It felt way, way too “to me” to put this in the last post but Harry Callahan is my absolute favorite photographer. Yes, I know, everyone always thinks it’s Francesca Woodman, and she’s up there. So’s Elinor Carucci. So’s Stephen Shore. So are others.
But it’s Harry. Harry and Eleanor. Forever.
In high school, one of my chores was shoveling the driveway. Given that we lived in the Colorado high country, way up in the Rockies over 5000 feet above sea level, we received a not-insubstantial amount of snow: On average, about 30 feet a winter.
The driveway to our house was not terribly long but it was long enough. It could fit a Volvo wagon and at least another car or two, including one of Toyota 4-Runner length and another similar, plus a little extra. It was straight and wide. Unlike most of the rest of the block, we didn’t have a snowblower, possibly because they were loud and obnoxious, but honestly I don’t remember why because I was 13 and too busy rolling my eyes and complaining in my head about the stupid reasons a person could come up with for thinking snowblowers were a bad idea.
Like many high schoolers, my first class of the day was at 7:30. If it snowed, and during the winter it often did, the driveway needed to be shoveled before I left for school. This sometimes meant shoveling at 5:30 in the morning. It’s worth noting that I was a teenage girl, that I do not do well in the cold thanks to bad circulation in my hands and feet, and that I was never in my life a morning person until recently - even this we could still debate, both in terms of “morning” and “person”.
Shoveling the driveway meant first standing behind a large metal scoop with a large handle attached to both sides of the scoop, near the back. You grasped the handle, jammed the scoop into the fresh snow, down into the packed snow, down as far as you could to get as close to the pavement. Then you scooped forward, gathering as much old and new snow as possible, carrying it to the end of the driveway and across the street, and dumping it in the field on the other side.
As a teenager, I was in good enough shape, but I didn’t have an enormous amount of upper body strength. I confess to you here what you can already guess: I hated this chore. Even so, I did it without fail every time it snowed, before school started, and I never hated it enough to intentionally do it wrong. I struggled with the scoop and often couldn’t get it to go down into the harder packed, old snow. Sometimes I’d just get the fresh new powder, running it along top the original surface, packing even more on top.
One weekend morning, as I was shoveling away, my dad - a tall, strong man - came outside and watched me for a moment as I maneuvered the scoop up and down the driveway. Suddenly I heard him behind me.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
I stopped as he came over.
“See,” he told me, “you’re not getting down into the old stuff. You need to really get down in there, harder.”
He took the scoop and said, “Let me show you.”
I stood there, my face and fingers tingling with a combination of cold and the blood-rush of unfettered annoyance. My father tilted the scoop upward, angling the sharp front edge down into the packed snow and drove it in, gouging far deeper than I’d been able to. The scoop piled high with snow and he deftly ran it down the length of the driveway, dumping it across the street. He dragged the scoop back up to the top and repeated the process, and then again, and then again. I watched him two, three, maybe four times.
And then I slowly and quietly turned and went inside. where it was warm. He didn’t seem to notice. Eventually, the driveway was clear.
So next time, if someone tells you you’re doing it wrong, why not let them go ahead and expertly show you how to do it right?
The truth is that I’m job hunting. Maybe now is not the time.
That post will return when the time is right.
Thank you for the amazing, immediate response. There are some kind and wonderful people out there. I hope you’re all able to connect to at least a few of them.
Neven, the only other Charles Mingus fan I know under the age of 50, brought this to my attention. It’s fantastic.
- Walk
- Crawl
- Run
- Jump
- Disapparate
- Personal Jesus
Geoff Barnes is my hero.
I was named after my great-grandmother.
That much I knew already. I didn’t know that I met her husband, my great-grandfather Lepa. I also didn’t know he was offering $1000 for one of his grandchildren to name a daughter after his wife.
“You don’t remember meeting Zaydeh, do you? I don’t imagine you would. You were a very little girl.”
“No. What happened? Did he hold me? What did he say?”
“He called you ‘little goil’. And no, he didn’t hold you. He was very old.”
“Little goil!”
“He was delighted we had actually named you after my grandmother. My cousin Diane had named her daughter Leora, but that didn’t count. Anyway, Leora sounds… I don’t know, like a washerwoman or something.”
“You’re terrible.”
“What? Come on, can’t you see the stockings rolled at the knees and the crepe-soled shoes?”
“Stop.”
“Anyway, Diane named her daughter Leora, but that wasn’t my grandmother’s name. I wanted to name you Lena, because that was how I knew my grandmother. I didn’t love the name Lena but I was going to name you Lena because I loved my grandmother and that’s how I knew her. But Zaydeh wanted a granddaughter to be named after her real name, Leah. Her Hebrew name.”
“I like the name Lena.”
“You can call yourself Lena if you want.”
“So wait, did you get the $1000? I always thought…”
“I don’t remember if I did. I mean, it was a lot of money back then but it was also a long time ago. And no, that’s not why I named you Leah. Not for the money. I named you Leah because I loved my grandmother, and I wanted to name you after her. Also, I liked the name Leah. Lena wasn’t too bad, so I would have gone with that. But believe me, if her name had been Leora, I wouldn’t have named you Leora, not even for $1000.”
*********
“I can’t believe my mother was friends with all these famous artists, and the only one she bothered to get a piece of art from was a total no-name.”
“She was friends with famous artists?”
“Sure. She went to the Tyler School in the late ’30s, the ’40s. She was there maybe even in the ’50s. She was friends with Boris Blai, the dean of the school. Apparently Blai had an incredible house on the coast, filled with an amazing art collection. Then one day there was a hurricane. No more house… and no more amazing art collection.”
oh hey great: Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination
My hero, Dahlia Lithwick, breaks down the Virginia ultrasound law in her article Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination on Slate:
Evidently the right of conscience for doctors who oppose abortion are a matter of grave national concern. The ethical and professional…
With all due-respect, I would hardly call this procedure state-mandated rape. It’s no more rape than a colonoscopy (by all accounts unwanted anal penetration). When a pregnancy is at such an early stage that an ultrasound would be performed by inserting something into the vagina, the abortion procedure (suction aspiration or dilation and curettage) would also insert an instrument into the vagina and through the cervix.
Of course, this procedure is not actually mandated by the state. It would only be mandated for those people considering an abortion, an elective procedure.
As someone who considers himself a feminist, I strongly support women’s right to choose about abortions, although I personally consider them to be deeply regrettable, and I sincerely hope to never be the father in such a pregnancy. Perhaps this is not a good law—I certainly haven’t made up my mind—but I’m honestly surprised to see such vehement opposition to it. From my perspective, it seems as though this could be a good way for pregnant women to get fully informed about what it is they are deciding. In the light of the fact that people have actually survived abortion attempts in the past, I think it is only fair to respect a growing fetus enough to at least consider these kinds of measures to make clear the realities of abortion to the potential parents.
This isn’t the sort of thing I usually write on this blog, so please forgive the descent into a bit of seriousness.
Wait, there’s a state that mandates colonoscopies? That has a colonoscopy law? That forces people to be anally penetrated? Really? Tell me about it because I do not want to live there.
If you can tell me where this place is, I’ll concede half your point. Until that time: No.
And why only half? Because a colonoscopy has a medical purpose, which is to detect the presence of colon cancer. There’s no stated medical purpose to a ultrasound before an abortion. So far, no one has stated one reason for this vaginal ultrasound before an abortion.
As for making sure pregnant women are fully informed before they get an abortion: What? Are you saying women need pictures to teach their ladybrains important life lessons? That they can’t grasp the complexity and magnitude of a decision without an image? Because I’m pretty sure most people who opt to make the difficult, unfortunate decision to have an abortion know exactly what the realities of abortion are, to the extent that someone can know something before they experience it.
I mean, really: What do you imagine it means to be fully informed. What do you imagine an ultrasound - and a forced one, at that - will teach someone who has already made a difficult decision? What? Please tell me.
Also, did you read the article? Say, this part?
viewing an ultrasound is not an indication that a woman will cancel her scheduled procedure, regardless of what emotional response the sonogram elicits.” Weitz summarized her findings in 2010 when she said that “women do not have abortions because they believe the fetus is not a human or because they don’t know the truth.”
All I see here is humiliation and a lack of control over a woman’s body. Forced penetration is rape. And this is forced vaginal penetration by an ultrasound wand, especially for women who don’t want the ultrasound. Sure, someone could say: Well then don’t have the abortion if you don’t want to be penetrated with the ultrasound wand.
And isn’t that convenient.
My hero, Dahlia Lithwick, breaks down the Virginia ultrasound law in her article Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination on Slate:
Evidently the right of conscience for doctors who oppose abortion are a matter of grave national concern. The ethical and professional obligations of physicians who would merely like to perform their jobs without physically violating their own patients are, however, immaterial. Don’t even bother asking whether this law would have passed had it involved physically penetrating a man instead of a woman without consent. Next month the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argument about the obscene government overreach that is the individual mandate in President Obama’s health care law. Yet physical intrusion by government into the vagina of a pregnant woman is so urgently needed that the woman herself should be forced to pay for the privilege.
Sugar is from Portland? Of course.
I was there last night, at Sugar’s coming out party.
She - Sugar, Cheryl Strayed - talked about why she chose to let Sugar be the way Sugar is. You know. Nice. Caring. Compassionate. Loving. Earnest. She said she felt so uncool, compared to the hip writers in San Francisco, but that’s the way she is, and the way she was going to write. She wanted to create a space where people could feel some compassion because, as she came to discover, the thing about so many people being snarky and mean and too cool, on the internet or anywhere: They’re usually struggling with something. Angry. In pain. Facing a problem they think they alone suffer from.
Sugar and her whole community have created a space that’s basically free from the snark and the too-coolness. Online. Think about how amazing that is. Let alone is it amazing to create something, and to sustain it, they’ve created something good and kind and compassionate. On the internet.
I know. This is super uncool of me to write and to post. But I’m okay with that. You can laugh at me and roll your eyes and say “she’s in Berkeley” or “Christ, what an asshole” or whatever. That’s fine. But listening to someone who works so hard to do something she loves, listening to someone who does something she’s passionate about and talented in, listening to someone who takes the vast amount the love and pain other people send her every day and not only carries that burden, but transforms it into something that can help other people: My god. It confirmed to me that sitting around being an asshole on the internet is just another way of avoiding all the scary, painful shit I don’t want to deal with.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
