Birthdays, turkey day, and elections

There he is—Ford Hudgeons, newly twelve years old, in the TCU shirt I sent him. Ford is in the middle of my grandchildren, neither the oldest nor the youngest. But he is distinguished by being the absolute best TCU fan in the bunch. For some time, his ambition was to play soccer for TCU, but he has played so many sports—including on the Austin all-city baseball team—that I don’t know what sport he’ll choose for college. But I sure am encouraging those TCU leanings. We have occasional happy weekends when his mom brings him to Fort Worth for a TCU game of one kind of another. His dad and brother stay behind and do dumb things like go off in desert country and shoot at targets.

It’s getting close to Thanksgiving. I was leafing through the November Bon Appetit today and was struck by the editor’s story of the year his mom introduced a new stuffing. She was severely chastised and threatened not to do that again. Actually, I don’t care a lot about stuffing. I grew up on “northern” white bread stuffing and like it with some gravy. But I’ve fallen into a family of southern girls who make cornbread stuffing, and I’m not crazy about the texture. The magazine had a recipe for stuffing with apricots and mushrooms—now I could go for that. We never “stuff” the bird anymore—it’s a side dish, just like mashed potatoes, green bean casserole.

One of my southern girls also changes the traditional green bean casserole recipe—heresy! Her version is good, but I long for the plain old green beans, mushroom soup, and French’s fried onion rings. In his opening essay, the editor suggested that Thanksgiving is 90% about cooking and 10% about eating. I think that’s true. I’m just never the one in charge of the kitchen anymore—a benefit/problem of old age. I remember when I was the head cook.

One thing I wondered as I read the magazine: why is everything charred these days? I don’t like a burnt taste. They had recipes for chicken soup with charred cabbage—okay I could happily eat chicken soup with cabbage, but the charred doesn’t appeal. Or shaved carrots with charred garlic? I read that as burnt garlic. Even my grandkids used to accuse me of burning things—and now people do it on purpose?

And then there’s politics, more so these days as the election draws closer. I am distressed by the vitriolic posts on Facebook, and I long to have a reasonable discussion with someone. Instead, I am told I’m an idiot for my opinions and even questions I raise. I have had several messages that call President Obama a POS and one that declares he and Hillary collaborated to murder Judge Scalia in a plot to put a Democrat on the Supreme Court. Really? I’d love to see the evidence. I’d like to ask someone why they’ll vote for Cruz and why they accept trump’s dismissal of the Khashoggi torture/murder and his hyper-tweets that place Middle Eastern terrorists in the midst of the immigrant caravan. My favorite meme of the day: Middle Eastern terrorists who want to slip into the country always fly into Honduras and walk the rest of the way.

What has happened to civility and common sense? I was delighted that the Dallas Morning News endorse Beto O’Rourke for his efforts to bring unity to the country. Remember the words of Lincoln: A house divided against itself cannot stand.

You Too?

This past weekend a respected figure on the Texas literary scene was accused by a thirty-something-year-old woman of having harassed her when she was fourteen, seventeen years ago. This is a man who is noted not only as a writer and poet but also as an editor and publisher. Over the years he has helped many new and seasoned writers. (No, I do not know him personally—only by reputation.) He is a married man with children. Apparently when accused of harassment he wrote a letter of apology (all before the Me, Too) movement.

All this came out when the accuser went public recently, causing him to state that his relationship to her, as a teacher, was strictly platonic. He also resigned from the state’s most prestigious association of authors to save embarrassment—and I suppose to save the association from a painful choice. As far as I know, no one has ever been booted out (yes, I am a member). Since then he has been censured and punished by other organizations. His once-flourishing career is in shreds.

All this sickened and saddened me, and led my thoughts to the Me, Too movement again. I am quite frankly uncertain about it. It’s long past time to out such men as Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Eric Schneiderman, and others for whom sexually predatory acts are an ongoing way of life. They are completely selfish, self-centered men who delight in domination. Probably Bill Cosby fits in that group, though it saddens me, and maybe our sitting president.

But the lives of a lot of less well-known men have been destroyed, often based on accusations that are decades old. And that’s where it gets dicey for me. This woman has been harboring all her insecurities for seventeen years, insecurities born in a fourteen-year-old’s mind (if you’ve raised a teen-ager, you’ll understand the peril there) and no doubt nurtured and encouraged to grow over those years. What it sounds like to me is that her teacher was fascinated by her and saw talent; in trying to encourage her he overstepped the bounds not only of the teacher-student relationship but of general propriety. But I sincerely doubt his actions were prurient or even lustful. Misguided, yes, by all means.

Someone wrote yesterday in response to my blog on calling the police. She was read about a police officer who pulled a gun on a man he thought was stealing Necco wafers (whatever they are). The writer asked if a bit of candy is worth taking a life over. My question today is where we draw the line between sexually predatory behavior and sexual harassment severe enough to ruin a man. When does it become a crime instead of an annoyance? Many women handle wandering hands and other annoyances tactfully and quietly, without public attention and, as far as I know, without great damage to the psyches.

The problem seems to be one of degree, and we need a definition of sexual harassment, a checklist if you will. Even with such a list, I am not convinced of the validity of all these “recovered memories.” Time can distort. And there’s the bandwagon effect—once a man is accused, other women come out of the woodwork to join in the accusations.

Maybe I’m an anomaly. I once described to a younger friend a couple of incidents and relationships that made me uncomfortable, and she said, “You’ve been harassed, and you just don’t know it.” Well, okay, if I don’t know it, it didn’t damage me that much, and I went on with my life without making a mountain out of a molehill. The classic example to me of women who exaggerated small, meaningless gestures into a brouhaha were those who were incensed because former President George H. W. Bush patted them on the behind. I’m quite sure he wasn’t copping a feel—he thought of it as a friendly, almost affectionate gesture. Yes, it’s a hangover from an era well put behind us. But for Lord’s sake, he’s an old man in a wheelchair who has served his country well. Cut him some slack. I am a bit weary of women on their high horse, though as I try to emphasize I support genuine victims 150%. Where do we draw the line between abuse and foolishness?

It’s another conundrum.

Have you called 911 lately?

            In recent years, we've seen an alarming number of fatal shootings of young, unarmed men—almost always black men and too often by law enforcement officers. I’ve thought for a long time that if I were the mother of a young black man, I’d live in terror every time he left the house.

But now, just in the last few months, we’re seeing the acceleration of a different kind of racial discrimination. Police are being called to check out African Americans going about daily life. Police have been called by a Yale student because another student, who happened to be black, was sleeping in the common room of their dorm; they’ve been called to check on men in Starbucks, women playing golf, and families having a picnic in the park. And, now famously, they were called when some Airbnb guests were checking out. The latter instance provides a strange twist: the woman who called the police did so because the Airbnb ladies did not wave. The moral of that is that if you are indeed robbing a house, all you have to do is wave and you’ll be fine.

I am a child of the South Side of Chicago. Back in the day, Chicago did not have the epidemic of gun violence it’s experiencing today, but I grew up with fear, no doubt about it. We lived in a pleasant and integrated neighborhood of older homes, but it was ringed by poorer, crime-ridden neighborhoods, and that crime leaked into our neighborhood in the guise of muggings, purse snatchings, and the like. A would-be mugger snatched my aunt’s Bible from her two doors from our house; she always said she hoped he read it carefully. Of course, he thought he was getting her purse. I was not allowed to go to her house after dark without someone watching me, and my uncle always carefully walked me home. I’m not proud at all to say that there was a racial element to my fear; today my intellectual side fights that intently, but my instinctive side still feels the fear.

It reminds me of my father who served with the Canadian army in Europe in WWI. When jet planes first began to fly over our home (in the flight pattern for Chicago’s Midway Airport), Dad would instinctively duck and head for the garage. The whine of the engines sounded too much like incoming enemy fire to him. Sometimes, it’s hard for our knowledge to silence our instinct for survival.

Today I again live in a comfortable neighborhood of older homes, a neighborhood prey to petty crimes, mostly auto break-ins and auto thefts. We have an active, even pro-active neighborhood association, and we are constantly urged to call 911 if we spot any suspicious activity or anyone who rouses the hackles on the back of our neck. That advice is counter to what I feel when I hear of police being called to a family picnic in the park.

Common sense might be the answer, because I certainly don’t think the college student at Yale or the authorities at the golf course (which is now struggling) showed common sense. But my common sense may trigger your instinct for survival. Who’s to know?

It’s a conundrum.