A New Height of Arrogance

People jaywalk all the time.  Everyone knows that.  I myself jaywalk - but only when it doesn't inconvenience any driver, and only when I am responsible for myself and not anyone with me.

Tourists in DC push jaywalking to the extreme, as if they have some invisible force field around them, making them impervious to cars going 35, headed straight towards them.  The larger their numbers, the more they believe in their safety and right to stop traffic. 

But this year's prize goes to the woman who crossed against the signal at the Lincoln Memorial this afternoon, looking straight at me and playing chicken with me and several other fast approaching drivers - while she pulled her small children along with her.  

Can someone tell me what kind of fucked-up thinking makes it worth using your own small children as human shields so you won't have to wait thirty seconds for the light to change?

It wasn't like we were several blocks away (which would still not have made it right); we were less than a block's distance from her when she started across the street.  This was at the northwest corner of the Lincoln Memorial, a stretch of roadway where there is rarely a break in the traffic coming from or headed towards the Memorial Bridge, a major artery across the Potomac connecting Virginia and DC.  After decades of dangerous situations involving tourists coming out of caravans of buses parked illegally on the opposite side of the road, a traffic light was finally installed.  There is no vehicular cross traffic at this light - no intersection exists - so there is no other reason to stop traffic.  Of course, this dumb-shit mother couldn't be expected to understand that that light was put there solely for her safety.

The only reasonable explanation for her breathtaking stupidity was arrogance - the belief that her time, even thirty seconds of it, was worth far more than mine or that of all the other drivers around me, and that therefore, she had the right to stop all traffic, regardless of the signal.  This is really the height of arrogance.  Not surprising in this city, though it's not what you would expect from a tourist (which makes me postulate that she was a local.  I think most tourists know when they're being stupid, even while behaving stupidly.)

Should I have stopped?  Probably.  Was it stupid to keep driving right past her as she reached the median?  Probably.  Was it worth the risk of hitting someone just for the sake of making a point?  No.  I'm sure that while I was thinking she couldn't possibly be stupid enough to actually keep walking, she was thinking I couldn't possibly be stupid enough to keep driving.

But let's not forget, she created the situation of her own free will.  This was not like NYC, where every day, masses of working people jaywalk with hostile drivers barreling down on them.  If you're going to play chicken with your own life and assume all personal risk, go ahead.  But don't take anyone with you, especially not children.  And certainly not your own.


 

I'm In!

I just posted my first FotoVisura album and now have my own page as part of the community.

Let me know what you think!
 

Re-Awakening of Spring - Er, Fall

The signs of fall are unmistakeable.  Outside my bedroom window, the Japanese maple is chartreuse, on its way to gold, and the giant cherry tree is tinged with yellow and orange as a prelude to its flaming red glory; the mornings and evenings have turned cool and the days are pleasantly warmed by the slanting sun - and the 2014-2015 PEN/Faulkner Reading Series began last night!

While I have attended the readings for many years, this may have been the first time I went to the season kickoff, and I found myself more excited than usual.  I suddenly realized that for me it was like finally getting to a concert on time instead of arriving late.  And how fitting that the first reading featured four emerging writers hosted by an established name, nascent careers serving as a metaphor for a reading series at the beginning of a season, and vice versa.

Each of the writers read an excerpt of a story just published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ann Beattie, the moderator, then asked each a question about their work.  It was an enjoyable evening, and it whet my appetite both for reading the rest of each story and for attending more of the reading series.

As I was starting to think about these things while walking back to the Metro after the reading, I was struck by the luminous quality of the quiet autumn night on Capitol Hill.  

The Hill takes on a different character at night, one not seen by camera-toting, t-shirt clad people spilling out of a caravan of buses.  The brick sidewalks in deep shadow and streetlight, the quiet streets of Victorian and Federal row houses, the dramatic spotlighting of churches and Government buildings, are all starkly on display when the only sound is one's footsteps.

It was also nice to not feel such a bifurcation between my writer self and my photographer self and to sense an easier fluidity between the two.  They may be different, but they're not oil and water.

 

Having picked up a copy of the VQR at the reception, I did read more of the writers' work before going to bed and again this morning, and I was impressed and inspired.  It was just the charge I needed to jump-start my own writing (starting with this piece) after taking several months off!  Part of this was re-engaging with the literary community and being reminded that even though writing itself is a solitary pursuit, telling stories is not - in fact, it's very much the opposite.

It was a night of great expectations - for these four talented writers, for the reading series ahead, and for my own development in this new year.  Thanks to PEN/Faulkner for doing so much to feed the literary community in D.C.!

This is No Red Moon

Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, which sought to limit reproductive health care coverage of its employees based on religious freedom.  Let's just cut to the chase.  This particular ruling may be about a very specific, "narrow" situation that will only happen on "rare" occasion.  But as we all know, Supreme Court rulings are precedent-setting.  It's a slippery slope that will allow certain "closely-held," "faith-based" companies to pick and choose what laws they will comply with, as long as they claim religious freedom as the reason.

I am a born-again Christian.  I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins.  I believe He rose from the dead and that the way to eternal life with God is through a relationship with Jesus.  I've memorized lots of Scripture, read the Bible cover to cover more than once, and been "slain in the Spirit" several times.  But this is a whacked-out ruling.

Just because a company is owned by people with certain beliefs does not mean that company should be allowed to cherry pick which Federal laws it wants to or does not want to obey.  Employment law applies to all employees; otherwise, what's the point?

Are we now going to see some extremist group thumb their nose at Equal Employment Opportunity law and keep their African American employees in the mailroom or deny them promotions because they believe that blacks are a lower order?  Are Muslim-owned companies going to be free to hire only men if they believe women should stay indoors?  Is  Hobby Lobby now going to openly refuse to hire or promote gay people?  Or to freely fire them (which is actually perfectly legal, since the Employment Non-Discrimination Act keeps failing to pass in Congress - not that it would matter, now that this ruling can be used to fight any lawsuit over it)?

A spokeswoman (woman!) said that this ruling is a victory for "all" people, no matter what your opinion.  Never mind that that makes no fundamental sense - this ruling is only a victory for straight, fundamentalist men who think their beliefs should trump civic law.  This woman might change her mind over Plan B coverage if her sister - or daughter - worked for Hobby Lobby and found herself pregnant after a brutal home invasion and it took several days wading through government bureaucracy to get alternative coverage.

When people decide which laws should apply only to others - or, as with marriage equality, which laws only apply to them - that is more a sign of the breakdown of democracy (or, dare I say, society?) than anything else in recent years.  And much scarier than anything Ben Percy can think up.  This ruling is truly frightening, because it is real.

Whether He Would or Wouldn't Is Up to Me

Last night at his PEN/Faulkner reading on Capitol Hill, Richard Ford quoted Lewis Lapham as saying, "Nothing necessarily follows anything."  He and Washington Post book critic Ron Charles were "onstage" (in a church) in conversation about whether a character's action can rightly be deemed believable or not.  Ford's position was basically that he was the writer, so he could make the character do whatever he wanted him to do.

What a freeing moment for me as a writer.

At the reception afterwards, standing in front of him at the book-signing table, I said, "It was great to hear you say that, because at the summer writing workshops I attend, someone always says, 'Well, I don't believe the character would do that.'"

Ford looked up and said, "Well, now you know the answer!"

(Allow me a brief digression to share this with you: I'm shaking hands with celebrated novelist Richard Ford, yes, that Richard Ford, who wrote Independence Day, the book that won both the Pulitzer Prize AND the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction - the first time any book had won both - and he is signing that same lauded book, writing a personal greeting to me...and I am nervous, tripping over my tongue, telling him I write fiction, too - how embarrassing, did I just tell him that?! - and he looks up at me and asks where I go for my summer workshops, and I say, "Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center," and he says, "Oh, yes!" and then goes back to finishing my inscription.  (He lives in New England, after all.)  He is somewhat intimidating, tall and grey-haired, such a literary luminary, but it's mostly his eyes - those blue-grey eyes that are so pale you can almost see into his head, like maybe you could catch a glimpse of some of his ideas, some of the magic and style of his writing, though it's almost frightening to look.  But I'm completely won over by his warmth, so genuine and patient, the way he looks right at you when he's talking to you, the way he takes his time with you, even though he's never seen you before, and when he says, "It's nice to meet you" and "thank you for coming," he takes his time, and you get the strong feeling he really means it - as if he hasn't already said it to the twenty people before you and as if he isn't going to say it to the fifty people behind you...as if he's not a 70 year-old famous writer who could probably use the rest more than you but won't get to bed until long after you.  Despite his austere publicity photos, Richard Ford is one very nice man.)

Why do writers always challenge other writers in questioning the behavior of their characters?  Sure, actions usually need the support of motivation, but sometimes people do stuff seemingly out of left field.  Would anyone have thought the following plausible?

• A young boy considered a "normal kid" by the neighbors goes on a slashing spree one day at school, severely injuring many, and gets charged as an adult
• A young couple takes their baby and toddler child on a boat into the open ocean, intending to sail around the world
• A grad student waiting for his wife to travel cross-country to join him in married student housing drops out of grad school and returns home to help her raise the child fathered by his (former) best friend

Though none of these seems particularly likely, all of them did happen in real life.  But workshop people would tear plots like these to shreds, claiming he/they "wouldn't do that."  Is human behavior that predictable?  Do we always know what people are or are not going to do?

And do we want to write or read only stories in which everyone behaves as expected and no one does anything surprising?  ZZZZZZZZZ  Not me!

Thanks, Richard Ford, for giving me the freedom to let my characters do strange, inappropriate, fascinating things that keep the reader turning pages!

PHOTO CREDIT:  Amazon.com

What He Left Me

Down in the basement of the house where I grew up, on the floor of an old grey metal cabinet that stretched far above my head, were supplies that held silent mystery: flat yellow boxes of Kodak Ektachrome photosensitive paper and scary-looking bottles of developing fluid.  Sometimes I would pick them up and just wonder, excited about my dad's occasional mention of setting up a darkroom.

On another grey cabinet, this one large and squat, with shallow drawers for flat storage of blueprints, sat some kind of developer machine.  We never knew how it worked.

Somewhere in my dad's past, he had apparently developed his own photographs, though he never gave us the details.  That remained for us to imagine, especially when it became clear that the darkroom would never happen.

Dad, always the shutterbug!

We all knew he liked taking pictures.  He documented everything, from holiday dinners (every one of them), to how we looked before going off to church, to the trees in our backyard.  I thought it was kind of ridiculous - and that was during the days of film, when every frame counted and cost something.  Weren't all the poses the same, whether around the dining room table at Thanksgiving or in front of the house on a Sunday morning?  Didn't we always look the same?

After he died in 2004, we discovered that this passion went back to his years as a young adult.  We found boxes and boxes of photos going back to the 1960s, World War II, and even as far back as his early childhood - meaning he kept pictures belonging to his father, who died before WWII.  And in an old Army foot locker were hundreds more photos from his days as a young draftee in the China-Burma-India Theater - along with rolls of movie film.

Young Man, as subject

Too bad he wasn't as good at organizing and mounting pictures as he was at taking them.  Since they were all loose - in envelopes, boxes, or simply bound with a disintegrating rubber band - it's hard to know if he meant for them to be passed on or if it was all just part of his general tendency not to throw anything away.

Whatever the case, he showed me over the decades that it was important to capture moments of time that will never be repeated (even if they seem to recur, in a young boy's mind).  That there was value in documenting events, family get-togethers, the seasons.  That even the ordinary was worth photographing.  And this, I have come to realize, was his greatest gift to me, this way of seeing and valuing life, this sense of urgency to capture a fleeting moment.  

From the time I received my first camera as a child - a cube-shaped Brownie, which I still have - I've always loved taking pictures.  I finally realized recently that this passion was hard-wired in me, and I decided to stop suppressing a years-long drive to pursue photography beyond simple snapshots and see where it would take me as an art form.  In 2012 I jumped in with both feet, crossing over to the visual arts side at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and taking my first week-long photography workshop.  This summer I will be taking my second one, working with David Hilliard in an exploration of photography as storytelling.  (And in my own full-circle experience, we will be working synergistically with Pam Houston's fiction workshop, which I took three years ago at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.)

When you're cool, you're always ready

As photography takes up more and more space in my head I feel grateful to my dad.  My friends get impatient with me for "taking 500 shots of the same thing" (that's a direct quote) the same way we would always groan when my dad wanted to take yet another picture of us around the dining room table as the food got cold.  He was on to something and passed a little more of it on to me each time he forgot to wind the camera first and we had to say "cheese" again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson couldn't have summed it up any better.  I've quoted him before in this blog and will likely do so again.  It is so much the reason my dad and I shared a drive to photograph:

Life is once, forever.

Winds of Remembrance

The drums and percussion beat feverishly - djembes and bongos, frame drums of different sizes, rattles, shakers - and then settle down to a quieter pulse when someone stands and sings with their flute.  Then applause and a few whoops burst out, and the drumming becomes wild and hypnotic again.  Eventually people get up and move around in a circle to the beat, pounding out the rhythm and allowing the synchronicity to express itself in their bodies.  It's nearly primal; we could be under the stars around a blazing fire surrounded by the red rocks of southern Utah or in some clearing in the Amazonian jungle instead of in a small Best Western ballroom in metropolitan Washington, D.C., on a cloudy day of an endless winter.

From a tag line of a previous meeting, it's music that "transports you to another place." 

Cedar flute, key of G, David O'Neal; bag by Shelly Stenzel, Feather Ridge Flutes

It was the closing to the 10th Anniversary Potomac Native American Flute Festival - three days of flute shopping with some of the very best flute makers in the country, three concerts featuring some of the best NAF artists in the country, and workshops given by those artists.  It was also a time to reunite with old friends, deepen relationships with acquaintances, and meet new friends-to-be.  And as with so many events and activities, that's the true essence of the festival; it's the people that make it such an incredible weekend each year and make it so hard to see it end so quickly.

Gilbert Levy, husband and co-performer of world flutist Suzanne Teng, summed it up best when six of us were sitting in this same small ballroom after almost everyone had left and he said, "Where's the after-party?  This can't be over!"

Will playing the penny whistle at Open Mic

In Mark 9 of the Bible, Jesus is transfigured so that his clothes become "dazzling white," and Moses and Elijah suddenly show up.  Peter is so awed (and a little freaked out) that he tells Jesus "it's good to be here" and they should just stay there, even suggesting that they build shelters.  Everyone wants to stay on the mountaintop.  Who wants to leave, when it's such an incredible experience, when the people are amazing - when it's so fun?!  Who wants to go back down to level ground, where you have to worry about dealing with people fighting and finding food for your next meal and battling the weather?

It's natural to feel sad when such a wonderful gathering comes to a close, knowing it's likely you won't see people for another year.  But maybe we aren't supposed to compartmentalize our lives into A) this wonderful NAF community where people love each other and seek peace and harmony and healing, and B) the real world.  Maybe we're not supposed to bifurcate our lives into 1) this great annual fluting weekend when everything seems wonderful, and 2) the rest of our lives.  Maybe it's all the same thing, hard as that may be to effect.

Transverse bamboo flute, Egyptian tuning, Craig Noss, FireFlutes; bag by Shelly Stenzel, Feather Ridge Flutes

I often restrain myself from referring to "spreading the gospel of the Native American Flute."  But it strikes me that the values of Christianity and the NAF community are quite similar: love, peace, healing, forgiveness, acceptance.  Finding common ground.  Loving your neighbor as yourself.  Agreeing to disagree (a phrase coined by John Wesley, founder of Methodism).  

Whether and to what extent people actually live out these values - in either community - is a completely different subject.  The point is: if fluting is more than just a shared interest in a musical instrument, if it really is about these values, then all the warm fuzzies we experience during a special weekend like this are not meant to be put aside, once we return to our workaday world.  It has to apply as much in real life as it does at a flute festival; otherwise, it's just malarkey (in honor of St. Patrick's Day).  We can't just love other fluties.  We can't only love people we have an affinity for; even the demons do that*.

If I drive home after the festival cursing out those who cut me off on the Beltway, it feels like it negates all the positive vibes from the weekend.  Then it goes back to being just a bunch of people who like flutes.  It can't be only about the music.

Gilbert Levy (playing my djembe!) and Dan jamming after the evening concert

So when I go back to work, back to living my everyday life, maybe I can carry some of this goodwill and love back to the people who were not on the mountaintop with me.  And maybe I can begin to understand that, even while it's about getting the job done, it's also about my relationships with the people with whom I spend the majority of my waking hours.  No one says that's an easy thing, but it's something to consider.

And anyway, my "real life" is what makes these weekends possible, not only financially but emotionally; the highs aren't high without the ordinary.  And every day of being on level ground brings me closer to next year's mountaintop.

* (If you can find the Scriptural reference for that, please comment or email me.  Thanks!)