well, maybe i can make one exception: when driving and faced with a dead-end corner and a one-way street. one way.
otherwise? not so much.
the headline read, “florida isn’t the only state pushing legislation that could be harmful to LGBTQ students.” there’s also idaho, georgia, iowa, tennessee and oklahoma. not to forget texas and whatever other states have jumped on the bigotwagon since this headline. what?! apparently, these are states in which leadership has decided there’s just one way. and it’s theirs.
as the proud mother of a gay man, i have to wholeheartedly disagree with these folks. any idea of “normal” that they have conjured up is a warped righteous positioning of power and control, some sort of strange arc into absolutism. it does make one wonder about the possibility of people who need to compensate for something in their own lives. it is astonishingly arrogant, haughtily heartless, cruelly uncaring, blindingly bigoted, disgustingly discriminatory, and sickeningly small-minded in the most prejudiced of ways.
i’m guessing, then, that these same huffy lawmakin’ folks are sittin’ around makin’ it their business to raise questions about people, ponder others’ sexuality or gender, disparage people who identify differently than they do. they are wringing their hands and plotting how to silence them, to marginalize them. because their one-way is the only way and lives that may be richly influential, steeped in open-mindedness and the embrace and love of all humankind should be silenced and marginalized.
“look it up,” my sweet momma would say. i blame her. for my word-curiosity. for my policing of spelling, punctuation, grammar. for my love of dictionaries and my commitment to learning. at 93 she was still asking questions, being curious, looking it up.
black and white composition books, of both thick and thin variety, populated my growing up, my teenage years, my college years, and ever since. though i do have a thready fondness of using My Girl’s and My Boy’s old unfinished spiral notebooks these days, we have piles of waiting-to-be-used composition books and they beckon when i open the supply cabinet in the sunlit office upstairs. places to jot poetry, thoughts, reflections, stories, lyrics, these composition books always make me think of my mom. they are places to process, to remember, to dream, to sort. they are the beginnings of stories, lyrics to ponder, the coda to the song. to someone else they are simply words on the page. to me, it is my breath that gives them life. we each have stories to tell, songs to write.
in the last few days i have had the frustration of feeling silenced. as i wrote in yesterday’s post, someone marked all five of my blogposts of last week on facebook as “spam” and that somehow triggered facebook to pull every last one of my blogposts – and any mention of my blogsite – down. every word – the simple ones, the ones that require looking-it-up – pulled down. with 650 posts, even averaging 500 words, that is 325,000 words. MY 325,000 words. gone.
in these times of chaos and unrest and pandemic, there are plenty of words out there. foul words, words of peaceful mantras, words of untruth, twisted words of conspiracy theories, imploring words, scientific words, words of wisdom from giants of wisdom, accessible words, words we have to look up, words we can hardly believe we’ve heard from various people-in-the-spotlight, words at which we roll our eyes, words we find reassuring.
in a daily email he receives, david shares a new word with me. “kawaii,” he reports, “means cute.”
the baby raccoons, most definitely kawaii, peeked out from behind the tree trunk. upon seeing us on the trail, they had scrambled from the little pond up the tree. they stared at us; we stared at them. they didn’t move, quizzically grasping onto bark and watching quietly. we didn’t move either. we just stood quietly on the trail and watched. the story they would tell about our encounter wouldn’t have many words. all was silent. all was motionless. they were safe; we were safe. for a few minutes, we shared the serene woods together, a little eye contact in hushed regard of each other. maybe, in their re-telling, in their speckled composition book, they would just tell the coda – “and then they left.”
every now and again i take out an old composition book. it’s astounding. i was so…..wordy.
during this time that FB, impossible to contact, figures out i am not ill-intended nor do i post SPAM, i would ask you a favor: if you have found any post of mine to be thought-provoking or encouraging or reassuring in some way and have enjoyed reading, please “follow” this blog. you can “follow” it on this post or later go to our website www.kerrianddavid.com/the-melange to find the link to this blogsite. wordpress will send you an email each day with my 5 day-a-week blog. you can certainly choose to read or not read each day and, at any time, you can choose to “unfollow” the blog. just as it is your decision whether or not to read my post on facebook each day, i would like to think you still have the option. subscribing gives you that. hopefully, FB will allow and restore my written work soon.
reverse threading 