almost home

The sun is coming up among buildings again for the last time in this journey. Tomorrow I will wake up in my own bed and watch it rise over familiar scenery.

I attended worship yesterday at the congregation of a friend from college. Very upper middle class, white and very educated and cultured. It was a music service and there was a piano, a cello and a 20-member choir with no fewer than four voices suited (and used) for solos. It was very cultured and high-brow. I don't think anyone there knew I was a teamster. But they all knew I was queer. It was interesting.

It was beautiful worship, please don't get me wrong. These folks offered up what they held dearest - fine chamber music - as praise for whatever shape the divine takes for them. It was beautiful (especially the Scottish/Irish-sounding bits). It was a bit of a shock to my system after my weekend in downtown Providence, surrounded by people of all colors and shapes and stripes and persuasions. Church on Sunday was a pretty homogeneous affair.

The clouds are lit this morning from beneath as the sun climbs. I cannot see it yet, as there is a house between me and it, but I can see its light reflected on the underside of the thin layer of clouds that is stretched over the city. They are the clouds that precede a snowstorm by a day or two, thin and grayish, like an old blanket worn thin. I can see bits of blue through the blanket in some spots. There is a hopeful-looking strip of blue along the horizon. Today will be a good day to meet some friends and then drive home.

I am especially looking forward to driving home.

I sit at a kitchen table in a nice apartment in Portland. There are Tibetan prayer flags hung in the window. Their letters are foreign to me - so many squiggles writ small on thin fabric. But they are beautiful. I imagine they, and others like them that I see all around, hold the hopes and prayers, thoughts of tomorrow, wishes and dreams written down and then hoisted and let go for the universe to absorb and care for.

A gray squirrel just clambered up the skinny branches of a tree in the next yard. He got to the eve of the garage's gambrel roof and dug his little claws into the asphalt shingles to haul himself up to the peak. He sat for a moment and had a brisk bath in the gray morning light and scampered off to find breakfast. He was lean for a gray squirrel, but I suppose that is proper in mid-February. I wonder if he can hibernate until food becomes more available or if he has to take his chances competing with cats and dogs and raccoons and skunks in people's trash.

I wonder if he is the same scoundrel squirrel who dug up every last bulb that the downstairs neighbor planted last fall, and sat smugly on the garden Buddha eating each one. I was here that day to witness his gluttony and her outrage. For the record, therapists are not always calm and healing people. She wanted fur-lined gloves that day.

Had an interesting talk this morning about personality types - as in Myers-Briggs personality types. I think it might not be a bad idea for me to do some reading. I need to know how I operate and how the people around me operate so that I can work effectively with them. Particularly if I work on a political project that I've been rooting for for a while. Still not sure how that all is going to work out, but I think something cool is going to come of it. We'll see.

The sun is up now, but I still cannot see it. It is 8:30 a.m. and I know it must be up, but between the close-packed houses and rooftops, the distant high-rise condos and the low-lying cloud cover, I never got to see it. I can't see the bits of blue through the thin spots any more now, although that hopeful slice of blue persists on the horizon. I think South Portland might have sun this morning. Maybe Scarborough, too.

It might be time to get moving. Worship this morning seems disjointed, awkward. Perhaps tonight, at home, things will change.

Stay tuned.

one day at a time

So I saw this NaBloPoMo thing that Robin in Israel and Jen in Denver both posted about to encourage bloggers to post every day for a month. Huh. That sounds way more reasonable than that crazy thing where people commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. Maybe I'll try it. So what the hell, I did. I signed up, felt really smug for a moment, and then realized that I have only five hours left in my first day. Deadlines were but one of the reasons I left journalism. Well shit. Now's a helluva time to remember that little tidbit.

A month seems like a huge thing when I look at it, but really it's not that bad. If I do a blog post today, that's all I can do, really. I'll plan to do one tomorrow, but until it gets here, I really can't be freaking out too much about it. Like much in my life, it is something I can do for one day, and that will be enough. If I succeed in writing at least once a day for a month, then yippee for me. My writing probably will improve with the practice - it very likely will not get worse. We'll see how it goes.

For now, though, I ought to have a topic. In school they always told us to write what we know. Write what we are familiar with. But try not to end sentences with prepositions. Or fragments. Double shit.

I went to an auction today. It was a combination of a few estates and some business stuff. The auctioneer is a great guy, a bigshot in the local Democratic Party and a vocal peace activist. His wife does good charity stuff for people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction. Nice people.

So the auction today was held at the moving and storage company over on the other side of the island. Usually the auctions are held at the Neighborhood House in Northeast Harbor, a very swanky village on Mount Desert Island. Today we were in Southwest Harbor, a somewhat less swanky locale. More of a nice drinking village with a fishing problem. Much less plastic surgery was evident in today's crowd that usually shows up when the wealthy summer people are in town.

And yet there is always a striation of sorts that happens at auctions. There are the newbies who try to bid out of turn and who get grumpy at the dealers. There are the cheapskates like me who are there to get a bargain on a treasure cleverly disguised as someone's castoff stuff. There are the semi-pros, the innkeepers and the people who work for the large summer estates on the island. They are always looking for antiquey-looking stuff to decorate with. Damned prepositions. Then there are the collectors - and darned if I can figure out what they're doing with all the crap they take home every month. Maybe they're closet dealers.

Next up are the wealthy summer people. These folks have very little idea the value of the stuff they're bidding on - mostly it is one-up-man-ship with each other over a coveted item. When the dealers drop out of the bidding and the guys in the boat shoes with no socks and with sweaters draped over their shoulders step in and up the ante, you can tell that they're too stupid to be allowed to hold on to their money. These are probably the same hedge fund managers who have flushed the economy so recently. Actually, no. These guys own the hedge funds. They're the medium-old money that is still insecure enough to need to show off, but the money is old enough to withstand whatever showing off junior (in his 50s) might need to do at the auction on a Saturday afternoon.

Then there are the antique dealers and the e-Bay entrepreneurs. There are probably a dozen or so that cycle in and out, each with his or her own special area of expertise. One guy buys paper stuff. Books, old posters, maps, boxes of documents, everything. He then sifts through it, looking for treasures that he can sell. There is one lady who likes to buy glass and another who buys old kitchen stuff. We often bid against one another, and she usually wins. I want a nice cast iron pot to cook with, she wants an antique to sell to a tourist. I came looking for a deal, she came looking for profit. Oh well. Then there is one guy who seems to buy the craziest shit ever, and he pays hundreds, even thousands of dollars for stuff I wouldn't give a dollar for at a yard sale. One of the regulars today said he makes scads of money selling that crap on the internet. Whatever. If you can do it, go for it, I guess.

Today there were a lot more first-timers and bargain-hunters than there were wealthy summer people. More Red Sox caps than little whales on belts. Damned fragment. So it was interesting. Some real crap went for more than I expected because the taste of the crowd was very different than usual, and some really nice stuff went for pretty cheap because the wealthy stupid people were not there to bid on it and the dealers stopped short enough to allow a profit margin on the resale.

It was an interesting slice of life. No matter where we go or what we do, there always seems to be a pecking order of some kind to keep us in line. If no one imposes it on us, we do it to ourselves. The poor resent the wealthy for being able to outbid them, and the wealthier ones resent the poor ones for not being professionals.

Oh, and me? I bought a nice fiberglass 8-foot class 1A stepladder for fifty bucks (pre-paint-dripped!) and a dog dish and a wooden mallet in a lot for a dollar. Not bad. Oh, and I had a hot dog and a Diet Coke from kids raising money for a school thing.

See? not bad. Day one is done. Put it to bed and try again tomorrow.

Money, class and respect

My girlfriend looked at my blog this morning, sniffed and looked at me slurping my first cup of coffee.

"Slacker" she said.

Who knew it would be such a demanding thing to maintain a blog?

I've been thinking a lot lately about class. I asked my friend J to write something about money and the division of wealth in Maine, and she did some, but of course what I really wanted was somebody else to write my opinion down and publish it so I could say "See! That's what I've been saying all along!"

Oh well.

Seems like this is one of those times when if I want someone to do my job, I'd better get me to do it. Damn.

I grew up blue-collar Irish. I was taught early to resent people with more advantages than me, to resent the wealthy and those for whom things seem to come easily. Never trust anyone who doesn't have calloused hands, I learned.

So here I am living in an island paradise. Years have come and gone since I was schooled in the fine art of hating the wealthy, and I have done some recovery and growth work, so I try not to compare my own internal insecurities to other people's external appearances, but there are times when it gets tough.

I pause here to catch my breath and so I don't sound like a raving nut-head. That and it is a small community where I live and it does not bode well to speak ill of anyone particularly those in a position to hire me to do things on their properties.

I guess what offends me is the attitude of some of the wealthy. Maybe it's just the nouveau riche, I don't know. I know people with lots of money who do not behave in a manner that screams "kiss my ring."

Attitude bothers me, and I guess the waste associated with excess bothers me. When some of the owners of big, fancy mansions and estates order $30,000 worth of shrubs, pay workers to for their labor to put them in, and then decide "no, I don't like them, take 'em out!" That's the stuff that makes me crazy. It offends me that people can simply throw away the labor and effort of craftsmen who take pride in their work, simply because somebody didn't think ahead far enough to know that 12-foot high shrubs would block the picture windows looking out over the harbor.

What was paid for those doomed shrubs could pay my rent and heat my home for a year, plus buy some groceries. And it was thrown out because it was bought by stupid people who can afford to waste things.

On the other hand, I know people with lots of money who use it carefully, not flinging it around in flashy ways. Investing soundly in real estate, spending wisely to maintain and protect that investment. They treat the hired help like humans, not like appliances; they understand that skilled workers have knowledge that is valuable to their investment and they listen to it.

Perhaps what this boils down to is which kinds of people value me and what I have to offer. I'm not an expert, but I do know some stuff about stuff. I know some stuff about building stuff, some stuff about politics, and some stuff about life. I haven't lived this long and not picked up a few things of value. I guess I just like to think that someone else values what I do, appreciates what I know and what I can do, and will not simply throw it away after I have worked hard to create a thing.

I wonder how much of the animosity within the discussion of class and wealth and socio-economic status has to do with our (my) own insecurities. The uber-wealthy may be as insecure internally as the working poor. How awful it must be to have to rely on others for everything! How vulnerable it must feel to have to rely on people to make the hard look good, the house look good, and the food to taste good. I cannot imagine not knowing how to take care of things. I learned how to change the oil in a truck when I was 12, and how to rotate the tires when I was 10. Spark plugs and wires had to wait until I was in my teens.

It is easy to look with jealousy at people who have comfortable things and few visible struggles. Honestly, though, I know how I hate being at the mercy of my mechanic. I cannot imagine that kind of vulnerability every day to people who make life work.

Does this mean I have turned around to the point of pitying the poor, helpless rich folks? No. Not hardly. I reserve the right to resent the hell out of anyone who does not treat me with respect. I owe no favor to anyone who demands preferential treatment because of their social status. I kiss no one's ring. I kneel before no man (or woman). If that makes me difficult to live with, well, I guess I am not surprised. Or disappointed. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

This has taken a very tangled path. This post has evolved over three (perhaps four) cups of coffee and several side trips around the web when my brain got stuck. What it boils down to, I guess, is a matter of respect. Don't demand what you have not earned. And respect is earned through competence, not through an inheritance or the stock market.

Money somehow seems to magnify the personality of the person who has it. A kind person who has money is seen in a saintly light. A jerk with money is seen as the consummate asshole. Arrogance is rooted in insecurity whether one has money or not, I think, and numbers in a bank account cannot make up for what is lacking in a person's insides. This has got to be frustrating to people whose only assets are in the bank.

I have no bankable assets, really, but I have more skills than many of the wealthy people I know. While money is appealing, I'd rather be able to rely on myself and my own skills to get through, I think. Having tools and knowing how to use them is more appealing to me than having money and having to rely on everyone else.

Monday morning

Busy week this week. The people I have been working for have hired me to build a screened-in porch on a summer cabin. It's going to be a lot of work and I expect to be exhausted at the end of every day.

I got to be a little bit famous last week - an essay I wrote got published in both the Ellsworth American and the Mount Desert Islander. It runs along similar lines to my previous entry here regarding Christians and Christianity, but it was still nice to see it get such prominent placement in the local press. The folks at the Maine Speak Out Project training on Saturday were most impressed.

It seems that I am moderately adept at diplomatically answering very difficult and invasive questions (at least in the practice sessions) and I think I am going to participate in the MSOP speakers bureau. I think that is a way I can contribute.

Depression is a tricky thing. It is so easy to slip into depression when I am idle. I have a real need to be useful, to be engaged in some meaningful form of work. And meaningful work can take many forms. It does not mean I have to bathe lepers or run a hospice for the destitute - it merely means that I have to be engaged in something that challenges me in some way and that will leave me with a feeling of accomplishment when it is finished.

To be of use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

This porch will go a long way toward that. It is a big project, and one I will do mostly alone. I have estimated 40 hours to complete it. That may have been ambitious on my part, but I don't know. Much of what I have to do is pretty elementary. It is only the screened-in part that offers a challenge of something new, and the built-in bench seats. The people seem pretty decent and I think they'll like what I come up with, particularly since they will see it when they return from a vacation in the south of France. Yeah, I think They'll like it just fine.

At some point I shall have to write about class and the separation between the haves and the have-nots. It is stark on this island where I live, but only obvious to those on one side of the divide. That is an entry for another day. Now I must go wreck things. What a great way to start a week!