Noise Reduction
quiet reflections on life in a loud worldThis and That
So, Tuesday night I was driving to a Christmas party, listening to public radio when I heard a story about California Senate hearings on human trafficking and slavery. The goal of the hearings was two-fold (at least): first, to discover the extent to which people are being trafficked into the state and second, to discover the extent to which the state might be able to put the brakes on trafficking and slavery by requiring businesses (including those who import goods, which is a great many in this state) to verify that none of its suppliers is engaged in either. It was an interesting story in a lot of ways, and I was moved when I heard the testimony of a woman who’d been brought to LA to work for a family, paid nothing, and kept inside their house for six months – without any contact with the outside world. Finally she asked if she could attend a church service, and when she got permission, she walked out of their house and never returned. Another woman was similarly brought from Sri Lanka and only got out when a neighbor asked her enough to understand the situation then called the state and had the family investigated.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning, when our cleaner, call her Marta, came. While the Hobbit was babbling away and sweeping alongside Marta’s partner, call him Adolfo, Marta and I got to talking about her new apartment, about Thanksgiving, about this and that. When we got to talking about Christmas, Marta mentioned that Adolfo was probably heading home for Christmas and that she was sad about it. “Where are you guys from?” I asked her. “He’s from Honduras,” she said, “and I’m from El Salvador.” Having recently seen a very beautiful, very sad movie about the war in El Salvador (Voces Inocentes), I asked, “So when did you come here?”
“Thirty-five years ago,” she said.
“Before the war?”
“Yes,” she said. And then she told me she’d come when she was fourteen. A Latino family had come to her village and made an arrangement with her father to take Marta to the U.S. The rest of her family stayed behind and lived through the war. Meanwhile, Marta worked for this family for a year, getting paid $100 a month and, like the witness at the senate hearings, being totally prohibited from any outside contact. Finally, Marta managed to make a friend, who was doing similar work for $800 a month. When Marta confronted the family, they said that if she made a fuss they would report her. She said fine, she’d report them. A compromise was struck when the family said Marta needed to write her father asking him to relieve them of responsibility for her. “So, I wrote him,” Marta told me. And her father wrote back, and Marta was free.
“Wow,” I said. And all I could think was: You were free and you were fifteen. And alone. In San Francisco. With a vicious war going on back home, your mother and siblings hiding under the table to avoid gunshots.
*
I also lived in San Francisco when I was fifteen, and it was around that time that I started to become aware of the wars raging in Central America. Partly I was made aware of them because a couple of my older siblings were working in Latin America at the time. Partly my awareness was a result of being a student in fairly liberal Catholic schools during a time when Liberation Theology was a powerful force in Latin America. And partly it was because my family’s house cleaner at the time had fled the war in Guatemala and my mom used to tell me stories that our cleaner had told her.
In fact, the wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua played a formative role in my personal politics and views on U.S. foreign policy. So much so that the novel I abandoned a while back was set in a military dictatorship that was fictional but drew much from these three countries and their wars. The Iran-Contra scandal, the School of the Americas, the atrocities committed by soldiers and paramilitaries trained by the U.S. – all of these, especially against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, shaped my thinking and made me highly critical and skeptical of my country’s role in the world. Ashamed even.
Through study, experience, life, my views have changed somewhat over the years. Yet I was reminded of the U.S. role in the Central American wars recently as I read through the coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and chewed on all the talk of U.S. soldiers training military, police and security forces. The Obama administration did an interesting thing with that several-month, relatively public consideration of Afghan policy, and I want to believe that the decision to send 30,000 more troops is a wise one. I want to believe that Obama is trying to do the sort of thing that is honored with the Nobel Peace Prize – to create conditions in which democracy and peace can thrive – and, in contrast with the situation in Central America in the 60’s – 90’s, in which the threats to U.S. security were remote at best, and U.S. involvement was ideological and economic, there do seem to be forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are threats to U.S. security. The U.S. was attacked in 2001 and camps that train people to commit acts of terror abroad are still active. Yet, I still worry. I worry about the corrosive power of the sort of corruption that is the norm in Afghanistan. I worry about the profitability of war. I worry about the dangers of independent players (with their own agendas) becoming involved in civil wars. I am not convinced by the arguments of people who say we should get out immediately. And, as noted, I want to believe that Obama is trying to do the right thing. I’ve even heard good things about McChrystal by people who’ve worked with him.
Still, I worry.
*
On a final, separate note: I’m in my thirty-fifth week of my second pregnancy now. The Hobbit was born at thirty-five and a half weeks. Newbaby could arrive any time now, and I got a text message from my sister-in-law when I was at the playground with the Hobbit tonight, asking if I’m ready. The answer is…No. No, I don’t think I’m ready. In fact, I don’t think I’m any more ready than the Hobbit, who is only three and has a very limited ability to imagine the future. Our world is going to be turned upside down soon and I don’t even know how one can be ready for that. Sure, I can have some tiny diapers on hand, and some soft, clean clothes and blankets. And I can be ready for an earthquake with a year’s worth of canned food and bottled water. But I’ve never had two children before. And I haven’t been awakened in the middle of the night to feed a tiny creature in over two years, not to mention awakened multiple times.
There’s a baby in my belly who soon will be out. It will happen, I know that. And I’ll respond as best I can. But no, I’m not ready.
A Glimpse Of The Future?
So, there there we were, the Hobbit and I, reading a story before lights out. It was a picture book, called Journey Around San Francisco (by Martha Day Zschock), filled with pictures of landmarks and historical places in San Francisco. When we got to a picture of Alcatraz, the Hobbit noticed a ferry in the background. (The Hobbit is pretty into ferries.)
“A ferry!” he said.
“That’s right,” said I. “Alcatraz is an island, so you need to take a boat there.” I paused, then added, “Maybe one day soon, we can go there. In fact, maybe you and I and newbaby can go there.”
He said nothing.
“Does that sound like a good idea? You and me and newbaby?”
“Yes,” he said. “And newbaby’s momma.”
“But I’m newbaby’s momma,” I said. “I’m your momma AND newbaby’s momma.”
“No,” said he. “You’re MY momma.”
Hmmmm.
Greetings From A Writing Retreat
Greetings from Marin County, USA. I’m here at a Zen Buddhist retreat center, with the local chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. I’ve retreated from home and hearth and am sitting in a Japanese-style room looking out at lush greenery, trying to moderate my coffee intake and discern just what is here for me. Children’s writing is a new world for me; one I entered last fall with enthusiasm and hope not unlike that I brought to adult literary fiction nearly a decade ago. Last October, I wrote a story and sent it out. It was rejected. In April, I sent another story out and it, too, was rejected. Now I’m here, with a slim but very real file of rejections, a laptop, a sketch pad, music, greenery, comfortable clothes, fellow writers and only the faintest clue as to what I want to accomplish over the next couple of days. Enthusiasm and hope are playing hide and go seek and I’m leaning against a tree extending my count beyond fifty, beyond one hundred. Truth is, I don’t feel like seeking them, and in this I feel like a little girl playing with kids much bigger, faster and craftier than she is. Even if I manage to find them, they’ll just get away again. No?
Yet, isn’t that what they say makes one a writer? Persevering despite the rejections, the tedium, the wearing struggle to maintain a firm and authoritative grip on enthusiasm and hope? It’s certainly something I’ve heard often enough.
So, here I go.
It’s 8:30 And I Don’t Know What To Do
Ever finish a novel and feel sad? Last night I finished Youngblood Hawke, by Herman Wouk and tonight I feel like I’ve been stood up for a date. It’s a huge book and I was into it all the way. Every night when the Hobbit went to bed, I tip-toed down the hall to get the book and dove right in. The husband’s been on the road for two weeks now and this book has kept me company all that time. The entire weekend past I was torn between wanting to escape with it and dreading the final act – that last full stop and those blank filler pages at the back. Last night I got there, and tonight, well, I suppose the best thing I can say for myself is that I’m posting an entry on my blog for the first time since May.
I do have other excuses (for not posting, that is). Just days before I posted that last entry I’d found out I was pregnant, and just days after that the worst weeks of the pregnancy began. That’s right, woe was me. There began fourteen weeks of mental fog, constant nausea, exhaustion and blues that some days were as dark and deep (and not nearly as pretty) as a midnight sky.
But, I’m through all that now. I have more energy and more interest in life, less need to eat as often as I breathe and generally more pep in my step. I can play with Hobbit1 and enjoy the new movements of Hobbit2, or newbaby as we like to call it around here. I can read a novel without falling asleep. And I can post a little of this and that on my blog. Here’s to that.
Single-Payer Nonsense
Often, people ask me if I miss England. “Not really,” I usually say, and then, after a second’s thought, I add, “Actually, that’s not true. I miss my friends, our flat, the public transportation, and the health care system.”
“The health care system?” most people ask, laughing. “Are you joking?”
“Not at all,” I reply. “In fact, after my friends it is the thing I miss the most.”
What I don’t say, but what is equally true, is that some weeks, I miss the health care system even more than I miss my friends. (Forgive me, friends.) Why, you ask? Well, take this week for example. Take Wednesday even, when just a few hours after suffering through an opinion piece in our local paper by Patrick Buchanan that, with depressingly typical rhetoric, accused Obama of trying to create a health system comprised of “bureaucrats deciding what care each of us shall receive, when we may receive it and whether we even ought to have it” (as if that isn’t what we currently have), I tried to make an appointment with a new doctor and was refused, because I didn’t have all of my insurance details at hand (we have new insurance and the husband, who had the details, was unavailable at the moment I was trying to make the appointment).
And then, as if that wasn’t enough to get me going, I read that congress did not invite even one advocate for a so-called single payer system (i.e., what they have in England) to testify at congressional hearings on health care reform. Not one. Zero. And that several of those that did try to attend were arrested.
Why? Why, why, why? Why are so many Americans – including the friends who laugh when I say I miss the system – so skeptical if not totally dismissive of a single-payer system? (Just consider the tone of this WSJ report on the congressional hearings.) Surely it is related to a general suspicion of all things government, and probably it has something to do with the way we value individual freedom, but let’s face it, we’re talking about health care, and when it comes to that, the freedom we can enjoy is the freedom to be healthy or unhealthy. When we get sick though (and as we try to avoid getting sick) we need health services, and in my experience, the National Health Service delivered health care far more effectively than what we’ve got here. And with plenty of choice, much less hassle from bureaucrats, good quality and good results. (And they say the national systems in France and Germany are even better.)
What was good? Well, how about how absolutely, beautifully simple it was to access it? With our Visas, we got National Health Service (NHS) numbers. With our NHS numbers, we had a choice of neighborhood practices based on our post code. All we had to do was check them out, choose one, fill out a couple of forms and that was that, we were patients, with access to doctors, nurses, prenatal care, postnatal care, lactation consultants, baby clinics, smoking cessation classes, geriatric clinics, STD clinics, travel clinics and so on. Were there more forms to complete than in U.S. practices? Not by a long shot. There were, literally, two or three. Were there more bureaucrats? Hah, now that is funny. Was I number without access to doctors? Not at all. Here’s how it worked if I had a health concern: I could either go to the neighborhood practice or I could call, be put on a triage list, and receive a call back from one of the practice doctors, sometimes within minutes but never in my experience in more than an hour. This was the case at any time, including in the middle of the night, as when the Hobbit was only days old and could not be consoled because I’d run out of breast milk – the doctor on call arranged for the husband to pick up some formula at the nearest hospital to get us through the night, then saw us first thing in the morning.
Then there was being pregnant and having a baby in England, which was great, first of all because there was no concern about getting care: we had a National Health number so we had coverage. Too, we had a choice of local hospitals, each of which gave tours so we could see what we would get. It was great because, throughout the pregnancy, I was seen by a team of midwives at the hospital, and if I’d had any complications would have been seen by physicians. Because, when it came time to give birth, I had a choice of a birthing center (low tech) or a labor ward (high tech). Because I had total confidence in the doctors’ care of the Hobbit in his first check ups. Because within three days of delivery, a community nurse came to the flat to see how things were going and give tips on breastfeeding, avoiding jaundice, etc. (This was followed by two more visits.) And because there was no scramble to get a pediatrician – our neighborhood practice was the Hobbit’s neighborhood practice, and from birth, he and I were welcome to attend weekly clinics where he could be weighed and I could receive new-mom support.
Was it perfect? No. The facilities were not all gleaming; but they had all the necessary equipment and the doctors and nurses were every bit as professional as any I’ve had in the U.S. Also, though we did go outside the system, we did so only for optional treatment – I, for insomnia treatment and the husband for sports injuries when he didn’t want to wait for NHS physical therapy.
Yes, there were budget shortfalls. Yes, there were problems. But, in general, the U.K. system felt healthier in every sense. Take this experience we had with the Hobbit, for example. When he was three months old, we were in the U.S. on vacation and he got sick with a chesty cough and fever. We took him to my parents’ primary care doctor and of course, the first thing we were asked was the very stress-producing, in no-way-related-to-his health question of how we were going to pay. Then, when the doctor saw him, he ordered x-rays and a battery of blood tests. He also told us that the Hobbit’s umbilical hernia was dangerously large and had to be looked at by a pediatric surgeon. In other words, he totally freaked us out and we spent several days chasing down a specialist over New Years only to be told exactly what we’d been told by our GP in England: that all was fine and there was nothing to be done other than monitor it. All told, the U.S. treatment, including the X-rays and tests (which revealed nothing) and the surgical consult cost thousands of dollars and a great deal of agitation and anxiety. In England? Just the cost of one regular health check with the practice doctor. In other words a few hundred dollars, with a much more relaxed baby, mom and dad.
According to the latest reports, President Obama said he’d go with single-payer if he were starting from scratch. I suppose that’s his way of admitting that they learned from the Clinton experience and they’d rather win some victory than totally lose, and I can’t say I’m surprised. Allow me to be disappointed though, will you? Because I can’t say that covering everyone with the system we have now sounds like a great idea. Not that I want the numbers of uninsured to continue as they are. It’s horrendous. But the thought of living the rest of my life in a place where I can’t make an appointment – just make an appointment! – with a doctor because I don’t have my insurance card in hand…well, that really bums me out. I suppose, if nothing else, I wish people would speak intelligently about the matter and not just swallow all the rhetoric.
End of rant.
Life Going On
Sometimes, when I want to post but can’t think of anything that moves me enough to make me want to write about it, I come back to “Noise Reduction” and spend some time thinking about what that means to me right then. The title, like any good title, is my anchor, and today, as I reflected away, I found that what I was most aware of was a din inside my head that has, for what seems like weeks now (I wrote “Lost in Space” after I’d already been feeling lost, and spacey, for some time), incapable of concentrating on any one thought for long, feeling any one feeling with strength, writing even one sentence with conviction. For a while I thought it was a symptom of seasonal transition; but Spring is well-settled now and I’m still feeling floaty. Sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with the childlike nature of the way I spend much of my time. My Hobbit – he doesn’t do a lot of analyzing or reflecting. He just experiences life, and life, at least his life, is not very complicated. Joyous, hilarious, interesting, sad, maybe confusing, sure – but not complicated. We go to the Top of the World Park and run around on the empty basketball court in the rain. It’s great. We go to the zoo and say “Hi Giraffy!” to a lanky, sunbathing giraffe, visit the gorillas, run over to the monkeys then eat hot dogs while watching flamingos walk back and forth along a path for no reason we can figure. We love it. While folding laundry, we make up a song about the Husband’s abundance of socks and sing it loudly, cracking ourselves right up. We sing our chicken soup song as we make our chicken soup then slurp it up three hours later saying yummmm.
Maybe. Maybe it’s that.
And maybe there is another factor: time. For me, just conceiving of a project takes time, and getting traction on a project takes even more time. They take time and concentration. And so do reflection, and idea-exploration, and the process of massaging reflections and reactions in search of kernels of wisdom and insight. It all takes time, and right now, on average, I have about enough quiet time to begin conceiving of projects. And that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, unless I give up sleep which, as a reformed insomniac, I won’t do.
So, along those lines, here’s something that jumped out at me this week. Something I haven’t quite had time enough to explore as I would like. On Thursday, there were three brief news reports in my paper, each about prison. One, was about Lori Berenson, a woman my age who was put in prison in Peru thirteen years ago after a trial before hooded judges. At the time, she was associating with members of the violent revolutionary group MRTA and was charged with being a leader of the group and therefore a traitor. I’ve watched her story through the years, and even read a book about her written by her mom. I always related to Lori in a way, probably because we are the same age, and because around the time she was arrested, I had many friends who were working for justice for poor people in Latin America. The most recent news? She had a baby in prison.
The second story was about a message found in a bottle buried underground in Poland. In Auschwitz to be precise. The message was written on material torn from a cement bag by six prisoners of Auschwitz who, in 1944, were forced to work building a bunker for the German military. The prisoners were sure they were going to die in the camp and wanted to leave something of themselves behind, so they wrote their names and numbers on the material. Several of them survived the camps, a couple are still alive. You can read about them here.
The third brief was about Roxana Saberi, the American-Iranian reporter who was arrested in Tehran in January and has been in prison since. She is a freelance reporter who works for NPR and the BBC among other outlets, and in a one-hour trial held behind closed doors she was charged with spying for the U.S. The report was about her decision to stop a hunger strike because of health reasons.
What was stirred in me by these stories was an awareness of a paradox of prison life, which is that in prison, life simultaneously stops and keeps going. I have a friend who was a political prisoner in Turkey for a decade. She was arrested when she was 18 and released when she was 28. During those ten years, she was all but completely cut off from the outside world and her life as she knew it simply stopped. Her university years, stopped. A career, nonexistent. Yet, within prison, a strange and usually horrible life went on, and that was what I was reminded of by these three stories.
And that’s that. I’d like to have more to say about it, but I can’t quite get my head focused enough to corral my thoughts into coherence. Maybe another day.
In the meantime, I’ll note that Roxana Saberi’s appeal trial is scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, how I hope that it will go in her favor and that soon she will be free to start her life again. What a glorious mother’s day gift that would be for her mom.
In the Morning, With the Hobbit
Yesterday morning, calling to me from bed, the Hobbit shouted, “Ma-ma! I don’t want my cookie!”
Cookie? I thought. What cookie? I went to his room.
“Hi Mama,” he said. “I don’t want my cookie.”
“Okay,” said I, “but why not?”
“It fell into a donut.”
“Is that right.”
“Yeah.”
A few minutes later, while still lying in bed, he said to me, “Mama, I fell.”
“You fell?” said I.
“I fell. I need Obama to pick me up.”
“Obama? Well you’re not alone in that,” I said.
“I need him to pick me up.”
“I’m sure you do,” said I. “Unfortunately you just have me.”
“Ok,” said he.
Thinking of Mom
I woke this morning with a very specific image on the brain: My mom, sitting at the counter in our old kitchen, drinking her coffee quietly while morning activity swirled and buzzed around her. This came to me as, in the background, the Hobbit was shouting from his bed, “MOM! I wake up!” The husband was away, so I couldn’t throw him an elbow and ask him to answer the call. But, with Mom on the brain, I ignored the little man for a bit. After all, I didn’t want to be awake, and I definitely wasn’t ready to switch on my mother persona. No, I was most definitely not ready to be cheerful, creative, patient, encouraging, in charge, not in charge, flexible or on top of things.
“Mah-mah!” the Hobbit shouted. “I can’t hear you!”
Oh hush, I thought, and rolling onto my side, I looked at Mom, realizing that I was seeing her in a new way. To the right, to the left, behind and in front of her were kids – my siblings and me – doing the things that kids do before heading off to school: eating cereal, spilling milk, clanking peanut butter-covered knives into the sink, arguing, complaining, querying Mom about lost items – yet there was Mom, sitting quietly. I’d never noticed her before. I suppose I’d only noticed the activity. But there she was. Right there. Ignoring us all, insofar as she could, for just a moment or two.
My mom had eight kids. Eight kids! Only they were never kids to her. We were “children”, because Mom grew up on a ranch, where kids were baby goats not human offspring. But still, the fact remains: there were eight of us and I tell ya, every day I’m a mother I respect her, feel for her, thank her and, I think, understand her a little bit more. I also, sometimes, feel a little bit lazy. Like this morning, when I was lying there ignoring the Hobbit. Who am I to complain? I asked myself. I have only one. What about all those women with two, three, and so on? What about Mom, for goodness sakes!
There was so much that Mom just got done. Our lives were organized. Our clothes were clean. Our hairs were brushed, our fridge was stocked and every night other than the occasional Sunday pizza night a hot meal was freshly cooked and dished out in a most civilized manner. Mom was – is – the sort of person who just got on with the business of life with a smile, and I must confess that sometimes I’ve found that example more than I can live up to. I mean, not only am I not always smiling, but also, the dishes are not always done and the food is not always cooked with care (if cooked at all – Takeout anyone?). Moreover, the Hobbit’s hair is sometimes a mess and, let’s face it, so is mine. Sigh.
The Hobbit was calling: “Maaaa-mahhhhh! Where are you?!”
“I’m coming!” I shouted back, “I’m coming!” And at last I pushed myself to sitting. Before I stood up though, I sat there on the edge a minute, watching Mom savor her last sip, happy that at least once in a while, she took a little time for herself.
Guantánamo, Guantánamo
Wherefore art thou, Guantánamo?
While the Hobbit learned to speak Spanish this morning, I sat in a cafe reading about the last days of the Guantánamo prison camp. It was an article in the SF Weekly, and actually it was as much about the first days of Guantánamo as the last. The first days, the first months, the first years – when torture was the norm and the Bush Administration was totally out of control. The dissonance between the clink and clatter and thrum of the cafe, and the descriptions of the abuses at Guantánamo was so great, I had to keep setting the paper down in order to keep my mental balance. And each time I did, I thought, Guantánamo, Guantánamo. Why, why, why?
As my mind wandered, I thought of the men who’d been held there. Who are still being held there. Of the people who’ve been guards there, of Abu Ghraib, of the veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq and the suicide rates among them. I thought of the prisons scattered all over this country and all the violence and degradation they contain. And I thought about my little Hobbit. My sweet little creature, who knows nothing of violence and degradation.
I couldn’t help wondering, What will I tell the Hobbit about Guantánamo when he’s older? How will I explain how we let it happen? How I, who have worked with torture victims, listened to their stories and helped them put their stories down on paper; who knows something of the lasting harm that torture does and the utter uselessness of it – how I have done nothing, other than cast a couple of votes, to stop it?
I don’t know, I thought. I really don’t know. And then: Perhaps now is a good time to do something more.
