Steffanie's Shoes

Last Friday night, my friends and I went to a party for work, which was lavishly decorated with edible decor.  My friends Lisa and Steffanie stood before one of the tables, admiring the chocolate artwork that would be thrown in the trash at the night's end. After hearing Lisa admire the shoes, Steffanie waited until her friend was no longer looking and charmed a staff boy, about 18 years old, to let her stuff this gigantic high-heeled dessert into her purse, which she presented to Lisa later as a gift.  "Let's eat it!" Steffanie said later at a small after-party gathering. "We'll cut it up and have a piece. It would feed all of us."  Lisa, ever nostalgic, said, "No, we should preserve it forever. Put it in the freezer."  "Why wait?" Steffanie said, with a shrug of her shoulders.

This small story hopefully tells you a lot about Steffanie Ross.  At 25, she worked with the mentally ill while saving money to go to graduate school to learn more about people with disabilities so that she could become an advocate.  She did not wait for someone to fill the shoes she knew needed to be filled.  She saw a need, and she addressed it.

On Monday, while Steffanie was delivering papers to one of her mentally ill patients, that patient stabbed her and left her in the street.  Shortly thereafter, she died.

The problem with memorializing someone is that the writer almost can't help but gloss over the details that made that person "real."  The memories you have of the deceased turn into Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul fodder.  The result is a kind of untrue, saint-like story of what made a person human.  Besides the grief, that's the reason I hate funerals.  So I'll tell you a few other things about Steffanie too, and when I'm dead, I hope you do the same thing for me.  She had a mutt-collecting addiction.  She cried whenever she saw horses, and if we ever passed a horseback riding establishment, I'd have to listen to a 15 minute tirade about animal abuse, no matter how many times I'd heard the same speech before. One of her favorite pizzas was this pistachio pie I always found gross.  She liked Fifty Shades of Grey for reasons none of us could understand, and she had a soft spot for curmudgeons like my friend David, her partner, whom she met on an internet dating site.  She was constantly searching for a different story about how they met to tell people, but she could never come up with a convincing one.

I'm not sure why I've told you any of this, except that I want you to know there's a hole in the world now.  That there are shoes to be filled that can't be.

The Midget Tyrant's Shoes

So it's been about a year and a half since my last post, and the reason is simple: I had a kid.  So, any spare time I had was spent -- hahahahahaha spare time. That. is. hilarious.

There's no way I can really retrace what has happened in the last year or so, so I'll start with today.  I'll start with shoes.

My son is 15 months old now, and the only word he can say clearly is "shoes."  Admittedly, this is adorable, but it's also a source of confusion. Most of my conversations with my son sound something like this:

Me: Jackson, do you want a banana for breakfast?
Jackson: SHOES!
Me: I don't understand. You have shoes on. Do you want toast?
Jackson: SHOES! SHOES!
Me: Maybe you want soybeans and steak!
Jackson: SHHHHOOOEESS! This is usually said as he tries to fall out of the highchair, reaching for the blueberries I'm eating on my plate.

If I let him down, having watched him stuff a bowlful of roasted carrots down his pants, he'll march into the pantry and point directly at the Cheerios box.  "Cheese" he says, turning to me. I test him and give him cheese rather than cereal, which he smashes between his tiny fingers and rubs into the floor.  Exasperated with my ignorance, he points to the Cheerios again and says louder,  "CHEESE!" He sounds a lot like a punk kid talking to an elderly person who refuses to get a hearing aid.  I get a vision of life 60 years from now.  If I don't respond quickly, he usually mutters "Dee-snatch" and gives up.  I'm not sure what "dee-snatch" is, but I'm guessing he deserves a swat on the backside for saying it. 

This routine repeats itself often in my household.  My kid has reached a point where he knows what I'm asking but he can't say what he wants or needs. This causes him so much frustration that he picks up his fat little feet and stomps around the dining room in a circle for a while, only to come to a halt before me in the kitchen, his hands behind his back like a really tiny diplomat, waiting.  Andrew calls him the "midget tyrant."

We recently taught him baby sign language for "all done" which has kept him from launching his plate across the room to signal he is finished with his meal.  This came in handy at the end of a 10 hour day at Disney when, totally exhausted, Jackson turned to us as we waited to ride a Mickey Train and waved his tiny hands in the air close to his face.  He couldn't speak but I finally got what he was trying to say. "All done," he was saying. "All done with this heat, this crowd, these tired moms and dads and babies."  "Me too, kid," I said. And it was nice, for both of us, to be understood. 




 

The "Ugli" Truth about Tomatoland

I have been on a hot streak when it comes to great books this summer; the first was The Poison Tree, the second March, and now I've just finished Tomatoland and I feel like I just have tell someone about it. So here it goes.

Tomatoland is the "Food, Inc." for the Florida tomato industry but that doesn't really do it justice. The idea for the book began when Barry Estabrook, the author, was driving behind a big tomato truck and a large tomato flew out of the back and bounced onto his car window. It then bounced two, three, four times onto the pavement and landed on the side of the road -- totally unharmed. The author began with one burning question -- what made this tomato indestructible? -- and found that one query led to thousands.

The book talks about how, if you buy a red tomato from Florida in the winter (or even if you get them sliced up on a salad or a sandwich from a restaurant), it is actually green and unripe but has been gassed with something called ethylene so that it will appear red. The fact that it tastes like a cardboard box comes from the fact that ethylene doesn't actually ripen the fruit at all but instead acts as a cosmetic mask. In fact, very few tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine; instead, they are bulked up with pesticides and various chemicals to keep them worm-, fungus-, and rot-free, which is a necessity since tomatoes don't grow well in the Florida sand. Tomatoes that do ripen on the vine are tossed out or left in the field to shrivel up. Heirloom tomatoes -- which are by and large responsible fruit varieties because they've adapted to their environment and so don't need chemicals to thrive -- have fallen out of favor because the Florida Tomato Industry have banned any fruit that isn't perfectly round and flawless (a sure sign your tomato has been tampered with, since natural, organic tomatoes are neither).

Fifty to 60% of these chemicals used to grow most Florida tomatoes stay on the fruit long after they've been hosed down by the packing plant; you then feed these carcinogens to your kids, your friends, your partners. What's worse is that, if you're buying a Florida tomato in November, there's a good chance that it came from Immokalee, Florida -- the modern-day slavery capital of the United States. Immigrants (legal and otherwise) are locked into trailers with 10 to 12 other men, forced to urinate in cups and fed 1 bag of chips per household per day. Holes are drilled into the floor to allow air -- and spiders, roaches, and mosquitoes -- into the sweltering buildings. Come daylight, workers are heavily guarded and forbidden breaks, even when coated with the pesticides they're not supposed to be anywhere near. Many who attempt to escape are beaten, at best, and murdered, at worst. An overseer guards the fields to mete out punishment.

Not long ago, three female workers in Immokalee were sprayed with pesticides while pregnant, and their children were born with horrific deformities. One woman's child never developed a jaw, so his tongue constantly fell backwards into his throat, threatening to choke him. And two children were born without either arms or legs, something the tomato companies said were "total flukes" -- despite the fact that the children's mothers were not related to each other.

Right now, your options for buying responsibly are limited but companies such as Whole Foods have started supporting growers such as UgliRipe, which allow their tomatoes to ripen naturally, without ethylene or pesticides. Small farms in Florida are starting to fight back, trying to get their misshapen but flavorful heirloom fruits back into stores. So far, our best solution is to grow our own or support the small farms that do so responsibly.

For those of you who want to read for yourselves, here's the link. I'd love to hear what you think about the book or any others you've found moving/inspiring/thought provoking.

The Not-So-Blind Review

This is a post for all of my academic friends, since ya'll are pretty much the only people I know of who, on a frequent basis, are preparing proposals or articles for blind review:

So I recently discovered that just taking my name off of my articles I'm submitting to journals does not make the submission "blind." If you are sending a word document to a journal for review, the reviewer only has to click "properties" to see that you were the last person who saved it. I found this out when a certain jerkface wrote a really nasty (rather than, say, constructively critical) review of one of my articles and sent it to me -- complete with her name in the "properties" box in Word. I was able to look her up to see the kind of unoriginal, underwhelming work she does at Nowheresville University, thereby reassuring myself that my work may not be as bad as her inferiority complex. Anyway, I learned how to "wipe" Word of its properties and thought I should pass the instructions along to everyone I care about.

For Word 2008 for Mac, go to "Word," "Preferences," and select "Security." Select "remove personal information from this file on save." Hit ok. Now your personal properties are wiped from the document, thereby officially making it a blind submission. This website will show you instructions for other versions of Word to achieve the same goal.

Words Don't Pull the Trigger; They Load the Gun

I've been trying to process the various responses to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' attack, and I feel very conflicted when listening to both sides.

On the left, people are saying that recent vicious political rhetoric is to blame for Jared Loughner's shooting rampage. Sarah Palin, in particular, has been on the defensive because of the map dotted with crosshairs she put out some time ago, urging Tea Partiers and Republicans to target 20 House Democrats who supported Obama's Health Care Plan. The argument seems to be that the right's use of violent words (such as "target") and images spurred Loughner to commit the crime, and if we are to avoid another tragedy like this one, we need to tone down the rhetoric.

The right is responding a number of ways. Some, such as Palin herself, are saying that Loughner was a madman and that Tea Partiers and Republicans should continue to speak out against policies they disagree with, using any metaphors they please. Others -- and I find this most interesting -- have decided to skirt the issue altogether and focus instead on making a devil of Loughner's attorney, Judy Clarke, the death penalty expert who represented Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Susan Smith.

To briefly address the approach of making Clarke somehow the real villain in this story: as my husband reminded me the other day, John Adams represented the British in the Boston Massacre and was humiliated for it, but he did it because the criminal justice system distinguishes the law-abiding society from the anarchic forces that seek to undermine it. The Right always trots out the founding fathers when it's convenient -- might as well be consistent with that strategy, eh?

As to the other (more viable) debate -- did madness pull the trigger, or did Sarah Palin? -- I don't believe the answer is clear one way or the other. I side with the right when I say that the spark of insanity had to be present in Loughner for him to believe that killing a 9-year-old girl (which he achieved) or a Congresswoman would change anything for the better. Without some chemical imbalance, or deranged upbringing, or both, he'd probably just be another "me," mumbling at the television or newspaper when I see the democratic system isn't working the way I'd hoped.

But I also have to admit, as a literature professor, that words do things. Speech act theory tells us that words such as "I now pronounce you man and wife," or "we. . .do. . .solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states," change people's lives in tangible ways. Strong words can cause people to see the world differently, can call them to take action, either for the better or, in Loughner's case, for worse.

Perhaps words don't pull the trigger, but I believe they load the gun. In that sense, then, I also side with the left. We should be careful of the rhetoric we soak in and spit back out, and, most importantly, we should refuse to elect the people who seek to polarize us with hate speech. We should agree to continue to debate but should try to do so civilly and without embracing fallacies instead of facts. We can't prevent another shooting like the one in Arizona because we can never get rid of insanity, but we can decrease the likelihood by refusing to feed madness with vitriol.

Food (and other) Rules

So, I absolutely appreciate that, at the heaviest I've ever been, I'm going to write a blog about weight and health. But who doesn't appreciate a little irony in the new year?

At the beginning of 2010, a friend of mine wrote me an email and said that she was tired of being unhealthy and was gathering tips from people about making lifestyle changes. I typed up a response, thinking little of it until I noticed a few months later that my friend had lost several sizes. "What have you been doing?" I asked her. "I printed out your email," she said, "and your suggestions worked." We were sitting with a colleague, who asked for the "plan," and others started asking for it, too, so I thought -- why not use the blog to type it up? The 3 top goals for the new year are, after all, saving money/getting out of debt, quitting smoking, and losing weight. So in the spirit of things, a la Michael Pollan (from whom I borrowed a bit), here are my "Food (and other) Rules":

1. Shop on the periphery of the supermarket. Milk, meat, and vegetables are sold there; the stuff in the middle is processed, and full of unpronounceable ingredients with which your body can do very little. If you limit what you buy from those aisles, it's likely you'll greatly cut down on sugar and sodium without even trying or calorie counting.

2. As soon as you get home, wash and cut up your fruits and vegetables and put them in a see-through ziplock bag. My husband unloads the other groceries while I do this, so that I'm not stuck in the kitchen for an entire afternoon. People use being too tired to chop as an excuse to grab a burger on the way home, but if the veggies are already chopped, and it takes 3 minutes to steam them in some chicken broth, you've already spent less time making dinner than you have sitting in the drive-through.

3. Put good-for-you food at eye level. I noticed when I put the chopped-up veggies in the vegetable drawer, they were out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But when I put them on the middle row in the fridge, when I opened it to think about what to have for lunch, "cauliflower!" was suddenly an easy answer I didn't have to dig for. The same rules go for your pantry -- putting those little bags of almonds with sea salt or 100-calorie packs of dried cranberries where your chips used to be takes the thinking out of what to have for a snack.

4. Eat on salad plates and out of ramekins. Throw out your giant pasta bowls -- if you fill them, you're eating enough for 3 people. But if you fill up a salad plate, you trick yourself into thinking you've indulged. As for the ramekins -- they hold about 1 cup of food. The average serving size of cereal is 3/4 of a cup, and a recent Cooking Light article I read confirmed that something like 90% of all people overpour, sometimes eating 400 calories for breakfast without even meaning to do so. You can't overpour in a ramekin.

5. Eat pizza, once a week, but make it yourself. No, seriously -- dieting means deprivation, and deprivation causes you to overeat, go off track, and go back to old habits. So plan to eat something you really like once a week, but make it yourself so you can control the ingredients and quality of the food. Homemade pizza is about 1,000 times better than take-out anyway.

6. Exercise 5 times a week, but make bargains with yourself, and rest for 2 days. Now that I'm about 7 1/2 months pregnant, the "bargaining" part of this rule is really important for me. There are several days that I wake up at 5 and don't want to go to the gym (my own rule is to work out first thing in the day so that you can't put it off, or so that people can't step on your workout schedule with surprise meetings, but that doesn't work for everybody). So I compromise; I promise that I'll take a lap in the swimming pool when I get home from work, or that I'll go ahead and get up at 5 but I can work on the recumbent bike (which is easy) instead of doing interval training (which I hate). Or if it's a really pretty day, my bargain is that I abandon the gym (where I get a more strenuous workout) and powerwalk near the lakes by the house, only I double the time I do it.

7. Vary your workout. This is kind of related to #6. Do different things so you don't get bored, or injured. Seems like a no-brainer, really. Last year I bought rollerblades and found out, using a heartrate monitor, that 20 minutes burned 300 calories. It took about 45 min of jogging to get the same results. Yay!

8. Give up on diets. Diets don't work because, when you're done, you go back to eating the way you did before.

9. Plan 3 meals a week ahead of time. The other reason people eat out is that they're hungry and they don't know what they're going to make for dinner, but if you planned your meals ahead of time, then you eliminate that problem. And there are several cookbooks out there (Sandra Lee has one, as does Robin Miller) that show you how to make one main dish and create 3 meals out of it, for people who are stretched for time, hate cooking, or are on a budget.

After teaching my food class, I've developed several other food rules, but I do not know how they'll affect my waistline. I've given up substituting splenda (which is apparently toxic) for sugar and have abandoned eating things with the word "lite" on the front, opting instead to just use less of something made with recognizable ingredients. I've also tried to cut down on eating red meat to once or twice a week, which has been easy since the baby reacts negatively to it most of the time. I'll have to wait until the spring/early summer to see if that has affected me at all, but so far, these "food rules" must work, since I'm on schedule (God willing!) to gain little more than the minimum 35 lbs the doctors recommend, have struggled with only minimum aches and pains during the pregnancy, and have managed to avoid other unfortunate pregnancy pitfalls, such as gestational diabetes.

Now that I've written this, I'll probably swell like a sausage and gain 20 lbs in the home stretch, being forced onto bedrest. But at least my strawberries will be prepped and ready for when I recover. =) What are your food (or other) rules?

Everybody Eats

I taught composition for about 8 years before I got to the University of Tampa, 9 if you include my time in writing centers at the beginning of my MA degree. I always worked very hard on the course, but I never could make anyone excited about the class. Sure, there were moments when students told me they learned vital skills in Eng 101 or 102, but few ever said they liked writing and research -- until this year.

This year, my research & writing course got a complete overhaul and a new theme: American Foodways: The Study of American Food Culture through Research and Writing. I divided the class into 3 sections: Food Memories, Southern Foodways, and Food Politics. One section encouraged students to write autobiographically about a memory they had that involved food (using the book Eat, Memory as a model); the next studied the culture of southern food through Cornbread Nation (a section that involved a food project -- edible research, yum); and the final section, which I'm currently teaching, is the "Food Inc," Omnivore's Dilemma, gritty agribusiness portion of the course.

A miracle occurred. Somewhere between my African student telling about his refusal to eat a sacrificial ox and my Hindi student defending her choice to eat halal, the students became interested -- not only in writing and research, but in each other. They became friends, in some cases, but colleagues, mostly, sharing resources, pairing up to go to Epcot to research The Land, engaging in vegan diet experiments together and comparing notes. It was . . . weird. People were speaking voluntarily, actually completing the assigned reading, and consistently bringing in current events, video clips, and other news references pertaining to the class.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what suddenly went right but I've had to admit finally that it wasn't me; it was food. Everybody eats. I wanted the students to love what I loved -- I tried memoir, the South, even a class with open topics. But what I needed was an undeniably common ground, and that, apparently, was food.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I just finished the wildest story that I have ever read, and all of it was true.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells a tale I was unlikely to be interested in, at first, since its focus is the origin of the HeLa cell, one of only a few cells that not only grows in culture, but multiplies. I don't really care much about nonfiction science stories, but this one was different.

Skloot tells the story of a young black woman from the South who had her cancer cells taken and experimented upon; neither she nor her family were the wiser, even long after Henrietta had died and the cells had become so remarkably important that every lab in the nation had a sample of them, leading to the development of vaccinations and treatments for polio, AIDS, syphilis, and a number of other diseases. The book is about the fight over the cells but also about the family tormented by their mother's "immortality." It's a story of eugenics, degeneracy, lies, rocket-ships, violence, forgiveness, trust, and faith.

Since most of the surviving Lackses never had more than a third-grade education, Skloot's journey to find the truth about Henrietta is long and hard, as she fought to win the trust of a group of people who both never understood and couldn't trust the science that made their mother immortal. Plagued by their own demons, the Lacks family members suffered from paranoia, depression, anxiety, rage, and high blood pressure -- none of which, ironically, they could afford to have treated, despite their mother's important contributions to science. Their story is hopeful and heart-wrenching. I would strongly recommend it, even if neither science nor nonfiction are genres you typically embrace.

Warming Up to the Kindle

I'm a bibliophile. I love everything about books: the smell of their pages, the triumphant feeling of turning that last sheet of paper at the end of a good story, the escape. So when the Kindle came out, I frowned and shook my head. "Not for me," I said. "I spend 3/4 of my day staring at a computer screen. Why would I want to spend my evenings doing that, too?"

At least, I felt that way until I filled my house up with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, cramming books into hallways and stuffing them under beds. If there's one thing I like more than books, it's a decluttered house. Clutter makes me unable to think; people who keep things for sentimental reasons baffle me, since a memory is worth much more than the thing with which that memory is associated. If I have too much stuff in my home, I feel anxious and sweaty. But I wasn't about to give up reading -- so, I turned, finally, to the Kindle.

No, the Kindle doesn't have that glorious smell of old dusty pages, but let me talk about what it does have. First of all, every time it goes to sleep (it is remarkably energy efficient), it digitally weaves a new "cover," made of art, the faces of familiar authors and poets, or classic book titles. It's a constant surprise and I find it delightful. As for the "computer" screen, it isn't one. Amazon has manufactured "digital ink," which reads like a book page, doesn't promote eye strain, and doesn't have a glare. I am no more fatigued after reading from it than I am from a paper-and-ink page.

But the best part is the giant online selection of books, which I can peruse from my own home, in a big comfy chair. I recently finished Mockingjay sooner in the evening than I'd hoped, which left me without a book to read for the rest of the week. My schedule is so busy that bookstore perusal can only happen on Saturdays, if I'm very lucky. But because of the Kindle, I was able to download 3 previews of books I'm considering reading and read 20 pages of each as a trial run before committing to buy. I can spread out my trial all week long, something I don't have the luxury of doing in the hour I might have to spend in the bookstore.

I can see this wireless / 3g feature working out really well on holidays, when I visit family with space to spare only for Christmas presents and not for the 4 books I think I might be able to read in two weeks. The newest version is as thin as a comic book and twice as light; it slid into my purse without adding a bit of extra weight, making it ideal to take to the many doctor's visits I have these days.

Did I mention brand-new hardbacks are $9.99? If for no other reason -- sold.

Reality News

So, this weekend at a monster truck rally, a truck went out of control and smashed 8 people in the crowd, killing them. While I was eating breakfast, the news decided to play it for me, causing me to immediately hit the power button to switch off the grizzly scene. At what point did it become necessary and acceptable to show scenes like that on TV? And why can't I become desensitized to it?

I trace the moment I became disgusted with sensationalist news to 9/11, when CNN ran a close-up shot of people hurling their bodies out of the windows of the towers before they completely collapsed. Their free-fall to the jagged stones of concrete below is something I will never be able to erase. If I'd been warned, I would have looked away; I did not need to store that image for instant recall, nor can I see how it added to the reporting of the atrocity in any way.

The Digital Age makes video so accessible that I rarely hear anyone talking about the appropriateness of screening a shot before considering airing it. On iphones, digital cameras, flips, and laptops, cameras are ubiquitous. The 24-hour news cycle makes the eyewitness account imperative, since it ostensibly keeps viewers from switching to another channel to get a summary, rather than an up-close-and-personal view, of the story. But what's lost in the fight to be first? Sure, it's the verifiability of the story, but it's also the respect of the subjects and the subjects' families being filmed, not to mention that of the viewers.

Dreams

Lately, I have had some very odd dreams. Last night, I dreamed that an old friend of mine was held hostage in the attic of a suburban home and she was traded for me and my dog Sierra. The couple who kidnapped me wanted me to be their maid so that they could throw dinner parties and look richer than they really were. When the wife was out of the room, the husband would try to slash my wrists with scissors, and when she was in the room, he'd pretend I did it to myself. At the dinner party, my parents showed up and began helping me wash knives and forks, trying to figure out why I couldn't leave. I kept slipping them tiny paring knives to hide under dishtowels and trivets so that I could stab my keepers and escape after the party, but my parents kept exposing the knives, shining them, and putting them into drawers. I woke up before I could escape the house.

The night before that, I dreamed I wanted to visit a former professor and friend at my alma mater, but instead of looking for him in the Foreign Languages building, where he worked, I ended up in the English building. It had been turned into a corporate office with suits and filing cabinets and papers everywhere and not one familiar face. Someone did tell me that my friend now worked in the elongated glass Toyokyo Building (a combination of Toyota and Tokyo, though I don't know why -- this building isn't real) and that I could find him there. But when I entered Toyokyo, all I could find was an underground basketball stadium with hundreds of Japanese businessmen everywhere. Above the concession stand, Baylor had submerged about five athletes in a "water coma" so that they could recuperate. You could watch them hooked up to underwater monitors being operated on by surgeons. I never did find my friend.

At least I no longer have insomnia.

The Cross-Dressing Patriot

As you lift your beer and sparklers in celebration of our nation's independence this 4th of July, don't forget to give a toast to Deborah Sampson Gannett, the crossdressing patriot. Although present-day Tea Partiers would probably write her out of the history books if they could, she's certainly someone to remember.

Gannett was about 20 years old in the late 18th century when she strapped her breasts tight to her body with a strip of cloth and donned a man's suit she'd been secretly sewing in a barn for months. One would imagine she sidled into the New England tavern where Revolutionary troops went to sign up for combat and collect their reward money for doing so. The story goes that, upon collecting this large sum, she drank herself into oblivion, passed out in her bedroom, and missed next morning's roll call, thereby invoking the ire of her superiors, who searched for her in her house and, apparently, discovered she was a woman.

Gannett wasn't to be deterred, though. Sick of farm chores and suitors, she put on her suit and ran away to another New England town, where she signed up for the Revolutionary War again, this time assuming her brother's name, Robert Shurtleff, and began her 3-year service with fellow patriots.

As with all cross-dressing war stories, this one gets complicated when she gets a small bullet (read: miniature cannon ball) in her upper thigh. As her body is carried into the tent where the doctor is going to take off her pants to dress her wound and, thereby, discover her secret, she tries to shoot herself in the head, but the gun is too unwieldy and her resolve fails her. She goes with plan B instead. She distracts the doctor by telling him she just needs to sleep, and when he leaves the room to tend to the others, she steals his surgical instruments and cuts the ball out of her own thigh. She then hobbles back to the battlefield, telling her comrades, "I'm just fine, boys; let's get moving."

So they do, and she serves well for the remainder of the war -- at least, until she reaches the fever epidemic in Philadelphia and comes so close to death that her body is dumped on a wheelbarrow intended for a row of cold unmarked graves. Doctor Binney notices her movement and plunges his hand into the front of her shirt, immediately coming to two realizations: (a) Soldier Gannett/Shurtleff's heart is still beating and (b) He has breasts.

Binney carries her to his house where he "leaves out" the fact that Shurtleff is a woman and allows her to recuperate there. He then parades her as a Revolutionary war hero to his friends, still maintaining her disguise. "Shurtleff" is courted by a lovely young 17 year old woman, who baffles Gannett in her ardor. After accepting loads of gifts from the young girl, Gannett finally tells her the truth and takes off with the other troops. Her biographer maintains that Gannett/Shurtleff and the scorned lover "remained friends," but, woman-to-woman?, I doubt this is true.

Binney rats out Gannett to her superior officers only after Gannett has moved on. She is honorably discharged and provided a sum for the remainder of her life from the American government. It isn't enough, though, and to make a little dough on the fascination with the war shortly after its close, she acts out her biography onstage at the Boston Federal Street Theatre. Each night, she paced through 27 military exercises before giving her speech to a packed house. Audiences loved and hated her.

So this fourth of July, as you celebrate all that the red, white, and blue stands for, don't forget to the thank the crossdressing soldiers who made this holiday possible.

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8,172 views and perhaps a total of 6 comments over the lifetime of this blog? Is anyone out there?

Back in Boston: Other People's Mail

Imagine the fall rolls around and my students and I are playing "my summer vacation." Sally went to the Virgin Islands to play Carnival and visit her folks. Rufus hiked the Himalayas, and Joan studied abroad in Prague. It's my turn and, giddy, I say, "I spent the summer in a library!" It probably wouldn't win me any awesome professor points, would it?

And yet, there's something wonderful about the library I spent the past 2 weeks in, researching for my book project. The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is a cool, quiet marble shrine to everything that means anything to people who want to preserve early American culture. The first time I sat down under the librarian's watchful eyes to touch Abigail Adams' letters -- to trace the worry for her husband in her slanted penmanship, to wonder if the paper's softness came, at least in part, from John's propensity to read her missives over and over again -- I became addicted. The yellowed pages, smudges, stains, misspellings, crossouts and cracked red wax seals made the clean, crisp, white, ellided, footnoted, neatly edited published versions of these letters look like lies. The letter's body often tells as much about the correspondence as the words on the page do. There is no substitute for the Real Thing.

This time around, I was visiting the MHS to read loyalist's letters -- you know, women who sided for the "wrong team," the Brits, in the Revolutionary War. And by the end of it, I was with the Tories. According to their version of the story, the Patriots were undisciplined, ungrateful, unfaithful children. The American soldiers were rude, vile, indecent men who barged into women's homes, often drunk, to make a spectacle of themselves before stealing wood and valuables to take with them back to camp. Those that fled the war took agonizing journeys to Nova Scotia to establish towns like Halifax that would become safe havens for British sympathizers, but they often did so while leaving behind brothers, husbands, and sons, who stayed behind to defend land the families would eventually have taken from them by the eighteenth-century version of Homeland Security (then called Committees of Safety).

At any rate, the whole trip got me to thinking about the death of letter-writing, and how letters and journals, like this blog, are at best semipermanent, so easily taken down and deleted that I ache for the archivists and historians who will want to know anything about millenials in the Digital Age. What will we leave behind?

Back in Boston: Edie Sedgwick

So yesterday, after a dinner of buccatini and pancetta, I needed a long stroll, so Andrew & my friend Lisa & I decided to cut through Boston Commons to see Faneuil Hall at sunset. I wanted to show Andrew the newest crop of baby ducklings, but when we got near the pond to see them, we found, instead, two men flicking water on the poor creatures. They turned to see us gawking, and, per my luck, one of them stumbled toward me.

"EDIE!" he said.

Here we go, I thought.

"EDIE SEDGWICK!"

"I do not look like Eve Sedgwick," I said. "Eve Sedgwick looks like a man." I was pretty impressed that someone as high as this guy could conjure up an image of a respectable feminist critic like Eve Sedgwick at the height of his hallucination, but was just as confused as to why he'd feel comfortable calling such a formidable woman "Evie." In case you don't know her, this is Eve Sedgwick:

He seemed confused by my response, so he wrinkled his brow and tripped over a tree root. He decided I couldn't speak English very well, so he started yelling at me.

"YOU LOOK JUST LIKE EDIE SEDGWICK!" he screamed. "FROM THE 60s!"

I thought the most logical way of dealing with him was to yell back.

"I DO NOT. LOOK LIKE. A MAN."

This was all entirely too confusing for him and, anyway, his companion was trying to sit in a perfect stranger's lap. She was flapping her arms trying to shoo him away, but it wasn't working. He swerved toward his friend and pulled him down the pathway away from the ducklings and, thankfully, away from us.

Of course, it was only after hours of giggling about it did I find out who Edie Sedgwick, 1960s pop icon, was (see below).

I have to admit, I was a little relieved.

Back in Boston

Boston looks different in the morning than it does in the day. By day, I can't help but associate Boston with the belly of a beast, mostly because, by day, I ride the subway, which smells like blown-out tires and hot exhaust and dirty feet and old newspapers. But this morning, I saw Boston at daybreak when I went for a jog at the Commons. And it was an entirely different scene.

There's a long hidden stretch of pavement that runs along Commonwealth that's shaded by old, long-fingered trees and tall apartment buildings. Bronze statues of women I've studied for years but thought no one knew about interrupt the sidewalk. Lucy Stone. Phillis Wheatley. People pour out of tiny apartments with big dogs on leashes. German shepherds, fat labradors, unnamable English-looking showdogs that probably cost more than my car. How do they all fit inside, I wonder? Then there are the impertinent little creatures -- Jack Russells, Rat Terriers with bellies larger than their little legs, Wirehairs with perfectly straight earpoints and leather collars, walked by women wearing 3-inch high heels at 6 o'clock in the morning.

There's no way I could ever fit in here, were I to momentarily go insane and move to New England. This has a little to do with the fact that I'm a hick and a little more to do with my complete lack of urban fashion sense. My Coldwater Creek sweater and so-five-years-ago wedges make me look dowdy around the women who shop on Newbury street, where they apparently develop some superhero ability to pair breezy pale colored skirts with floral vintage-but-not-bargain-basement collared button-downs. Their long bare legs seem impervious to the weather, which is a steamy 50 degrees in the middle of June. I wear a hooded jacket and scowl at them as I clunk down the street but it doesn't make me feel any less out of place.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Coming Out in Cass County

I recently went home and opened the newspaper to a story about a man who was living a closeted gay lifestyle with a crossdresser who called himself Sa'Derius. You have to understand that crossdressing is something you have to drive 4 hours to Dallas to do; it must've taken a lot of stealth and planning on Sa'Derius's part, and somewhere between Commerce and a club in Deep Ellum, Sa'Derius must've done some soul searching. He decided that he and his partner should come out to their families and stop living life as if they were ashamed of themselves. When Sa'Derius approached his lover to convince him to come out to Cass County (ok it was Bowie but the alliteration is appealing), his lover shot and killed him. He told the judge he was convinced Sa'Derius was clutching a gun in his hand, but when he pried open his cold, dead fingers, all he was holding was a bottle of blue nail polish. Honest-to-God true story.

It's hard to come out in Cass County. When I was teenager, I had a friend who didn't so much come out as she was outed by her lover, who was a wild girl with dark punk hair and Goth white skin and acne. When she sat down at the prep table and put an arm around my friend, she was making a statement. Before we could blink, Goth girl had taken out a rotten banana and taught us how she and my friend had learned to do all kinds of things with it. She took time to take in our faces, and then she left. My friend never recovered from the ridicule that followed her outing in the school cafeteria. She moved and didn't tell a soul where she'd gone. I haven't heard from her since.

When I was a bit older, I met one of the best preachers I'd ever had. She helped me through the worst year of my life -- 1996, the year I became a 16-year-old, had my first heartbreak, and lost my grandfather to cancer -- and helped me understand Faith and Doubt can, in fact, go hand-in-hand. When she moved to become a pastor in another city, she divorced her husband and took a female partner, a Lindenite who had also been married with children. Everyone buzzed. I'd heard some people xeroxed her partnership announcement in the paper and tacked it up on telephone poles, but it's impossible to say if that was true.

It's hard coming out as anything different in Cass County, and that applies to just about any label someone might try to adopt. It's hard to be a drug addict, divorced, depressed, alcoholic; it's tough to be too smart or too dumb, to have no job or two jobs, to have no kids or ten. Being part of a rural town is a lot like being part of a big family. Some types of deviation can bring you closer to everyone in it, while others can make you a permanent outcast. Which it'll be is anyone's guess.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Lacy's Bridge

Lacy was dead, to begin with. That's all I can really tell you because I don't remember the true story behind the ghost that allegedly haunted Lacy's Bridge. Variants of it have something to do with a young girl, a suicide, maybe an unborn kid, maybe a lover scorned -- who can tell?

Rumor had it that if you crossed Lacy's Bridge at night, all manner of things could happen to you. Your car would stall. Your lights would go out. Faces would press up against your window while you stared out into the dark night.

If you wanted to reach the witch's grave, you had to cross Lacy's Bridge, and that's just what we were doing one Halloween night when I was about 15 or 16 years old. The car was stuffed with teenagers dressed as slut-whore bellydancers, slut-whore cheerleaders, and slut-whore nurses. The guys smeared gooey fake blood on white t-shirts, halfheartedly playing along with the charade. We turned the car engine off at Lacy's Bridge to call her out. You don't know quiet until you reach the country in East Texas at night. Bullfrogs turn to vampires. Bellowing cows become the moaning dead. I surreptitiously put a handprint on the humid back window and tapped my friends to show them that Lacy was trying to push the car over the edge into the black water. Someone, undoubtedly Carrie, maybe Lauren, gave me a good smack for pulling my old antics.

Let me pause a second to tell you that smack was entirely justified. One night, at a sleepover, I forced my friends to watch the Exorcist when we were entirely too young to do so, then crept outside and, at the scariest part, raked my fingernails down the dark glass that looked into the livingroom. Thereafter, my friend Steph slept in the bathroom wedged between the toilet and the wall. This was a stunt topped only by the time Melinda & Carrie tried to pull one on me by planning (a little too loudly) a sneak attack on me after I'd fallen asleep. Since I'd overheard the plot, I unscrewed all of the light bulbs in the room and hid, so that when they pounced on my bed, they found it empty. When they went to turn on the lamp, all they heard was CLICK. And then, my favorite part: CLICK CLICK.

So I'm saying I deserved the smack. At any rate, I was about to try something else to elicit a scream when we heard a gunshot. Everyone slipped and stumbled and scraped, a flutter of gauze and sequins and fake wigs and high heeled shoes, trying to cram back into the car and speed away. Lacy must have been preoccupied because the car started -- did it do so weakly? -- and we skidded away on the dirt road back home.

We say, to this day, that somebody's daddy was firing at us for trespassing near his house. In Texas, you don't step on someone else's land uninvited in the middle of the night -- especially Halloween Night -- and expect a glass of sweet tea. Maybe it was Lacy, trying to teach me a little something about fear.

If Necessary, Use Words

Every day on my way home from work, I pass a used car lot, and that used car lot has a sign that hasn't changed in the year I've lived here. It says, "Go forth and spread the gospel. If necessary, use words."

I've always thought that was a ridiculous sign, mostly because evangelicals who might follow that advice are probably already too full of words and too short on action. But for some reason today, the sign struck me. It made me think of Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, which says the South is marked by signs with words and signs without words, and while she was talking about state-mandated and social segregation, it still has resonance with me today. Everywhere I turn, I see a message.

Take, for example, the other day. I was sitting at a red light next to a homicidal maniac who decided that, when the left-turn-only arrow turned green, he'd shoot out of the go-straight lane I was in and attempt to careen into the cars veering left on their protected signal. Seconds after the maniac made his attempted suicide, I sat at my own red light, wondering how in heaven's name he hadn't been smashed to pieces. Suddenly, the car behind me sat on his horn and gave me an ugly hand gesture. Beeeeeeep. He wanted me to run my red light, too. His message was, "I'm more important than your safety," "I have somewhere interesting to be," and "You don't matter very much."

I was recently engaged in a service opportunity with a woman I didn't know well. A man walked in after all of the food had been cleaned up and approached me. He'd missed breakfast and the access pass he needed to obtain clothing for the month. "Do you have any shoes?" he asked. It was 95 degrees on the pavement outside. Summer was approaching with fury. "The clothes closet surely does; let me get you the ticket you need to get them," I said, turning to the woman in charge, expecting her to give it to him. "You're LATE," she said sharply at the man with no shoes. To add emphasis, she looked at her watch and blew out a huff of air, rolling her eyes. "I'm sure they don't have anything. Because you're SO LATE. But I GUESS you can look." He was eyeing the 13 loaves of bread she was preparing to toss in the trash can, and she noticed it, and she took them away anyway. "I am important here," she was saying without saying it. Her sign read: "I matter here. I feel powerful when I deny you what you need. I am in charge and you are not."

I thought about my own signs without words. What have I printed there for everyone to see?

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Drugstore

I didn't know, at the time, that spending every day after school at a real, working drugstore would one day be an unusual thing, but it would be.

A drugstore in a small town is about more than just pharmaceuticals. Like the Country Store, it's where old guys go to drink coffee in a drab room in the back. And it doubled as a video store with neat rows of plastic VHS boxes. I always wanted to rent the ones that had titles like "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" but I was a creature of habit. I would always pick Labyrinth even though I knew every word from the beginning to the end.

The drugstore also had rows of neat white Whitman's chocolates for men who forgot their wives on anniversaries and valentine's and didn't have time to make the hour drive to a big city to pick up a present. It was the best place to pick out cards with bad puns before stepping down the street to Capital Florist, which let you charge your flowers to your account because they'd know where to find you if you didn't pay your bill. I didn't want chocolates, however; I was most interested in the Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers Lipgloss which I was convinced would make boys want to kiss me. It didn't.