we would include Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, atheism, and many more. As our understanding of human diversity expands, so does our language.

And now, without further ado, I’d like to introduce our readers: ?

Mitch Gross from the Coralville Public Library Board and the Coralville City Council
Greg Hearns from the Iowa City Federation of Labor
Meghann Foster from the Coralville City Council
Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz from the Consultation of Religious Communities
Lata D’Mello from Monsoon United Asian Women of Iowa
Rod Sullivan from the Johnson County Board of Supervisors
Shel Stromquist, UI Professor of History Emeritus and Freedom Summer veteran
Kingsley Botchway from the Iowa City Community School District Equity Department
the Reverend Bill Lovin from the Consultation of Religious Communities
Newman Abuissa from PEACE Iowa and the UI Center for Human Rights
Senator Bob Dvorsky from the Coralville Community Food Pantry
Fatima Saeed* from the Eastern Iowa Center for Worker Justice

*Fatima was unable to make it, so I ended up reader her part

2017

2017 was the year that people started telling you to call your senators. If you had already called them, you should call them again, and again. It was unclear how many times you needed to call them, or whether any number of times would be sufficient. It was possible that you could devote your life to calling them and it would not be enough. And indeed, how could it ever be, when the news kept coming, fast and terrible?

It was the year I began to be afraid to look at news alerts on my phone and yet could not look away from them. It was the year that the question on my psychiatrist’s diagnostic survey about how often you felt something awful might happen no longer seemed as though it belonged on a psychiatric questionnaire. Awful things were happening every day—US citizens were denied entry into their own country; refugees were turned back at the gate, white men gunned down scores of people gathered in public places and marched with burning torches; women seeking legal medical procedures were told by the government that had legalized those procedures that they were no longer available. Who in their right might did not believe that something awful was about to happen?

It was the year when information began to disappear, when data scientists began to save things we had always believed our government would keep secure, when librarians began to wonder if government information was something we could still tell people to rely on.

It was the year I lost my keys and my driver’s license, when cash was stolen twice from my wallet and medication from my home, the year I lost six days of my life to a psychiatric ward and another to an accidental overdose on antipsychotics, the year I went to get an abortion and learned I’d already lost the pregnancy.

It was the year that my mother moved into my house with all her earthly possessions and the year my son started kindergarten and an SSRI.

It was the year my son ripped up books and broke windows, the year I wore long sleeves all summer to hide the bite marks on my arm. It was the year men were everywhere found to have harassed and groped and raped women and when others began to pontificate on the nature of toxic masculinity or argue that the crimes of some men should be overlooked in order to preserve the good work they had done, and I began to wonder if it would be possible to raise a white son not to do these things. It was the year that people yelled a lot and the year that I began to lose my faith in the ability of words to convince people of things.

The other day I found one thing that survived the year: a book called Ant and Bee and the ABC, an English book for “tiny tots” that once belonged to my mother. In it Ant and Bee lose their hats and go looking for them in a place called Lost Things Found in Boxes. There is a box for each letter of the alphabet, and they look in each in turn, looking for their lost hats, but there lost hats are not there. Not in Box J with the jack-in-the-boxes or box E with the elephants; not in box Q with the queens or box L with the lions. Spoiler alert: their hats are in the last box, the box that comes after all of the alphabet, a box called Box Funny Things. In the end, they get their hats back and give them to each other, because Ant’s hat fits Bee better and Bee’s hat fits Ant’s better, and they go on to have many other alphabetical adventures in further books.

My house is still full of unpacked boxes. Perhaps when I unpack them I shall regain some of the things I have lost: for of course the last thing that came out of Pandora’s box was hope.