I love camping (and also hate it)

Last July, when Meredith and I had known each other only a month, I asked her on the spur of the moment to go camping in Rocky Mountain National Park with me and Mitike.  I didn’t ask, “Do you camp?” or “Do you like camping?”, as I assumed everyone my age loved to crawl into a nylon tent and sleep in the wilderness.  This assumption had been formed by: 1) my sometime blindness to experiences outside my own; 2) the unusually high percentage of time I have spent in a tent in the past 20 years; and 3) the fact that I love camping.

Meredith, on the other hand, had not been camping for ten years.  Meredith doesn’t love camping.  She loves five-star hotels and white sheets, long hot showers, soft supportive mattresses, innovative restaurant food. 

But she was falling in love with me.  “Do you want to camp with us tonight?” I asked, and she said, “Sure!” as if she camped all the time.  She had to drive five hours round-trip to retrieve her dusty camping gear from her parents’ garage, then meet us at the Moraine Park Campground site, working hard to appear nonchalant.  I did wonder why she struggled a little to set up her tent, but otherwise, she fooled me completely. 

A year later, securely in love and engaged, Meredith confessed to me that she really doesn’t love camping that much.  This was just before we were to depart for a four-day camping trip in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho. 

I responded gently:  It will be fun!  I’ll make it easy.  There are actually showers (true), flush toilets (true), the food will be great (sort of true) and the air mattress is incredibly comfortable (not really true, though it’s better than hard ground).

But I wanted to say:  HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE CAMPING?

I didn’t grow up camping.  When I was a little girl, we headed west from Iowa to Colorado, where we spent a week in the Rockies in a cozy cabin with electricity and indoor plumbing, then drove back across Nebraska.  Once or twice, my family did camp in the sticky Iowa humidity in a nearby county park, and when I was in 9^th grade, my brave (and young, and also foolish) biology teacher Mr. French took our entire class camping for a night at Wildcat Den State Park.  But I didn’t actually begin to love camping until I was nineteen, working as a camp counselor in the Sangre de Cristos in Colorado.  It was then that I had a revelation:  for free, I could carry my house in a backpack, and live happily in the most pristine wilderness for days and days.  At age 24, I hiked the Colorado Trail from Durango to Copper Mountain, happily living in a tent for four weeks. 

For some reason, this was one of the first pieces of biographical information I chose to share with Meredith’s parents the first time I had dinner at their house.  Her dad’s eyes widened:  “So you didn’t shower for weeks?”  I quickly assured him that I shower regularly now.

But what is it about camping that still enamors me, all these years later?  It’s not easy.  It requires hours of organization and packing and set-up (and unpacking and re-organization).  It’s not always fun, especially when it’s raining, hailing, sleeting, or all of the above.  Even the most gourmet meals get cold, or get bits of dirt or pine needles in them.  Campground camping is a strange mix of solitude and too much company from RV owners, children on bikes, and your own tentmates.  Just one night of a lovely campfire perfumes your hair, skin and clothes for the rest of the camping trip.  After a circuit or two of the campground and a few hours reading a book in the hammock, it’s time to walk around the campground again.  The air mattress is not comfortable, and each morning, your back and neck ache, and your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and you get those little yellow crusties in the corners of your eyes.  At most camping sites, you either have to poop into an outhouse pit toilet filled with other people’s excrement or you have to dig a hole and poop like the black bears.  In the morning, making coffee requires warming up your fingers enough to flick on the lighter, which may or may not start the camping stove that may or not have enough fuel.  Add to all this a relatively new understanding of mine about camping:  family camping means no adult privacy ever, since an excited little girl in a purple sleeping bag is rolled up right beside you, with her brown eyes wide open.

Why do I still want to go camping?

Because I love staying up late under the brilliant stars, warming my hands at the campfire.  Because I love cooking on my little propane stove, and I love watching the light fade from the sky through the silhouettes of the pine trees.  Because I love having nothing at all to do in a day but hike and lounge in my hammock with a book.  Because I love being woken by birds and the light filtering through the nylon tent.  Because I love that I have everything I need right there in the wilderness:  kitchen and bedroom and living room.  Because I love making tinfoil dinners and tasting hot coffee on cold mornings and roasting marshmallows late at night.  Because I love the moment my feet get warm in my sleeping bag.  Because I love my daughter’s sense of freedom when we’re camping:  the way she plays in the woods, and feels important that it’s her job to fill the water bottles at the pump.  Because I love the simplicity of camping:  that our devices go dead after a day, that no one can call or text or email us, that we have to mull over a question together instead of look it up quickly on Google, that to-do lists and expectations and obligations cease to matter.  Because I love the quality of conversation that happens between people camping together, when there is time and space to reflect and discuss.  Because, even though a little girl and a dog are sleeping nearby, cuddling with my fiancé in a tent beneath layers of blankets and sleeping bags is sweet, and cold nights are a lovely excuse to cuddle closer.

As I set up our tent in the beautiful woods in the Sawtooths, and Meredith laid out the lunch food on the picnic table, I called over to her, “Isn’t this great?”  I so dearly wanted her to love camping the way I love it that I had hidden my long list of reasons I don’t like it.  She smiled at me across the campsite, a Wheat Thin layered with peppered salami and fresh mozzarella cheese in one hand.  “Yes,” she said, gazing up at our canopy of pine trees, and then over at our tent, “this is a beautiful place.”

One of the many reasons I love Meredith is that she’s open to adventure, even if it’s not what she would have chosen to do on her own.  We finished setting up the camp and then walked down the hill to the white-sand shore of Redfish Lake, where the Sawtooth Mountains rose in an impressive backdrop to the glittering blue water.  Mitike and our dog splashed around, and we lounged on the beach, our backs against an enormous fallen tree.  Later, after a dinner of hot dogs and steamed French green beans, we built a roaring fire and watched the stars emerge.  And still later, we crawled into our bed in the tent, cuddling close.  I closed my eyes and thought about the Milky Way above us, and I thought about how much I love camping.

And then, in the middle of the night, when the temperature had dropped to 35 degrees and my feet and nose were freezing, when my lower back hurt and Mitike was whimpering, “I’m cold, Mommy!” and the dog had curled himself into the smallest ball possible, I whispered into Meredith’s ear, “I actually hate camping, you know.” She burst out laughing, which sounded odd through her chattering teeth.  “You do?”  “Yes.  Let’s get a hotel room, with white sheets and a hot shower and room service.”  Instead, we pulled the blankets and sleeping bags closer around us, draped a sweater over the dog, and cinched TK’s sleeping bag around her head.    

Four days later, when we were actually enjoying hot showers and clean white sheets in a Provo, Utah, La Quinta Hotel, I admitted it again:  “I really don’t know if I love camping.”  Meredith grinned at me.  She’d just listed everything she’d loved about our trip to Idaho:  a hike on a dramatic ridge above the lake, kayaking, campfires, star-gazing, dinner on the beach, a lazy morning with scrambled eggs and coffee, our tree silhouette canopy, the ease of our togetherness and of being unplugged for awhile.  She pulled me into a full hug.  “I love you, you know.  And next time we go to Redfish Lake, we could stay in one of those cute cabins.”

We could, of course.  Almost everything I love about camping could be achieved through the kind of cabin experience I had in my childhood, and everything I dislike would be fixed by a comfortable bed, a flush toilet, a hot shower, and a little heat within four walls.  But.

What if the point of camping is to more fully appreciate a hot shower?  What if the point is to understand how lucky we are to have soft beds and clean sheets, restaurant food, and sweet-smelling hair?  (Meredith says she already appreciated these things). 

What if the point is to be a little uncomfortable, to shake ourselves out of the expected comfort of daily modern life?

Several days after our camping adventure in Idaho, Meredith showed me a little YouTube video advertisement for the Australian-made “Teardrop” camper.  I watched the video three times on my own.  In that dear little tow-along camper, one has a comfortable king-sized bed and a full kitchen. 

“If I had that, I’d never sleep in a tent again,” I said, in awe, and then clapped my hands over my mouth.  I had just betrayed tent-camping!  But maybe – just maybe – I’ve put in enough time on the ground.  Maybe it’s time to transition to something a little more comfortable in the wilderness. 

Maybe. 

Ask me next summer, when enough time has elapsed, and I’ll tell you I can’t wait to unroll the tent and shake out the sleeping bags.  I love camping, I’ll tell you.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.

We are the change we've been waiting for.

A little "art" I created in a Naropa class last week:  Anna
Dickinson, the 19th century Quaker abolitionist and
orator (and lesbian) observing 9-year-old (lesbian) me.

While Facebook friends and my classmates and professors at Naropa's Summer Writing Program celebrated the SCOTUS marriage-equality decision last Friday, I struggled with anger.  What were we celebrating, really?  The Supreme Court's decision that my fiancé and I deserve basic human rights?  I thought about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, and wondered if African American families felt celebratory or exhausted and angry when it was announced.  Of course my child should get to attend school with your child.  It's about time.  Or the 1919 passing of the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in the United States 143 years after Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he helped write the text of the U.S. Constitution.  I've seen the photographs of women celebrating the amendment, victoriously holding their placards aloft.  But surely they felt anger, too.  One hundred and forty-three years?   The fight was painful, vitriolic.  Opponents hurled insults at the suffragettes:  she's really a man, she neglects her children, she's a Sapphist. Many suffragettes did not live to see their dream of the vote realized.  When justice takes so long, how can we forgive the time frame and just celebrate?

I carried these brooding thoughts with me to a table at the Naropa Café, where my poet-friend Val was gesturing for me to join her.  Val is much older than I am:  short gray hair, life-worn, a poet shaman who wears bright scarves, believes her dreams, and talks openly of a difficult past she barely survived.  We're connected because we're both writers and we're both lesbians.

"I can't shake this anger I'm feeling today," I told her.  My bones felt heavy.  I told Val what I'd been thinking about Brown and Abigail and celebrations, and she nodded, agreeing, but I caught the glint of loving amusement in her eyes.  And suddenly, I heard how young I sounded.  I came out as a lesbian at age 28, in 2005, after famous people like Ellen had begun to come out (1997), after the last sodomy law was overturned in Texas (2003), after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage (2004).  I was born eight years after the Stonewall Riots (1969).  And I didn't feel like celebrating?  In the middle of my own sentence, I burst out laughing.

Val grinned.  "The world is changing," she said.  "It's our work to be midwives to all this change.  We've got to celebrate.  It's our work."

It's our work.  I celebrated the rest of the day without hesitation, cheering with all the rest when Anne Waldeman introduced our Friday colloquium with a joyful fist in the air and a "How about that Supreme Court decision?" I checked Facebook more often than usual, and felt only glad to see all the rainbows.  Meredith texted from the World Series of Poker in Vegas:  "Because of the Supreme Court decision today, I've already won!"  Determined to be a midwife for all this change, whenever it arrives, a friend and I toasted Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer at dinner that night.  What does anger accomplish?  The change is happening.  People who struggled with police at Stonewall never thought they'd see this day.

This morning, I sit outside on the front porch with my coffee, the sprinklers nourishing the new plants in our garden, and contemplate change in my own life.  In four years, Mitike and I have moved three times:  Juneau to Fort Collins, Fort Collins to Boulder, and now to Denver. Four years ago, Ali died.  Only two years ago, I emerged from living all the time inside grief.  And now, in this past year and a half, as if something in me was finally prepared to midwife good, life-giving change:  I met Meredith, I got a few pieces published, I earned an MFA, I found a good high school English job, and I got engaged.  When the assistant principal at South High asked me why I was moving to Denver, I told her I was moving in with my fiancé, and that she lives just a few miles from the school.  It wasn't long ago that it was dangerous for a teacher to come out to an administrator.  The assistant principal just smiled and said, "Congratulations!  Will the kids have to get used to you having a new last name next year, then?"

This morning, I feel only joy.  Yes, these changes that seem obvious take too long.  Yes, we have a long way to go in this country to craft a safe and equal world for people of all races, backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.  But this morning, I'm watching the sun glint off the droplets of water on my new yarrow and coneflower plants.  In a year, I'm hoping these plants fill this garden, but they're still new.  They're waiting for the soil to be right for their roots, for the sun and rain to nourish them just enough.  Then they'll grow tall and full.  For now, I'll stand nearby and write, a midwife for all this good change.

Overwhelmed

After my sister Katie and her book club read and studied Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, the group of women attended Schulte's April 23 talk in Fort Collins. In the Q&A session after the talk, Katie raised her hand and asked where an overwhelmed working mother of two small children could even begin.  Schulte's response:  "Throw away your to-do lists."

On Katie's recommendation, I've bought this book, and. . . I've stacked it on the top of a pile of other books on my desk that I plan to read soon, when I have time.  When I'm not so overwhelmed.  One stack is my stack of esoteric "to-read" books; another is inspirational "to-read" books; the final one is "I've read this recently but haven't bothered to put it away yet" books.  On my bedside table in my room, I have the stack of "fiction I've started but haven't gotten around to continuing" books, the stack of "poetry I'd like to say I've read but it never holds my attention at midnight when I go to bed" books, the stack of "biographies I mean to read but stop reading because people's lives aren't as interesting as they could be at midnight when I've finished writing and grading papers and planning lessons" books, and the stack of "bad lesbian romances I buy because I want to support other lesbian writers but just can't bear to read them" books.

Schulte's book, Overwhelmed perches on the prestigious stack, the first stack I see when I come in the door after a long day of teaching, the stack I see when I grab my laptop to write my 1500 words for the night, no matter how tired I am.

To-Do:
*Read all those books.
*Stay as well-read as possible.
*Do everything on my to-do list, every night.

If I didn't have a to-do list, I'd never get anything done.  Throw it away?  I'm too overwhelmed to think about doing that.

Tonight, for example, I decided I would not let myself start anything else until I'd crossed off two important items from the long to-do list on my desk:  buy a dress for the San Francisco wedding in June, and buy shoes for that wedding.  Simple enough, except that I detest shopping, even online.  Styles, colors, reviews, comparisons.  I tried to shop in person earlier tonight, but one walk through Macy's made me shudder.  I'll take my chances online.  Two hours later, I clicked "purchase" on Amazon, then immediately regretted I'd chosen a lavender dress instead of something safer, like brown.  Already 11:30 pm.  Instead of picking up one of those books, I played three games of Words With Friends on my phone, then felt frustrated that I'd frittered away the time when I could have been enriching my brain.

To-Do:
*Get a dress for San Fran
*Stop frittering away the hours.
*Quote Thoreau more often.
*Read Thoreau more often.
*Do more yoga?
*Stay off Facebook!
*Check in with friends and family (Facebook for five minutes.)
*Stay up later, to do more things from my To-Do list

I know these are first-world problems.  White, privileged problems.  The anxiety that rises in me when I think about the full laundry hamper, the empty refrigerator (when TK needs food for her lunch tomorrow), and my current job search is the anxiety of someone who lives in a safe and secure house and neighborhood, who has a stable and well-paying job, who is relatively healthy and is surrounded by supportive, loving family and friends.  I don't need to worry.

To-Do:
*WORRY.

My chest aches, my arms go numb, my breath is too shallow.  My lower back hurts.  I sit on my couch and try to distract myself with The New Yorker, and end up reading about forest elephants which poachers are evidently killing at a rate of one every fifteen minutes.  American researcher Andrea Turkalo has camped out in the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic for twenty years.  She spends her time observing the elephants and reading voraciously.  She told The New Yorker:  "That's why I like being here.  You have time to focus on things."  Her life is in danger because the Sudanese poachers carry automatic weapons, and her work is in danger because the elephants are disappearing and the Chinese are blazing roads so they can log the forest.  I shouldn't feel jealous of Andrea Turkalo.

To-Do:
*Start a campaign against the buying of ivory.
*Discover a way to make my Boulder apartment feel like a tent in the Dzanga-Ndoki

I'm not overwhelmed the way I was when I lived in the middle of grief.  The smallest tasks overwhelmed me then.  I'd run out of milk and lean against the counter to cry about it.  I'd lie in bed in the morning and dread the complicated task of getting dressed and then brushing my teeth.  The dentist bill made me panic, and so did the price of ground beef, and of soccer lessons for TK.  Now I'm mostly overwhelmed by happiness:  moving, job searches, future plans.  And I'm a mother of a small child, which makes me overwhelmed anyway.  I don't get to come home from work and just lounge on the couch with my peanut butter tortilla in one hand and a book in the other.  I have to cook a healthy dinner and then encourage TK to pack her lunch and then push her to put her pajamas on and brush her teeth, and somewhere in there we practice math (tonight, we practiced fractions), and somewhere in there we read another chapter of Harry Potter, and then I tuck her into bed.  I could flop onto the couch after that, and read, or watch TV.  But I make myself write.

To-Do:
*Sleep more.
*Write three more novels before August 30.
*Find out why I'm so compelled to write.
*Find something bigger and more important to write about.
*Ask myself:  if I never relax and only write, about what will I write?
*Ask myself:  what will happen if I order out for dinner more often?

My middle school students are all researching nonviolent action in the world right now.  That's the best gift I can offer a privileged, predominately white population of students, to show them that 1) violence is not an answer to the world's problems and 2) they have some power to enact change.  But as I circulate in my classroom, helping with sentence construction and image layout, advising about the credibility of online sources, I only feel overwhelmed.  Yes, people are marching in Myanmar against the jailing of journalists, and holding up signs in Russia against homophobia, and projecting holographic images of themselves illegally protesting in Spain.  But North Korea continues to abuse its people, and Uganda's corrupt regime is still in power, and Guantanamo Bay is still open.  Is it working? I ask each group of students about the nonviolent actions they're researching.  They shrug.  It's still not fixed, if that's what you mean.  No.  It won't be.  All we can do is keep marching.

To-Do:
*Overcome the Powers That Be.
*Keep marching.
*Don't give up!

I'm tired.  I think I'll grab this Overwhelmed book and crawl into bed, open it, read a few pages before I fall asleep.  Tomorrow, I'm taking the day off so I can hike all morning in Chautauqua State Park, where I plan to think about nothing except what I see.  I won't bring any to-do lists.  I won't even make any in my mind.  I'll just walk, and breathe.  Maybe that's the most important action I can take in the world right now, before I can accomplish anything else.

Light

Today feels heavy.  Dark clouds hang in the eastern sky, and the prediction is for rain and snow in Boulder over the next two days.  My students have been restless, edgy.  Spring break gave them a taste of freedom, and now they're back in these plastic chairs, trapped for hours in these square rooms, told to open their notebooks, get out their pencils, pay attention, engage now.  I stand in front of them and conduct a fun economics game that most of them seem to enjoy, but I keep drifting to the hours M. and TK and I spent driving through the red dust of the southwest, all that open space in my mind.

Today is heavy because eleven educators were convicted of racketeering in Atlanta and sent to prison.  They look familiar to me:  the stooped shoulders of people who work for too many hours for too little pay.  They've stood in classrooms in front of too many students.  What they did was wrong, of course.  But I recognize them as my colleagues.  And as victims of an enormous system that coerced at least 178 people into cheating.  The science fiction I'm writing doesn't seem too distant, if the testing culture is pushing entire school districts to these extremes.  Educators as criminals.  What's next?  Educators as superfluous?  I thought to look up a piece of satire I published as a 28-year-old grad student ten years ago -- "A Modest Proposal for Our Schools" -- and was shocked to find it's even more relevant today.

Today is heavy because Arkansas wants to pass similar "religious freedom" laws to the ones recently passed in Indiana.  In how many states will I -- and my family -- be declared unwelcome?

Today is heavy because I got the fifth rejection letter I've received in two days.  Yesterday, Room magazine wrote that they "regret to inform me" that they did not want my fiction or my creative non-fiction pieces.  And today, The Orlando Prize emailed that there was too much greatness in the submissions for spring; my essay and my flash fiction were "just not for them".  Fence thanked me for patiently waiting a year for their decision about their 2014 book prize, but I had not been chosen.

Sigh.  M. teases me when I write out "sigh", or when I say the word aloud to accompany the sound.  Thinking about that, and the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases me, makes me smile.  And TK's excitement today about April Fool's made me smile.  And a few future possibilities I'm leaning toward.  And the way it felt to write all day yesterday at a coffee shop, acoustic guitar music in my ears.  And the plain M&Ms my friend Dede thinks to send me every single holiday because she knows they make me happy.  And the memory of Arches, that red-brown rock, the secret silences.  And the fact that it's Thursday tomorrow, and I know my students will love comparing Russian and American Cold War propaganda.  And the fact that I just beat M. at Scrabble.  And my niece and her round cheeks and the way she says "I don' know!", and my baby nephew with his voluminous wild hair and his fascination with his fingers. And my sister's laugh.  And the way TK murmurs in her sleep sometimes, like she did just now.  And my dad's happiness to be out on the trails again, stopping on a bridge to search for an American Dipper.  And the letters my mom and I write each other on Sundays now, like she and Gram used to do. And June, which I've always loved for its possibilities.

Days aren't heavy like they used to be.  I spent almost two years in the darkness, and now it's Easter, all deep plant roots and first crocus blooms and light breaking in, all the pagan fertility and whispered joy.  A light shines in the darkness.  NPR is playing the news about Israel and Palestine, and TK says, "Could you turn that off so we can be happy together?" and I do, because she's right.  I want to be responsible and learn as much as I can about the Iran nuclear negotiations and the ongoing search for fairness in Ferguson, but I also I want to make sure I keep a view of the light.

I'm here.  In Gram's green chair, with a view of the bright yellow happy wooden star that used to hang in a doorway at Gram's house.  My apartment is quiet; I've spent the evening reading The New Yorker; I'm about to write another chapter of my novel.  A sweet, smart, beautiful little girl is sleeping just down the hall.  Tomorrow, M. says, she'll be here after school, and she'll take care of dinner and hug me when I come home.  It might rain all day tomorrow, but we can have warm brownies and ice cream and watch Bette Midler's Hocus Pocus, and Fable the dog will stretch out beside us and close his eyes because his pack is all accounted for.

The message emerging in the science fiction novel I'm writing is this:  connect to humans. Turn off the devices; hold someone's hand; watch the clouds change in the sky. It won't fix everything, but it will make everything a little easier.  A little lighter.

Twenty Ways of Looking at the PARRC Tests

inspired, of course, by "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace Stevens

1.  As I'm passing out pencils and scratch paper to the ten eighth graders who are taking the PARRC test in my classroom, I listen to them talk about why they're there (three-fourths of our school's eighth graders' parents opted them out of the test):
-- F. says her mother, who grew up in Mexico, wants her to obey whatever the school says.
-- S. says he wants to know how well he can do.
-- J. kicks the desk and says his dad wouldn't let him out of it: "He says I can always learn something."
-- C. shrugs.
-- L. points out that their peers who have refused to take the test are required to sit silently in the next room.  "I might as well take the test."

*

2.  I read the directions from a thick book, and the students open Chromebooks, type in codes, click "sign in".  I'm not allowed to say anything but what is printed in the "SAY" boxes.

*

3.  Begin.

*

4.  The test administrator book contains a special section for "extreme weather situations".  If there's a tornado, I am supposed to ensure the kids' safety and then return to secure the tests on each of the Chromebooks.

*

5.  The daffodils blooming in the tall slim glass vase on my table this morning made me happy.  M. left me and TK a note:  "This is how I feel now that I've met you both." That makes me happy, too.  I walk around and around the testing room, thinking about M.

*

6.  J. must be clicking random answers.  Only nine minutes into the 90-minute testing period, he raises his hand and tells me he's finished.  He eyes the football in his cubby, and leans back in his chair as far as he can.  "Did you do your best?" "Sure."

*

7.  In Georgia, twelve teachers are currently on trial for participating in systematic cheating on state tests in 2009.  They are being charged with racketeering, and if convicted, could serve twenty years in prison.  They erased student answers and filled in the correct ones.  Maybe they did it because administrators threatened their job security, or maybe they did it because demonstrated school progress would translate into raises for teachers.  Or maybe they did it because they were just scared.

*

8.  Twenty years in prison.  In how many ways would that change a life?

*

9.  Outside the window, there is no tornado.  Inside, the students tapping on keyboards, J. tilting back in his chair again, me walking and walking in circles.

*

10.  If education meant reading all of the thousand books in this classroom, we would live in a radically different world.

*

11.  On Sunday, M., TK and I shared breakfast on the front porch:  waffle sandwiches with bacon and scrambled eggs, a side of chopped cucumber and tomatoes.  The sun warmed us and Fable stretched out at our feet, his nose quivering in his sleep.  When I looked at M., I thought: I almost forgot the world was this lovely.

*

12.  C. is working harder on this test, which counts for nothing and means nothing, than he ever does in class.  His brow is furrowed.  Some days, it's difficult to get him to write more than a sentence or two on an assignment, but he is typing furiously.  I don't know what, since I signed my name to a contract promising I would not look at the test screen or discuss any part of the test with students.

*

13.  The 1st and 2nd graders have just been released to recess.  They run pell-mell from the door toward the playground.  I see TK isn't wearing her jacket, as usual, and she is grinning, racing her friends to the tire swing, where they will spin and spin.  J. catches me watching them, shakes his head sadly.  I hear his thoughts:  not fair.

*

14.  It is sacrilege to keep quotes from e.e. cummings ("be nobody but yourself") and Emerson ("I am a transparent eyeball") and Mary Oliver ("What will you do with your one wild and precious life?") on the walls when students are taking a computerized standardized test in a silent room.

*

15.  The British-based publishing giant Pearson has made millions of dollars from its contracts with states like Colorado.  S. asks me in the hallway:  "Is that taxpayer money?"  He's fourteen, asking the important questions.  I nod.  "And they're British?" I nod again.

*

16.  Next week at this time, I'll be in a car with M. and TK, driving across the red canyonlands of Utah.  For five laps around the room, I pretend I'm walking through a canyon at Arches, and that I'm entirely alone.  A red-tailed hawk calls, but otherwise the world is silent.  Abbey's world.  He'd tell me to hightail it out of this square room, these standards, these kids who would prefer to look at mindless games on their phones than engage, engage, engage.  Abbey, of the Monkeywrench Gang.  Where's the weak spot in this testing infrastructure?  What can I sabotage, and how?

*

17.  Two kids are still working.  The others sleep, or flip the pages of books.  Why are these two kids pouring so much time and effort into this test?  It won't count.  It can't.  They wouldn't judge our eighth graders' performance based on just one-fourth of our population.  Would they?

*

18.  We don't need no education.  We don't need no mind control.  Teachers!  Leave those kids alone!  R. and J. try to communicate with invented sign language across the room, and I shoot them a look.  Why?  R. would rather spend all his time playing video games.  J. just wants a ball in his hand.  In my social studies class, they want to play war games, and they stop paying attention when we debate freedoms and basic rights.

*

19.   I'm burned out.  Burned up.  Burning.  Not fired yet, but not firing from all cylinders.  Fired up.  I'm a good teacher, but it's the scores that matter.  The data.  Bill Gates announces tests must be standardized so we have a measurement for all Americans.  Pearson sets the cut line.  Cut.  Cut up.  Cut down.  Cutting edge.  Cut me and I'll bleed.

*

20.  All the kids have finished.  Now we are supposed to sit in silence until the administration tells us all the testing rooms are done.  Silence is the only gift these tests give us.  No phones, no music, no conversation. I sit down on a blue plastic chair, gaze at the far wall and let myself be silent.  I don't know where else to begin.

Notes From the Human Teacher

I'm working on a sci-fi novel right now that I started a few years ago, when I first moved to Colorado from Alaska.  I'd taught middle school in Alaska for ten years, and Colorado teenagers were fairly similar to the ones who had filled my classroom in Alaska:  eager, resistant, malleable, stubborn, rebellious, needy. Teenagers.  However, Colorado teenagers were far more absorbed by their cellphones.  Had I failed to notice this in Alaska?  Did the mountains and glaciers, the glittering ocean water, the sight of whales pull Alaskans' eyes up and out of their devices more?  Or did the "no cellphones" rule at the middle school where I'd taught in Alaska just shield me from the direction our society has been moving for quite awhile?  Everywhere I looked, in every common space, at every lunch hour, in the parking lot after school, in the Mexican restaurant down the street from our high school, kids were bent over their phones, checking, checking, checking, posting, checking.  It was a problem.

One day, the sentence came to me:  "No one has talked to me in eleven years."  I had this image of a world in which all teenagers have ceased to interact with each other face-to-face at all, where it would be possible to move through all of one's years of school without a human voice, where everyone has shifted to only needing their phones, and nothing else.  

It was an outlandish idea, and I discarded it for a couple of years.  How ridiculous to think that we will ever reach a time when people do not crave the basic human interactions of laughing together, kissing each other, looking each other in the eye, touching a hand or a shoulder.  Yes, teenagers are obsessed right now with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HeartChat.  That doesn't mean their phones will take over their lives completely.

Unless we help make it happen.  Last Friday, I sat through the annual proctor training for the state tests.  For the past several years, I've been administering state tests to my students each spring, dutifully reading the directions, keeping time, pacing around and around the room while my students sit in desks in straight rows and fill in bubbles on scan-tron forms.  Every principal for whom I've worked has emphasized the seriousness of the tests, the way our students' performance will affect the school's funding and status in the state.  Each year, the stakes have gotten higher.  Administrators stand at the entrance to the secure room that holds the boxes of tests and signs each box out to each teacher; we're instructed never to look at the tests students are taking; we're required to bring the tests back alphabetized on the penalty of a note in our files.  The ring of a student's cellphone will invalidate all the tests in that room; a test given in the incorrect order will also invalidate all the tests for that room and jeopardize the overall performance of the school.  This is unbelievably serious.

For the first time this year, the state of Colorado will administer computer-based tests, the PARRC tests created and sold by the Pearson Corporation.  Although twenty-four states originally signed up to administer these tests, parent lawsuits, financial constraints, and other considerations have dropped the number to ten plus Washington, D.C. Because Colorado is helping pilot the tests this year, our student scores will not count at all.  The idea is that states could all administer the same test across the country, to see if students are actually meeting Common Core standards, or if each state's standards are relative.  I've never believed in the worth of these standardized tests, as they rarely test what my students know or how they know it, and they take away weeks of academic content time.  However, the computer-based tests are taking all of this to a new low -- and they're compounding the problem of a society overly dependent on their devices.

These are actual words and phrases from our training last week: 
*"It is an option to have a human reader."
*"Scratch paper is not secure."
*"The test monitors must be state-sanctioned."
*"Teachers should be in a position to see students working, not students' work."
*"Teachers should use proximity to keep students on task."
*"Ensure a standardized testing environment."
*"Proctors should erase the seal code once the test is underway and only provide current seal code."
*"A misadministration of the test includes systematic unethical behavior."
*"Watch for a breach of secure test materials."

*"In these virtual groupings of students. . ."

*"The administrator will ensure the chain of custody of the tests. . ."

I'm frightened.  At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, a conspiracy-theorist, a science-fiction writer, I'll say this: if we continue to place our children (from third grade and up) into these secure, contained, completely computerized environments, and we allow an unchecked dependence on devices during their free time, we will see a dramatic shift in the ways our children think, imagine, feel, and interact.  No one other than the designated proctor (me) is allowed to be with them in the testing room, so I cannot invite you into my classroom to witness the way a testing session looks -- my twelve- and thirteen-year-olds dutifully sitting in straight rows with their Number 2 pencils poised, bubbling circles, silent for two hours when they are never silent, docile when they are never docile.  Now they'll be on computers, and we are not allowed to say anything but "Keep working," even if their computer is malfunctioning.  The human teacher becomes a mere monitor of a room of children interacting with a computerized tool the human teacher is prohibited from seeing because that violates the test's security.

We should all be frightened.  

People write science fiction as a warning.  This is what could happen if. . .  But the deeper and deeper I move into the future I'm imagining in my fiction, the more frightened I am of the present.  What are we doing?  People in the corporate world shrug at teachers' passionate vitriol about standardized testing and say the tests are a way to guarantee quality. Advocates for Common Core say it's a logical way to ensure high standards across states and communities.  I've made those arguments before, too.  Except I've lost faith in the tests as utilitarian tools for learning, and have begun to see them for what they are:  punitive tools attached to money that finances corporations, long bureaucratic hours that only increase students' alienation at school and add nothing to their learning.  

I'm moving forward on the science fiction manuscript again, but sometimes I have to pause -- blink -- tell myself we're not in that world yet.  It's still February, and I'm teaching my students about the Holocaust, exploring personal narratives, interviewing survivors, examining primary source photographs.  I want them to think for themselves, not as part of a machine.  Only that kind of creative, critical thinking will save us from repeating the history my student Forrest, a 7th grader, captured in this cartoon he doodled in his notebook last week.

I can still be a human teacher, encouraging our "no cell phones" policy in spite of the eye rolls, forcing them to look each other in the eye and talk about the human truths of history.

I will do this until I am notified that my methods are not state-sanctioned, not secure, a breach of the system.

Yikes.  Lately, it's been too easy to imagine a dystopian world in a which a child really could go years without hearing a human voice or making eye contact with another human's eyes. . .

Teaching: War is Not a Game

We're currently playing World War II as a game.  Two weeks ago, I asked each of my 7th and 8th graders to choose a country by sitting in the chair behind a placard, and they've been role-playing the Axis and Allied powers each day since, rolling dice for battles, shouting out the "secret powers" that give them extra points.  The kid playing Germany yells out, "Dictator who will stop at nothing, for two extra points!"  Canada grins.  "I've got 'millions who want to serve' for one extra point, and France has 'free French Vichy fighters in the south' for another point".  The strategies begin as the kids enter the classroom.  "I think it's 1941 today.  Pearl Harbor happens now, doesn't it?  That means the U.S. might enter the war."

Like everything about teaching, this may or may not be an effective approach to learning about World War II.  While we're not repeating my own dismal middle school experience of memorizing battle names and dates, victors and generals, I worry I'm making war feel like too much of a game.  It's fun, which isn't the message I want to convey about global conflict.

So we took a break from the game yesterday to read and view primary sources from the Library of Congress collection about Japanese Internment in the U.S.  Ansel Adams' and Dorothea Lange's photographs silenced the kids.  This happened here?  In the U.S.?  We read FDR's Executive Order 9066.  This was okay to do?  What about the Constitution?

I asked them, "Could this happen again?" and in every class someone said yes.  "To whom?"  Maybe Muslims.  Maybe people from the Arab world.  Maybe gay and lesbian people?  Maybe immigrants.  The list grew as the kids imagined the ways in which certain groups could become enemies of the state.  I allowed the conversation to continue not because I want them to become paranoid, but because I want them to think critically.  

We're protected from that happening again, though, right?

It's happening now, I wanted to say.  In Guantanamo Bay.  At the Mexican border.  In Palestine.  In Ferguson.  Behind prison bars, inside detention centers.  In Alabama's resistance to same-sex marriage.  

What I said:  Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.  

Today, we returned to our World War II game, to the final year: 1945.  The dice battles were raucous again, and the score in every class between the Allies and the Axis was close.  It felt more like a basketball game than anything, with the Allies cheering when they forced a German retreat, and again when the Soviets encircled Berlin.  "I'll use my secret power of 'Location in the Pacific'!" Australia announced in a battle with Japan, and Japan shot back, "Then I'll use my power of 'Kamikaze pilots'!"  One point here, one point there.  

And then, in every class, the kid portraying the U.S. looked at his or her card and said, "I'm going to use my secret power that wasn't ready until now.  The atomic bomb, for fifty points."  And in every class, the kids reacted to this with stunned silence.  Well.  The war was over.  And?  The game had changed.

We ended by reading an excerpt from Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing.  I let Hachiya's words linger in the room.  "It was all a nightmare -- my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead."  

My students left class quietly, subdued.  

War is not a game.  But maybe two weeks of role-playing these countries and the events of WWII made the end seem more personal, more real.  Maybe that was the reason for the silence when the atomic bomb was finally played in our game.  Or maybe -- for a flash of a moment -- the kids understood that none of these events are fictional, that all of this really happened, inthis world, in the world they are in the process of inheriting.

Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.

Keep Writing

Photo by Richard H. Hahn, Jan. 15, 2015

Ever since I stopped steeping myself in grief all the time, I've lost some of my direction as a writer.  What is there to say, when there is everything to say, suddenly?  When my eyes are open to all of life again?  My smile isn't forced anymore; I walk into my apartment at the end of a day and feel only happy gratitude for the orange tulips M. has left on my table to greet me.  When I sit down at my computer each night, the world seems so open to endless possibility that I feel stumped.  What should I write?  Do I have anything to write, other than grief?

Doubt whispers in my ear.  Were you ever any good, or were you just writing about topics so extreme that people wanted to read them?  If you're happy, how can you possibly have anything to say?

Then tonight, I attended the annual Boulder Writers' Workshop Member Showcase and Recognition event, and remembered that I am not just a writer alone in a dark apartment at midnight, but a member of a community of writers.  The keynote speaker, Gail Storey, reminded us all that our work as writers is to "bear witness" to others, to create an offering of love to the world.  Storey warned us that it is fear that stops us, preventing us from mustering up the courage to transform with our art.

I listened, and remembered:  I was a writer long before grief.  Maybe, for a time, I needed to pour all of my art into sadness, but now I'm ready to write about parenting, teaching, hiking, Colorado, marriage, being gay, adoption, travel, technology, violence, aging, writing, love.  I'm ready to create characters in fiction again.  I'm ready to explore the world's problems through science fiction, to suggest happy endings in romances, to experiment in literary fiction.  I'm ready, like I've been in a white-hot fire and emerged pure.  I'm edgier, wiser, a little more anxious, but ready.

At the showcase tonight, I read my Long's Peak essay, which the BWW was kind enough to award the annual "Editors' Choice" award for essays published in the Flatirons Literary Review.  It was strange, to read an essay that did not flay open sadness, or only consider death.  "A Woman on Long's Peak" is ultimately about the joy of being alive in a majestic, wild, and dangerous place.  It's also about being part of a community of women who summited the mountain once, too.  I'm not alone.  As a hiker, as a writer, as a person: I'm not alone.

Some morose Germanic part of me wants to insist that great literature can't arise from joy.  But maybe it should.  I think I'll silence Doubt, whose other name is Fear, and just write.  Charley Parkhurst needs me to write him a lesbian version of his story, and I've got a scared girl character trapped in a future in which everyone texts and no one talks face-to-face.  I need to reveal some truths about education, and I need to record the experience of parenting Mitike right now.  I need to espouse my opinions about the death penalty and about gay marriage, and I need to write some good essays about love and relationships.  Ah, it feels good to make such a list!  Every night, I write, but every night lately, I've begun with Doubt.  No more.  I'll read and re-read this blog post instead, as my opening ritual.

Lately, in the midst of quite a bit of happiness blooming in my life, I've caught myself playing the saboteur, searching for reasons to worry or to be a little sad.  I start worrying about finding a college job (which I'd love), or about whether I should move to Denver, or about what I'll do for my parents when they become elderly (they're all in their 60s and are currently fine), or about whether I'm parenting my child well enough that I'll prevent her from becoming a dysfunctional adult (she's currently 8).  It's all fear.  It's that I'm afraid the happiness won't stay.  But tonight, I'm considering this:  I was so intent on detailing every aspect of my experience of sadness; I was so certain my journey required me to hold grief up and examine it closely from all angles.  Why should I not do the same with happiness?  Maybe a good writer's responsibility is to seek to witness the entire range of human experience.

I love to look at this photograph I've posted with this text, a photograph my dad, a professional photographer, took a couple of weeks ago.  The immensity of the universe -- all those stars! -- reminds me I haven't even begun.

Time to keep writing.

Taking a stand as a teacher

I took twenty-four 7th and 8th graders on a bus to downtown Denver last Wednesday, to the First Unitarian Church, where a man named Arturo Hernandez has claimed sanctuary from the U.S. government and its immigration enforcement arm, ICE.  A local immigration lawyer set up the meeting and accompanied us as a translator of Spanish and of law.  For over an hour, we sat in a circle with Arturo and listened to his story.  We learned why he decided to overstay his tourist visa fifteen years ago, a baby in his wife's arms.  We learned that he's worked to build a contracting business and a good reputation in the community, and that he's done it all because he wants his two teenage daughters to have the opportunities he never had.

He cried as he spoke to us.  Es duro, he said.  It's hard.  But he says he would do it all again if he could.

My students were studying immigration from a variety of perspectives last week -- we visited the Boulder Carnegie Archives to find out about immigration history, we heard a panel of three immigrants who came to Boulder legally (one from Nepal in 1960, one from Japan in 1962, one from Tibet in 1991), we met with the warden of the Aurora ICE Processing Center, and we visited Arturo.  My intention was mainly to get my students to start asking questions and to start thinking more deeply about immigration in this country.

Three of my students were so moved by Arturo's story that they wrote a letter to the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera about it.  Another small group of students composed an email to Representative Jared Polis; a group wrote a heartfelt letter to Arturo; and other groups made PSAs about what they'd learned.  It was an powerful, effective week of teaching and learning.

Or was it?  The vitriol in the online comments on the Daily Camera's site since yesterday's publication of my students' letter have stunned me.  "Horizons staff should be ashamed" and "This is why I don't send my kids to public school."  They criticize our learning as "one-sided" and "propaganda".  One commenter expressed horror that we communicated that breaking the law is okay and that an "illegal alien" deserves sympathy.

At lunch yesterday, those comments still fresh in my mind, I sat at my desk alone for a long moment.  All my students were outside at recess, playing basketball, giggling in small groups, munching from bags of pretzels while their friends performed tricks on the swings.  I listened to them for a moment, and let myself breathe.  My heart was hammering.  Where is the line between exposing students to real injustice and encouraging and inspiring them to take action. . .and objectively presenting both sides?  Had I inappropriately biased my students toward immigration reform?  Isn't my job as a social studies teacher to foster critical thinking and the search for as many perspectives as possible?

A student ducked her head in the door.  "Thanks for today," she said.  "I felt like social studies mattered today."

I smiled at her and she disappeared.  We had spent her class discussing the die-in protests in Boulder over the weekend, working to understand the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the Grand Jury decisions, and the reasons people are now protesting.  I didn't offer any opinions.  We read articles from The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Fox News, The New York Times, and Ebony.  I let them put together their own thinking about the cases.

At the end of the day, a student's parent stopped by my room to tell me she'd been trying to shield her son from the details of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, though she says she makes sure he "knows his 'isms'".  She seemed resigned when I told her what we'd done in class, sighing at her son's loss of innocence.  Again, I wondered:  what is my job here?  To shield kids from current reality?  The official Colorado state curriculum dictates that we teach about slavery, but we should give kids the impression that all race relations are now fixed?

I don't know.  I've never been good at separating my desire for justice in the world from my social studies teaching.  Howard Zinn is one of my heroes.  Today, we started a study of women's suffrage by looking through the lens of the current protests.  Everything's connected.  There are always more questions than answers.  The textbooks collecting dust beneath my desk only offer an edited version of a story, and not the whole truth, so help us, God.

I think about the people who don't get to choose to think about race or whether they grow up in a neighborhood where they feel safe, and I think about families who have come here seeking a better life (just like my German ancestors did), and I know that balanced objectivity is sometimes overrated in my profession.  I am on a side.  It's the human side.  I'm on the side that asks about the Sand Creek Massacre; the Lawrence, MA, strike; the force-feeding of suffragettes; the Jim Crow laws; nuclear programs; immigration law; Michael Brown.  I will present the primary sources that surround each event, and again and again I will ask my students:  What is just?  What would you have thought/felt in the same situation?

A few years ago, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't have an opinion about gay marriage.  When my students asked, I responded that it was a human rights issue, and that it is wrong to deny any adult the right to marry a person he/she loves.  I refused to speak objectively about it -- about my right as a lesbian -- any longer.

In the past two weeks, as I've led my students into an exploration of the immigration question and of current events, I've again taken a stance on the human side. It's not balanced.  Neither is our world.

Why we all need to think about Ferguson and Michael Brown.

I'm a white mother of an African child.  Over six years ago, when I adopted Mitike from Ethiopia, I promised (via a required adoption agency online course) that I would do my best to become culturally aware and to surround my child with diverse experiences that would instill pride and a sense of belonging in her.  I can do better.  I'm raising my now seven-year-old in Boulder, CO, so we have to travel to get to the Ethiopian church in Aurora or to Ethiopian heritage camp outside of Chicago.  Even a regular trip to the Denver Zoo makes her exclaim, "Finally, other brown people!" I've written elsewhere of the gift it was to sit in the hair salon on Colfax for four hours while two Malian hairdressers divided Mitike's hair into tiny cornrowed braids. For the entire morning, I was the only white person in sight, and Mitike noticed.  "It's good for you," she told me later.

These are the stories I usually share about parenting a child of color.  Or I tell about Mitike's own growing awareness of her difference.  Or I detail the saga of my learning how to care for her hair.  Or I recount the story about the lady who told us that Halle Berry's mother just told her she was beautiful every day, which empowered her to stand up to a hostile world.

But the story of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, moves this conversation to a different place.  When I heard the news on NPR of the August 9 shooting, Mitike was coloring at the kitchen table.  I looked at her, and her brown eyes were wide, and I chose to not turn off the radio.  At dinner, we talked about it.  "I just don't understand why, if he wasn't doing anything wrong," she told me.  None of our conversation was about race.  I didn't want to make note of it unless she did, and she wanted to focus more on the unfairness of the situation, that an armed police officer would shoot an unarmed teenager who had correctly put his hands in the air.  I'm certain Mitike would have discussed the event in the same way if an unarmed white teenager had been shot by a black police officer, instead.

It's not that my 7-year-old is unaware of the complicated ways race intertwines with justice and opportunity in this country.  Every January, her class studies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds out how he utilized non-violent resistance to insist segregation was wrong.  Last year, in first grade, they added Rosa Parks to this strangely isolated study of race relations in the U.S.  The chapter books Mitike finds to read now have overwhelmingly white protagonists; the few with protagonists of color are nearly all about the Civil Rights Movement.  Sometimes, she chooses books with white characters just so she can get a lighter-hearted story.  Someone needs to write a series of books that feature a strong African-American girl in the modern day, doing normal things, like trying to be a kid in a complicated world.

Mitike knows about slavery, again from children's books.  She knows about the Civil War.  She knows about segregation and poverty (largely from her love of the Ruby Bridges story).  But until this summer, she thought (and I let her think) that all of this racial strife was in this country's past.  Surely, the adults had fixed it, right?  It was only days after we heard the NPR coverage of Michael Brown's shooting that Mitike asked me at bedtime one night, "Did they shoot Michael Brown for the same reason they shot Dr. King?"

I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that the Grand Jury in Ferguson failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Michael Brown.  Evidently, grand juries do not have a reputation for indicting police officers.  I'm not surprised, and I'm still angry.  The thousands of people protesting across the country tonight are not just protesting the death of Michael Brown; they're asking for a nation-wide examination of why a disproportionate number of people in prison are people of color; of why a disproportionate number of people in poverty are people of color; of why schools comprised predominately of kids of color often have fewer resources and inferior support.  An African American woman told an NPR reporter today in Ferguson that she hopes awareness and justice come from the tragedy of Michael Brown's death.  This has been a long, ugly road, this construction of "race" in the United States, and the road -- and the ugliness -- continue.

Of course, the conversation is even more complicated by class.  Mitike, as the daughter of a middle-class social studies teacher in Boulder, Colorado, is inevitably growing up differently than a 7-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri or Sanford, Florida, where Treyvon Martin was shot.  She's also a girl, which further shifts the perceptions strangers might have of her.  The conversation we should all be having is not just about race, but about the ways in which race, class and gender tangle in the United States, and what we can do about it.

What can we do about it?  Well, I could close my eyes.  I could tell myself that my daughter is safe here in Boulder, and that this problem is distant from us.  But I could only pretend that because I'm white.  Because I can walk into a public space and hold all kinds of power because my skin color is perceived to be white.  Talk to me long enough and find out I'm lesbian, find out I've got an African child, and that one category -- skin color -- gets complicated, but because the first wave of perception in this country is of skin color, I could accept the tempting comfort of dominant culture.  I could say the story of Michael Brown is a tragedy but that it doesn't apply to me.  And I'd be wrong.  Not just because I'm the parent of a child of color, but because I'm a citizen of this country, and I want it to change.  I can do something about it (read "12 Things White People Can Do").  Every day that I teach middle school social studies, I push my students to see the connections between then and now, to ask questions and more questions about what has shaped and continues to shape this country.  There's always more I can do, but getting the next generation to ask questions seems like an important start.

Just now, I sat at the foot of my daughter's bed and watched her sleep awhile.  She looked so perfectly peaceful, secure beneath her purple comforter, surrounded by a crowd of stuffed animals.  I don't know what to tell her about this country I've given her.  I don't know how to keep her safe.  I don't know how to explain why, yes, even now I believe things could get better.  They do, here.  Again and again, history's surprised us like that.  It all begins with a few voices demanding justice.

Mitike's voice will be one of those, I'm certain.  And maybe strengthening that voice is the most important job I have.

The toaster joke.

At our monthly Lesbian HERstory Consciousness-Raising Group (yes, an unwieldly title), a fairly consistent group of 10-12 lesbians gathers to discuss a different lesbian and her life -- her ideas, her work, her influence.  The idea is to find some commonality with these lesbians who lived before us, to find our heritage in a world that still omits truths.  In my social studies class today, I answered a question about GLBT rights in 1800s America by talking about Susan B. Anthony.  "Susan B. Anthony was gay?" an 8th grade student asked, her eyes wide.  I nodded.  "I'm so glad to know that," the student murmured.  That's why we're doing the CR group.

We don't ask easy questions.  In August, our discussions about Adrienne Rich's poetry led us to explore the difficulty of coming out, the political aspects of being lesbian, the idea of compulsory heterosexuality.  In September, Audre Lorde's essays pushed us to consider race and class and the ways in which those categories of identity intersect and clash with sexual orientation.  In October, Virginia Woolf's Orlando challenged us to examine gender roles and assumptions (and even prompted us to discuss the pros and cons of purses for awhile).

Last weekend, at our November meeting, we decided to explore lighter topics by focusing our discussion on Ellen DeGeneres.  We watched the great comedian's stand-up routine from her 1986 appearance on the Johnny Carson show, and we watched the famous "Puppy Episode" from 1997, when Ellen announced she was gay.  Technically, I'm the facilitator/organizer of this group, but as we started to discuss Ellen, I realized how little I actually know about lesbian culture.  I came out in 2005 in Alaska, and I didn't move to the Lower 48 until 2011.  I'm like the German logger in Annie Dillard's novel The Living who worked for a year in a logging camp in Washington, was convinced he'd learned English from the other loggers, and sauntered into a Seattle bar to try it out. . .only to realize he'd learned Finnish in the camp, and could understand no one.

It's not that egregious, though.  I am a woman who loves women, after all, and I've read Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters, I've watched The L Word, I know Adrienne Rich's poetry.  But I didn't know the toaster joke until I watched the "Puppy Episode" preparing for the CR group.  I didn't know how many women dislike the word "lesbian" (Ellen told Time magazine in 1997 she hated the word, though she'd begun to get used to it).  I didn't know any of the stereotypes:  that lesbians can fix anything, that they mostly wear pants.  I'd never thought about purses before.  I know my 19th century history, but I'm ignorant of current culture.

And that's why we have this CR group, too.  Where were you in 1997? I asked everyone as the opening prompt on Sunday.  That was the year Ellen came out, of course.  As women took turns sharing their responses around the circle, I felt an increasing anxiety.  Where was I in 1997?  I was 19 years old that April, a college sophomore signing paperwork to study abroad in England for the next year.  I'd just broken up with a boyfriend and the world seemed vast and lonely.  In April 1997, I didn't know anyone who was gay (or I thought I didn't -- now I know I did), and the news about Ellen didn't even reach me.  It would be another eight years before I realized I was gay.

And I'm just learning the toaster joke now.  Does it matter?  I watched Ellen Degeneres talk to the Canadian actress Ellen Page about Page's recent coming-out announcement, and my eyes welled up with tears.  Even in a country that's slowly moving toward acceptance of gay marriage, it's hard to be different.  I'm proud to be who I am, and it's hard.  We need each other.  We need to know our history.  All of it, from Sappho to Susan B. to Audre to Ellen to me to beyond.