Travelling Pants

I have a pair of Travelling Pants.  They are nothing like the pants immortalized in Ann Brashere's novel Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, which were a pair of blue jeans you may recall fit each of 4 very differently-shaped young women perfectly, in a sexy and shapely way.

I suspect you could not find four women in the universe who would look sexy in my Travelling Pants.  Shapely they are not, unless by shapely you mean makes a person look even more like a lollipop than usual.  They are faded, stained khaki, of threadbare Tencel, with a wildly unattractive elastic and drawstring waist.

They are at least fourteen years old.

The prime--some might say only--virtue of my Travelling Pants is that they are the closest thing to pajama pants that aren't actually pajamas.  They are comfortable.  Always, everywhere.  If you think that's not of primary importance when travelling, then you, gentle reader, have never flown coach class to Cape Town.

Last December, I wore the Travelling Pants for four straight days.  There was a little problem of our luggage remaining in Paris while we flew on to Cairo.  Sounds exotic, but the reality of three days touring in the hot desert then returning to dine in the upscale restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in the same pair of pants (not to mention shirt, socks and bra) was a trifling embarrassing.  By the time the bags showed up I was tempted to throw the Travelling Pants into the Nile.  But I didn't.  What would I have worn on the flight home?

Today marks day two of  the current run of Travelling Pants.  I should have woken up this morning at my favorite hotel in the world, Cashel House, in Connemara, Ireland.  Instead I woke up in Charlotte, NC, a city that had not been part of my itinerary at all.  We were fortunate in that we have a good friend in Charlotte who picked us up last night, stopped at the store for some wine, and gave us beds, showers, and a boffo breakfast.  Still I feel sorry for my husband.  It's his birthday, and he's spending it in airports, wearing for the second day his Travelling Pants.

A Conversation with My Nephew

7:00 am.  I come downstairs to find my nephew Huey, aged 3 1/2, sitting at my kitchen table.  He says, "Hi, Aunt Kim.  I ate all your airplane cookies."

I say, "Are you up by yourself?"

He says, "Dewey (his brother) woke me up.  I've been up since 4:30!  Are you making coffee?"

A glance into the family room has revealed my sister-in-law wrapped in an afghan on the couch.  Coffee seems like the best option.

Huey says, "I love coffee!  I love coffee!  I want some coffee!  Aunt Kim, I want coffee!"

I say nothing.

Huey thinks for a moment, then says sweetly, "Aunt Kim, can  I please have some coffee?"

I say, "It's not done yet.  Also, it's not up to me whether or not you can have coffee.  You'll have to ask your Mom."

Huey runs into the family room, runs back.  He reports, "She said, 'Uh-uh.'  That means yes."

I say, "'Uh-uh means no.  Uh-huh means yes."

Huey runs into the family room, runs back.  He says, "She said, 'Uh-huh.'"

I say, "The coffee's not done.  Would you like something else?"

He says, "No.  I already ate all the airplane cookies."

I'm feeding the dogs when Huey yells, "The coffee's done!  It's done!  Done, Aunt Kim!  Coffee's ready!  I love COFFEE!"

My sister-in-law rolls her eyes and pulls the afghan over her face.  I take a mug and pour half an inch of coffee into it.  I fill the rest of the mug up with milk, and hand it to him.

He looks at it suspiciously.  "Is that whole milk?"

I say, "No.  We're out of whole milk."

"What kind of milk is that?"

"That's skim milk."

"Oh," he says, "I don't like skim milk."  And he puts the mug down and wanders away.

A Further (Very Happy) Update on Marian Randall

1.  She's out of ICU.  In fact, she's been transferred to a hospital that's both closer to her daughter's house and more setup for rehab.
2.  She's off the ventilator.  Breathing on her own, in the end without the very risky surgery to slide plates beneath her broken ribs.
3.  Her spinal fracture is healing with a brace and without surgery.  She can move all her fingers and toes.
4.  She's beginning to speak, and what she says makes sense in context.  (Sarah, I know you want her to talk more.  Don't worry.  She's still on lots of pain meds, and if you could see what those do to Bart you'd not be as concerned about your mom.)
5.  No infections so far, no complications so far, and the surgeries so far (repairs to femur, humerus, knee, and foot) have gone well.
6.  Thank you, God.  Thank you, everyone who held her in your hearts.  The day Marian's husband emailed me a photo of her car, post crash, was the day I broke down.  I can not believe anyone survived that.  But she has.

Huey and Dewey (No Louey this Time)

For the last three and a half years, I have been an Aunt.  I love being an Aunt.  My brother has two little boys and my sister one, and, for the purposes of this blog, I will call them Huey, Dewey, and Louey.

Louey turned nine months old today.  That's epic, but he's up in Wisconsin, where my parents are celebrating with him; a long way from where I am. 

Huey and Dewey are playing trains with my husband.  My brother and his wife came to spend the whole slam-dam Fourth of July weekend extravaganza with us, which was totally excellent.  Due to flight delays, they arrived after midnight on what was technically Thursday morning; my husband had to go into work at 7:30 am even on the Fourth (he's the ophthalmologist on call for our town this weekend), so he was sleeping, and my daughter crashed; my aunt and uncle, who were visiting, also headed to bed fairly early.  I "stayed up" by falling asleep on the couch, and my son stayed up for real.  So we played with our sweet nephews for a few moments in the middle of the night.

Yesterday the Fourth was a little funky.  At 8am the weather channel said, "100% chance of rain at 8 am," but the sun was shining.  We called off our barbeque based on the radar.  At noon, still based on the radar, we called it back on.  It stayed completely beautiful through the cookout and the wiffle ball games and the homemade ice cream, and then it started to rain.  When it slowed to a drizzle we lit off some of the fireworks.  Dewey, who's not quite two, hit his face in a blanket for the first few, and then howled.  Huey, who's 3 1/2, sat on his dad's (my brother's) lap until he decided his cousin and her friends were more fun.

Tonight my son is out with friends.  My aunt and uncle have left to visit their own friends.  My brother and his wife are out on a delayed anniversary dinner.  I rather expected Huey and especially Dewey to howl about being left along with us, but they didn't: Huey just kept scrubbing bubble solution into the flagstone patio with his heels, and Dewey threw a ball into a prickle bush.  My husband played baseball with them, if by playing baseball you mean tried to show them how to hit a thrown wiffle ball while preventing them from clobbering each other.  We ate leftovers for dinner.  Dewey sat staring at his uncle, then careful put his napkin in his lap, then scrubbed his face with it.  He tried to eat his bratwurst with a fork, which means he picked up a piece of bratwurst, held it in front of his lips, and then used his fork to push the piece into his mouth.

Now they're playing trains.  Their uncle built them a terrific track from our son's old wooden train set, and they're zooming through tunnels and over bridges.  "Choo, choo!" Dewey yelled.

It's awesome.

Hating in the Name of Jesus

I got a pretty awful comment on an older post yesterday.  The ironic thing is that was directly responsible for the highest number of hits I've ever had in one day.

Now, I don't mind negative comments.  I express my personal views on this blog and don't expect everyone to agree with me.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that nearly nearly everyone disagrees with me about something.  It's okay.

I was not sure, though, how to handle this particular comment, as it seemed pretty inflammatory.  I'm not  okay with name-calling.  I asked some friends how I should handle it, and in the end decided to let it stand, especially after one of my friends posted a strong rebuttal.

The thing that made me sad was not that the commentor--who I don't know, at least not under the alias used--disagreed with me.  It's not even that the comment was so hateful.  It's that the hate was justified as being a Christian response.  Hating in the name of Jesus.

So this is what I have to say:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; you works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.  (Psalm 139:13-16)

"The most important [commandment]," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord our God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"  (Mark 12:29-31)

[Jesus said,] "Do not judge, or you too will be judged.  For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with measure you use, it will be measured to you.  Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:2-3)

Paula Deen and the 'N' word

Yesterday the woman who cleans for me said, "Isn't that just awful what they're doing to poor Paula Deen?"

I replied, "Actually, I think she got what she had coming," which sort of shut down conversation for awhile.

I realize that a lot of people leaping to "poor Paula Dean"'s defense haven't read much about her situation, and think the only reason she's losing endorsements and her job with the Food Network is because she said the 'N' word once thirty years ago.  Unfortunately, she seems guilty of a whole lot more.  The "poor Paula Deen" conversation reflects badly on how most of us white people view racism in our society today--but Kristen Howerton, who blogs over at Rage Against the Minivan, discussed that in detail yesterday, quite a bit better than I can.  Here.  I encourage you to read it and think about it.

I'd like to talk about the N word.  It's a word I happen to have thought about a lot, mostly because I spent four years researching and writing a book called Jefferson's Sons, which is about the last 20 years of Thomas Jefferson's life as told through the eyes of his children with Sally Hemmings, a slave.  The book takes place between 1805 and 1826 and is absolutely as historically accurate as I can make it, with two exceptions:  I never attempt to write in dialect, and I don't use the N word.

I don't write in dialogue because I dislike reading dialect.  I also feel it's very difficult to do it well, and extremely difficult to use it in the sort of situation I had in Jefferson's Sons.  As my fellow writer John Rocco said when I described the book to him, "But these were real people.  How do you get away with that?"  If I'm using dialect, I'm forced to make all sorts of assumptions about how everyone spoke that I really don't know.  For instance, we do know that grammar was more fluid, especially in speech, in the colonial era--but when I tried to write accurate colonial dialogue in a previous, wholly fiction-based book, (Weaver's Daughter) my editor axed it on the grounds that we couldn't expect modern children to understand that this was probably how everyone spoke back then.  To modern children my characters sounded like illiterate hicks.  Thomas Jefferson was known to be an eloquent writer but a poor public speaker:  would he have sounded vastly more educated than Sally Hemmings, who was raised from earliest childhood inside his house, as the companion of his daughter?  Probably not.  Would Sally Hemmings, who primed her children from birth to understand that they would someday "pass" for white, have tolerated poor speech from them?  Probably not.  But who really knows?  Not me.  That whole "slave dialect" thing--was it real, or was it the product of Margaret Mitchell and her ilk? 

You can see why I left that alone. 

The N word is a whole nother kettle of fish.  It was absolutely historically accurate--it was used, along with several other offensive terms, to describe Jefferson's purported liason with Hemmings back as early as 1801.  (A hundred years later, in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to a private meal in the White House, the next day's New York Times headline was, "President Dines a Nigger."  The headline.  Look it up if you don't believe me.)  But I couldn't use it. 

I'm a white woman.  I find the word abhorrent. I write fiction for middle-schoolers.  The suggested reading range for Jefferson's Sons is grades 5-8.  If I put it into my book, even on a strictly historical basis, I would be in some sense condoning the use of the word.  Sure, I could say, this is strictly historical--but would the ten-year-old reading the story understand that?  Would the ten-year-old white boy realize that while it was common in 1805, it was completely unacceptable now?  Would the ten-year-old black girl feel marginalized? 

Would the school system teaching these 10-year-olds refuse to use the book?  Oh, yes.  Trust me on that one. 

It might be that if I were black I would have the nuanced understanding and the credentials to feel comfortable using the N word.  But I'm not.  The end.

One of the most interesting parts of the Rage Against the Minivan essay concerned white people complaining that black people got to use the N-word when white people didn't.  The response was, Do you want to use the N-word?  Why?  If not, why are you complaining?

Race is a complicated subject, but I don't feel sorry for Paula Deen.  She's not lost her freedom or her health or anything but money from companies who are looking at her and saying, you know, racists aren't really the best representatives for our products.  Bye.  With any luck, this will lead to less racists, or at least racists who think hard before organizing a "plantation" wedding featuring only black servers, or who allow their employees to be bullied based on race, or who ever use the N-word, even once, thirty years from now.

Peremptory and Proud-Minded: The Drama Days

Yesterday I got a sweet note from one of the kids I helped teach in a drama class--wait while I pause to do the math--oh, Lord--ten years ago.  Could it really be that long ago?  I'd gotten sort of sucked into the class.  I wanted to try my hand at adapting my novel Ruthie's Gift for the stage, but, before I could write anything, the middle school drama teacher asked if I could help throw something together for the first semester, first.  I suggested a few scenes from Shakespeare, along with modern translations.  She thought that sounded fun, so I spent a few hours picking out a couple of scenes from some plays, figuring I'd get the middle-schoolers to help write the modern translations.  At the time my own children were in second grade and kindergarten.  Middle-schoolers looked practically adult to me.  However, these middle-schoolers took one look at my Shakespeare pages and were horrified.  Absolutely gobsmacked.  "Don't worry," the regular drama teacher said, "Mrs. Bradley's going to help you."

So Mrs. Bradley stood in front of the class explaining what all the complicated old-fashioned words meant.  And then Mrs. Bradley helped craft the modern versions.  And then Mrs. Bradley helped cast the scenes.  I had a big advantage there--I didn't know one diddly thing about any of these students, except what they'd already revealed to me in class.  So that kid with the dark hair and the flashing eyes?  I thought intelligent instead of troublemaker.  I had no preconceptions.

The boy--man, now, he's a college graduate, headed to law school, but he was a boy then--who wrote me the note yesterday I cast as Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew.  He shuffled up to me at the end of class, script in his hand, eyes on the floor.  "Mrs. Bradley," he whispered, "I can't do this."

I looked at the top of his head.  (He towers over me now.)  I didn't actually know whether he could do it or not.  I barely knew his name.  "Listen," I said, "I will make sure you understand what every word means.  I want you to try your hardest.  And if it turns out you really can't do it, I will change things until you can."

This was not the answer he hoped for.  He gulped and scuttled away, still looking at the ground.  And I, with a sigh, realized I'd just made a commitment to him.  To the class.  I was in.

Six weeks later the same boy jumped onto the wobbly stage we'd set up in the great room of the Presbyterian Church across the street from the school.  I can see him still in my mind's eye, as though it were yesterday, not a decade ago.  "Well, I'll tell you, father," he said, loud, clear, slow and bold, "I am as peremptory as she is proud-minded, and where two raging fires meet, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.  So I am to her, and so she yields to me, for I am rough, and woo not like a babe."  And in the audience, I thought, "Yes!"

Sometimes it's better if you don't know what you are asking.  Speeches like:

“You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation."

really aren't that easy for a 12-year-old to pull off.    Let alone this exchange:

• Katherina. Mov'd! in good time! Let him that mov'd you hither
  Remove you hence. I knew you at the first
  You were a moveable.

• Petruchio. Why, what's a moveable?

• Katherina. A join'd-stool. 

• Petruchio. Thou hast hit it. Come, sit on me.

• Katherina. Asses are made to bear, and so are you.

• Petruchio. Women are made to bear, and so are you.

• Katherina. No such jade as you, if me you mean.

• Petruchio. Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee!
  For, knowing thee to be but young and light-

• Katherina. Too light for such a swain as you to catch;
  And yet as heavy as my weight should be.

• Petruchio. Should be! should- buzz!

• Katherina. Well ta'en, and like a buzzard. 

• Petruchio. O, slow-wing'd turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?

• Katherina. Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard.

• Petruchio. Come, come, you wasp; i' faith, you are too angry.

• Katherina. If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

• Petruchio. My remedy is then to pluck it out. 

• Katherina. Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.

• Petruchio. Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?
  In his tail.

• Katherina. In his tongue.

• Petruchio. Whose tongue? 

• Katherina. Yours, if you talk of tales; and so farewell. 

But I was lucky: my Kate was as talented as my Petruchio. (The next year "Kate" would have the starring role in Ruthie's Gift.) Not only did they remember the words, they made sense of them.  The scene was funny, as it was meant to be.

After the performance, one of the middle-school teachers came up to me.  "Who are you, and what did you do to that child?" she asked.  "I didn't do it," I said.  "He did."