Failing the girls

The rest of this article by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic may or may not be worth your while to read, but I keep returning to this paragraph, from the conclusion. Emphasis mine.

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls. I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It’s in the nature of who we are.

I don’t really have a comment to improve the insight. Only that women who used their sexuality as a weapon or plaything are frequently effecting a thorough self-evisceration. I heartily wish we would stop celebrating it.

Valiant mothers

After reading the Grant Jury indictment of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, what occurred to me after the initial feelings of revulsion was an appreciation for a young boy’s mother who blew the whistle on this predator more thoroughly than nearly anyone else. Though she could not overcome the force of the man’s deception and the establishment supporting him, she dared to challenge him to his face, to involve authority, to see even slight evidence of something amiss and to ask difficult and unrelenting questions.

When Victim 6 was dropped off at home, his hair was wet and his mother immediately questioned him about this and was upset to learn the boy had showered with Sandusky. She reported the incident to University Police who investigated. After a lengthy investigation by University Police Detective Ronald Shreffler, the investigation was closed after then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar decided there would be no criminal charges…The mother of Victim 6 confronted Sandusky about showering with her son, the effect it had on her son, whether Sandusky had sexual feelings when he hugged her naked son in the shower and where Victim 6’s buttocks were when Sandusky hugged him. Sandusky said he had showered with other boys and Victim 6’s mother tried to make Sandusky promise never to shower with another boy again but he would not…At the conclusion of the second conversation, after Sandusky was told he could not see Victim 6 anymore, Sandusky said, “I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.”

Behold the force of a mother’s righteous anger.

In a recent story I covered, a local man went on a spree of lewd behavior, allegedly exposing himself and performing obscene acts in front of women at a college campus, then at a gas station. (The story was particularly newsworthy because the man was a well-respected senior Marine officer) We’ll never know how many women he intended to exploit, because his third victim chased him off, called 911, and reported his license number to officials, precipitating his arrest.

Because of the woman’s courage, the two earlier victims came forward with their accounts.

I can’t be sure why the woman chose to report the man’s lewd behavior, especially considering that many women (myself included) can recount an instance of being the object of a man’s obscene actions or indecent exposure, and choosing to forego the hassle of involving the authorities.

But I like to think that her courage had something to do with having her young daughter resting in the car, and the power of the protective maternal instinct: the instinct that makes mothers bold and fearless and willing to take on wrongdoers, even the strong and well-protected ones.

I thank God for valiant mothers.

My writing can be ugly and awkward when I try hard. I know, I see it too.

Love, and war, and being human

The worst-kept secret of my life: I love Marines.

Immersed as I am in their culture and lifestyle thanks to my job and where I live, I adore every bit of it. From the bizarre, acronym-heavy way they learn to speak and their obsessive attention to every element of the crisp uniforms, to their famous cult of honor, courage, and loyalty to their country and each other, the Marines tend to command admiration, even from 0utsiders. You meet a few of the troops who would sacrifice their lives in a heartbeat for Semper Fi, and your heart is a goner.

This weekend, I paid a long-anticipated visit to the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va.  I’ve seen my share of museums, and I was beyond impressed with this one. Superbly curated, bursting with artifacts, endlessly interactive…and of course, rewardingly motivated.

From stepping past yellow footprints into a booth for a surround-sound drill instructor experience to crossing through exhibits via the back hatch of a CH-46 helicopter, I was in my element.

But, as always, the reality of war slowly did me in. Somewhere between the KIA counts of World Wars I and II and dioramas of the “Frozen Chosin” and the jungle miseries of Vietnam, I discovered tears in my eyes. It’s not so much the historical account of war that grips me as it is the faces and the voices, both ancient and heartrendingly young, that have given me their own accounts of war’s hells.

I’m not sure if it is the wisdom of years or the fear that returning to memories of war will be unbearably painful, but of the dozens of veterans in their latter years who have spoken with me, precious few will talk plain about the realities of combat. One day, though, I met a World War II veteran who, surrounded by his family, had the courage and strength of memory to talk about those times.

The stories he told hit me in the heart and stomach. I recall one from the heat of a protracted and costly battle for Okinawa. One night, as Marines were securing their location for whatever rest they might manage, the sound of a thin wail pierced the silence of the evening. Troops were dispatched to find the source of the the crying, and they reported back that a tiny Japanese infant, lost or abandoned, was lying nearby. Marines who went to retrieve the child were repulsed: it was covered with scabs, diseased, and fetid.

As the baby continued to cry, the veteran recalled his concern that the sound would damage the morale of an already suffering unit. A non-commissioned officer, he knew he had to take action. He dispatched a Marine: “Take care of it.”

The crying stopped. He never asked why.

Among combat veterans of my own age, brokenness from war can take many forms. I asked a 25-year-old Marine friend about an Afghanistan firefight. He told me the enemy had been far away, but not so far that he could not make out their bodies and their weapons, aiming and firing in his direction.

“Did it feel personal, that they were aiming at you?” I asked.

An arrested look and the prick of tears in his eyes, he nodded wordlessly.

Another Marine told me about being in Afghanistan and seeing the dead body of a comrade brought into camp. He didn’t know the dead Marine, and the body was the only one he saw during the deployment. But after months of living with the constant awareness of lurking death (”imagine walking from your living room to your kitchen, thinking you might set off an IED with every step,” he told me) the sight did him in.

“He was just…broken,” he told me, his powers of description failing him.

I am ill-equipped to respond to tall, invincible young men who are struggling to hold back emotion and looking lost, disjointed, and in pain. I wanted to hold him in my arms and rock the memories away.

When I discovered Karl Marlantes’s new book What it is Like to Go to War, the feeling of catharsis and relief was overwhelming. I read much of the book in an airport during a lengthy layover, and I couldn’t help the embarrassing, antisocial tears that blurred my eyes, soaked my cheeks, dripped from my chin.

Finally, I had found the self-account of a veteran who had met his own war-brokenness and learned to heal.

Marlantes was a Marine’s Marine who received the Navy Cross and the Silver Star for heroism as a young officer during the ugliest days of jungle warfare in Vietnam. He recounted sitting on a Vietnamese hillside with comrades, saying the names of their dead brothers into the wind and weeping.

The return home, difficult under any conditions, was made harder by the American antiwar sentiment that turned battlefield heroes into hometown pariahs. Uniformed troops were subject to invective, rejection, and even the humiliation of being spit upon.

With the benefit of years of reflection, Marlantes describes the proper homecoming for a veteran.

Veterans just need to be received back into their community, reintegrated with those they love, and thanked by the people who sent them. I wanted to be hugged by every girl I ever knew. Our more sane ancestors had ceremonies like sweat rituals to physically bring the bodies back into civilian mode. Mongolian warriors were taken into heated yurts and had every muscle that could be reached pressed and rolled with smooth staves, squeezing out toxins, signaling the psyche and the body that it was time to stop pumping adrenaline.

There is also a deeper side to coming home. The returning warrior needs to heal more than his mind and body. He needs to heal his soul.

For Marlantes, part of his process was a ceremony for the dead, in which he invited the spirits of the fallen, allies and enemies, to commune for an evening–to say farewell, give and ask forgiveness, make peace.

For my part, I want to show combat veterans that healing love and gratitude. I will always hate the hell of war and the scars it leaves on hearts and souls. But perhaps I can serve these courageous veterans with war-broken eyes simply by being there, by listening, by trying to understand.

An explanation

I’ve missed a few days on here, and I owe an explanation. It turns out that when you’re in a long-distance relationship and only manage to close the distance once or twice a month for a weekend, every minute of those two or three days is precious. It was a glorious weekend, and I can’t seem to feel sorry about missing time on here.

So, onward, and upward with new entries and a new day.

Here is my favorite Robert Frost poem, best enjoyed in the fall or springtime:

TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Grateful

As Thanksgiving nears, I thought I would post an essay I wrote for my favorite college class, Rhetoric, five years ago this month. The assignment: write an opinion editorial appropriate to read aloud at a Thanksgiving family gathering. Not since college have I had the luxury of hours to choose my perfect words and the incentive of grades to make me spend them.

As I reread my paper for the first time in half a decade, I can look past its imperfections and feel the warmth of what are still my most poignant and cherished memories from living in the city. Toure, who I believe still works behind that concierge desk in the busiest part of Herald Square, would always pull me in with his eyes and smile as I walked through the foyer to my apartment elevators. He would regale me with stories about his childhood in Africa, and gesture at his ornately bound copy of the Qu’ran as we talked about our different faiths and how we prayed.

Toure was un-coarsened by Manhattan’s bustling workdays and endless, raucous nights. He believed that his character was defined by how he treated the smallest, least significant person he encountered–and I believe he was right.

I will never forget one cold, late night when some business or other took me downstairs to the apartment lobby, where Toure was completing the final hours of his shift. He had prevailed upon another resident to bring him a small paper cup of hot black tea, and he eyed it with anticipation from time to time as he chatted with me.

I was overcome by circumstances that night, finding myself in the throes of unrequited love, sleeplessness from midterms, and the recurring roommate conflicts that seemed a permanent fixture of my college experience. But Toure was a friendly presence, and I hoped a chat with him and a retreat to my favorite hideaway on a nearby rooftop would help to redeem the night.

As I turned to take my leave, Toure pressed the fragrant cup of tea into my hands.

“I can’t take this,” I said. “You asked for it. You want it.”

“Of course I want it,” Toure said, his brown eyes warm and direct. “If I did not want it, it could not be a gift.”

I stepped into the city night air and began to weep uncontrollably.

I never did tell Toure that I wrote about him, or that his tiny gift warmed me to the marrow that night. But tonight, five years later, I am still grateful.

A Cure for Common Coldness

Toure sits perennially behind the front concierge desk, nodding affably to
residents of the apartment complex and proffering a sign-in book to visitors. Originally
from Cote D’Ivoire, he sometimes shares a brief interchange in elementary French with
tenants who appreciate it. At his post daily from 4 p.m. to midnight, his greeting and
brief smile are still as warm and personal at the end of his long shift as they are when he first arrives.
As one of the world’s busiest cities, New York has an archaic reputation for
being a city that is uninviting and into which it is difficult to assimilate. It is not the
swelling hordes of people that have the potential to make New York uninhabitable,
but the aloof attitudes and cold demeanors that are almost expected when eight million
bodies migrate to their jobs each day, many on foot and focused beyond distraction.
But outside the strictly business pedestrian commute that very much conforms to time-
honored conceptions of New Yorker standoffishness, city residents—supposedly the
rudest people in the country—are surprisingly cordial and obliging.
Common courtesy at any time is refreshing and pleasant. But in the hostile and
unlikely environment of a fast-paced metropolis, ordinary politeness is an unanticipated
delight. In the crush of crowds on 34th St., there is no tiered hierarchy from boardroom
executives to beggars, though both ends are represented and interspersed with every
class in between the two. Brief exchanges such as the purchase of morning coffee from
a Middle Eastern vendor with a silver-painted street cart become chances to share small
concerns about the weather, or to offer a tactful compliment or a wish for an enjoyable
day. They are meaningless words perhaps, but they are indescribably missed when
Like a firm handshake or intentional eye contact, simple civility has a
humanizing effect. A pause of less than a second and an almost imperceptible nod
of deference from a suit-clad man in a shared elevator are enough to communicate
that it has not gone unnoticed that I am present and a woman. My rank and status
have nothing to do with the act; discussions of chivalry and feminism are best left
unexplored. As a way of expressing my thanks, I flash a deliberately warm smile and
accept the offer to exit first. My new debt of courtesy is owed to society, and thus
follows a gentle cycle of appreciative words and considerate gestures. The opportunity
costs of courtesy are often as low as the material rewards, but there is something more
essential and beneficial to human nature that should not be overlooked.
Alfred Painter said, “Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good
spirituality.” Discussion of faith aside, there is a sort of tangible karma that common
courtesy engenders. One decent or respectful act incurs another as easily as a hot cup
of coffee seems to warm a surrounding frosty night. There is no formula or code for
courtesy, and it is primarily this gratuitousness and lack of obligation that makes us feel
that something so simple and so subtle is akin to the divine.
Civility stretches beyond the limits of language and transfers easily from culture
to culture. Within the patchwork of dialects filling the smog in the subway stations, the
difference between a nod and a shove is universally understood and the actions elicit the
same reaction in any language. I choose to buy my lunchtime bagel from the friendly
deli owner who speaks little English and pass by the bored, laconic locals at the nearby
And the city is one of the most hostile environments for the graciousness that
seems to flourish in spite of the cynics’ minimifidianism. Courtesy is a nationwide
tradition that has not been as much diminished with the technological era as so many
believed or predicted. Regardless of where in the country you choose to travel, you are
likely to be greeted with these “unsung heroes” of language and gesture by strangers
who do not expect to benefit from their thoughtfulness. Pragmatism may have its
place, but it takes a rightful back seat to the humanity evinced in simple exchanges of
Seated at his desk, Tory looks up and flashes the same smile that I have seen
hundreds of times since moving into the complex. The day has been long and full of
tasks and the night looms to promise more of the same. Smiles mean so little in contrast
with the hard edges and rough surface of reality. They shine, as it were, on the just and
the unjust alike. Yet the humble signal of friendliness inexplicably comforts me. Among
the eight million people in this city, I know that I am not alone.

Acquainted with the Night

Acquainted with the night
By Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain–and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still sat at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have always felt a kinship with Robert Frost, because I believe he understands that feeling I know from cold nights in the north. When you are outdoors and the air seeps under your clothing, making you feel slender and bare and alone, and your heart is sweetly sick with the aching fullness of solitude, tranquility.

When the city lights and the stars dazzle your eyes and the bitter air makes them watery, and you bend your forehead into the wind, listening to the sound of your footfalls and counting the steps and moments until your body reaches warmth.

When you catch the eye of strangers and feel impossibly distant from them, even if your arms brush in passing. When the sight of your breath in the air makes you feel primal, immortal.

Frost understands.

But in the past few years, I believed I have made a different kind of acquaintance with the night. I once interviewed an author who told me that journalism was a good education for life. A reporter becomes a student of sorts of every source, a miniature expert on every subject. And the darkness that splashes across the headlines and leads the nightly news is our stock-in-trade.

In two years, I have felt my heart rending as I spoke with 23-year-old widows plunged into grief as the love of their life was just beginning to hit its stride, and as I heard from mourning parents–those who had the hollow comfort of knowing their son died heroically defending honor and country, and those left with nothing but the certainty that they would never understand.

I have passed the watchman on his beat/And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain

And I have become well acquainted with the actions of evil and troubled people. I have studied murder and motive, so that I would not lie awake wondering why. Sometimes I feel that I can mock and belittle the darkness and disown it; other times, I fear the darkness may be creeping inside, or worse, that I am slowly becoming inured to the horror of evil or coarsened by its knowledge.

Can you be familiar with the night and not let the night in? I will never forget that it was partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that precipitated the fall of man.

But I hope and believe that what I have learned can lead to wisdom, not numbness. After you have seen the nights and known the night, it is hard to wish truly that you never had. I suppose the only thing that can be done is to remember the difference between the light and the shadow, and to know that there is a warm place to come into out of the darkness.

I have walked out in rain–and back in rain…I am one acquainted with the night.

Back for November

Last November, I decided to write a novel in a month. To say I failed would be an understatement. Some part of me knew I was doomed from the very first evening, when I opted to snooze off the Halloween afterglow instead of pulling up that horrifying blinking, glowing Word document and facing the vacuum that is possibility.

Two days and a traffic ticket later, I was officially toast.

This year, I’m not fool enough to try to create another work of fiction in the time it takes to grow a decent goatee. But I am going to write 30 days worth of blog entries, one for each day of the month. I’ll be damned if I can’t accomplish that much, with a schedule that thus far has allowed me to stay up-to-date on Glee. And they say a 30-day commitment can be the precursor to formation of a healthy habit. I can hope.

To start, I thought I’d recap the last twelve months. As I thought about it, I realized it has been a rich year, full of of firsts. Here are a few of them:

-Fell in love

-Received a journalism award

-Lost a grandparent

-Had my long-coveted Osprey ride

-Spent a day in the White House Press pool

-Covered a murder trial

-Planted cukes. Grew pumpkins.

-Went skinny-dipping in the ocean–twice

-Had a duck…for about a month

-Got a Kindle

-Covered a hurricane. And a wildfire. And a tornado

-Ran a 15K and got up to 11 miles in training

-Did absolutely everything that can be done legally in Jacksonville, N.C. (approx.)

-Was not raptured. Was not raptured again

Seems it was a rather rich and fruitful year. Until tomorrow, then.

Writing fiction is dangerous

I found a new place to write: The Kettle Diner.

Pencil drawings of Andy Griffith on the walls. Bright red curtains. OUTLETS!!! And those light fixtures. Lovely.

Originally I had planned to add something here about how my experience was not unenhanced by the comings and goings of a number of young law enforcement officials and EMS workers, but that aspect of the Kettle quickly soured on me.

Slightly queasy from half a plate of cheese fries sprinkled in bacon and dipped in early death, I packed up my operation around 1a.m. and crept home, aware that the streets were swarming with bored police officers with nothing to do but pull people over.

STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!

I tapped the brakes going through a blinking red light and…the rest is history. Not even my pleading puppy-eyes or my concerted efforts at crying could get me out of a ticket.

So, the final tab for my night at the diner:

Cheese fries: $5

Ticket: $50

Court costs: $141

Insurance premium: Manifest sadness

—————————

Total: Shame and Disgrace

Insult to injury: I came up a few hundred words short on my word count. So…how are you doing?

Week two begins

I thought I would share a few photos from the Trading P0st.

Here was my little camp, on those cozy leather sofas.

Notice here two most excellent things: a marvelously premature Christmas tree and bookshelves on the far walls holding a smorgasbord of hand-me-down book treats. I wish I could live at the Trading Post.

You may have noticed that I’ve been silent the last few days. I took some time–five days, in fact–to contemplate my start and decided how screwed I was by my opening scene. Well, I’ve broken my silence. I did a few hundred words this afternoon and plan to hit the Kettle Diner tonight and knock some more in. If I meet my 2,000 word goal every day for the rest of the month, I should stay right on target. Chances of slacking again and spending a few desperate, sleepless days writing at the end of the month? Extraordinarily good.