June 5, 1972

United States armed forces have invaded Cambodia
as Nixon prattles on about peace with honor.
An eighteen year old boy was killed on the
New York Subway this morning.
Thousands of students are marching to
Washington to protest the draft
as illegal and immoral, and
I had a son today.

Nineteen persent of America's high school students
cannot read.
Footage from the 6 o'clock news shows
boys dead in Viet Nam,
because you don't have to read to be drafted,
just be a red-blooded, all-American boy,
young and scared and
I had a son today.

TIME magazine screams "Is God dead?"
as children's blood is spilled on
our nation's streets.
Big Brother is watching us all
and I think I want to run
far, far away.
I won't stop to pack because
I had a son today.

The Bad Motorcycle Boys and How They Grew

Torrington, Connecticut, circa 1974. The Inferno bar was in its heyday, people coming from all over the state to drink cheap beer and jostle against each other as they danced to "Sympathy For the Devil". We crowded the dance floor - wild, sweaty, frenetic; keeping time to the drum's relentless tatoo. Sex and drugs melded with music and alcohol to make The Inferno a dark question of violence barely suppressed and nirvana just a tequila away.
Outside, leaning against the building, watching the paralell line of their motorcycles parked at the curb, were the toughest of the tough, coolest of the cool, poster boys for alienated and disenfranchised young male adulthood - the bad motorcycle boys. Girls loved them, mothers feared them, and the other guys - well, the other guys just stayed out of their way. This was where you'd find Joey, who'd inherited Mick Jagger's looks but none of his savoir faire. Little Tony would be leaning there, assuring all that "I ain't little where it counts, heh, heh." Next to him stood his pal John who could crush a beer can with one hand (and, I suspect, eat it). Mike usually lounged at the end of the line-up. We called him St Michael of the Motorcycles. Impenetrable dark eyes, auburn hair down to his waist, bearded and booted, he looked as if he may have just stepped out from Dante's Inferno instead of the Torrington location. These were the main players, but various and sundry bikers would come and go throughout the night.
I would go to the bar after my 3 - 11 pm shift at the woolen mill. Those were the days before I had grown into my looks and the infamous line outside the door never gave me a second glance. No one would have been more surprised than I to find that I would, in the future, have a long and not always happy relationship with one of them. But that's another story.
I went there to dance. Afterwards, I would go home and dream of roaring motorcycles and licking flames of fire.
The Inferno attracted its crowds of customers in a way that was as inexplicable as it was successful. In that last, blissfully ignorant era before AIDS, one would have been hard-pressed to find out who was going with whom, who was cheating, who was just looking. I recall overhearing a conversation between two men, one of them insisting, "But it's my week to go out with Lisa!" Dialogues and disagreements would ensue between both the frantically searching and the wearily blase. That's the kind of place it was.
One hot, muggy, Friday night, indistinguishable from any other hot, muggy, Friday night, a stranger entered the bar. Alone, and slightly aloof, he stuck out. Aloofness was only allowed if you were one of the motorcycle boys. He ordered a draft beer and idly watched the couple necking in the corner, several fights being broken up, a woman vomiting into her shoe, and a knife being confiscated from a man who was preparing to hurl it at the band. He nursed his beer. When a woman picked up his elbow, mistaking it for her drink, the young man decided it was time to leave. The band struck up a rousing rendition of "Sympathy For the Devil" as he abandoned his stool.
As he walked down the sidewalk toward his car, through the gauntlet of bad motorcycle boys, one of them stuck out a foot and tripped him. The man turned around, looked at the small knot of us huddled in the doorway, at the scattered patrons who'd drifted out onto the sidewalk, and especially at the motorcycle boys. In a soft, clear voice, he asked, "Why don't you all grow up?"
We were surprisingly stunned, as if the concept had never before occurred to us. The young man walked away from an uneasy silence. We returned to the bar to try to forget what he'd suggested; to drown our fears in the dim lighting, the dance and another beer. Several boys roared off on their bikes, perhaps in a futile attempt to outrun the ageing process.
Most of us, in spite of our aversion to it, did grow up, although not that night. I am a freelance writer and a nurse in an obstetrics unit. Mike had 3 children and 2 divorces, none of them with me. Little Tony is working on his college degree in prison. John took over the family business. Joey had a heart attack, married, and settled down to his factory job, not necessarily in that order.
And the young man who walked away? I married him. After all, who better to marry than a grown-up?We have a happy marriage and a well-ordered life with all the adult responsibilities that jobs, mortgages, and raising children entail.
But sometimes, when my husband is not home, I think of those old days and the bad motorcycle boys. I play "Sympathy For the Devil". I dance.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

I want to talk about motels. The thing about motels is that you have to suspend your analytical nature along with your natural squeamishness about that wonderful, invisible-to-the-naked-eye world of germs and bacteria. You really can't think too hard about who else has used the room, what they've done there, and what bodily fluids they've left behind. But as long as a room looks clean, I'm OK with it. I even managed to cope when I found a black hair in the bathtub (our hair is red or gray, or sometimes, red and gray) of one motel, and another where I had to pick a hunk of unidentifiable food off the front of the microwave. It wasn't easy, but I took deep breaths and got by it.
And this is another thing about motels and hotels that I have always wondered about: Why do they fold the toilet paper into that little point? Sure, it's nice, but wouldn't one feel more reassured about cleanliness if one knew that the maid's hands weren't all over the toilet paper? I'm just saying.....
Anyway, we just got back from Lenox, MA, having gone up there to see the BSO (that's Boston Symphony Orchestra for the culturally deprived), at Tanglewood. As usual, I'd made reservations online at a place we'd stayed at previously and liked. Or so I thought. However, a menopausal mind is a forgetful mind. Sometimes, it is a downright absent mind. Because when we arrived in Lenox, we whizzed right past the motel we'd stayed at before and arrived at The Knight's Inn. I suspected right away that no self-respecting knight had ever stayed there. I realised that I had gotten the motel names mixed up. I had meant to make reservations at the Yankee Inn, and I'm sure it is apparent to all how Yankee and Knights could be mixed up.
Now I love curry (No, this isn't a flight of ideas, I'm going somewhere with this), but I love curry in the context of eating it in a nicely appointed Indian restaurant. To smell curry when one walks into a motel registration office is disconcerting, to say the least. As I waited for the clerk (who also smelled of curry), I noticed the Fruit Loops and corn flakes sitting in partially open bins in the adjacent "Continental Breakfast" nook, and idly wondered how curry-flavor enhanced Fruit Loops might taste. I decided not to find out. I may eat a grape that has fallen briefly onto my kitchen floor. I may eat an unidentified tablet off the windowsill.* But one has to draw the line somewhere.
Things didn't improve when we hit the room.It was a little too small. It was a little too shabby. It was a little too orange. It was a little too not too clean. On the inside of the bathroom door were posted instuctions on how to lock it. However, the bathroom door had no handle on the inside, the management missing the point that if you feel the need to post instructions on how to work the door handle, there should, really, be a door handle. Three lightbulbs were burnt out and there were only four total. We had no view of the pool. Because there was no pool.
I looked longingly down the street at the pool flanking the Yankee Motel. I looked at my curry-scented room. I looked at the Yankee Motel. I looked at my curry-scented room. Throwing monetary caution to the wind, I left Curryland and booked a room at the Yankee. A woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do.

* That is another story that will be told, eventually, in The Evil Twins Blog.

Quote of the week

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be President." -- Kurt Vonnegut

How to be a Charge Nurse

I wrote this while working at a hospital in Florida where the charge nurse had a lot more responsibility. But a lot of it is still pertinent, so here it is.

#1. Make out patient assignments - Do not spend a lot of time on this.No matter what you do, there will always be a better way to do it and someone will be sure to tell you what that way is.
#2. Keep staff awake - Remember, no TV. No videos. No cards. No games. No magazines. That leaves telling embarrassing stories about your sex lives.
#3. Assess staffing needs and cancel someone if neccessary - Don't spend a lot of time on this either. No matter what you do, you'll have called: A) too early B) too late C) the wrong person.
#4. Delegate unit duties as neccessary and appropriate - Get real - no one listens to the charge nurse.
#5. Be a link between the unit manager and the rest of the staff - Staff members should be able to come to you with work-related problems that you can then pass on to the unit manager at which point she A) won't believe you. B) decide that you are the root cause of the problem.
#6. Keep abreast of all unit activities - The charge nurse is always the last to know.
#7. Grow big shoulders and a thick skin - The charge nurse's main duty is to be there to blame when something goes wrong.
#8. If something should go wrong, assess what caused the problem and
how it can be prevented in the future - ie, blame it on A) the night shift. B) the day shift.
#9. Maintain open communication with other hospital employees - This is a good concept, but in reality, when you, for instance, speak to another unit st 9PM and say, "Call us if you need any help", by 9AM, you will be reported as saying "We'll work in hell before we help you." Go figure.
#10. Report incidents, when neccessary, to the unit manager - Let's see, in what country did they say "Kill the messenger"?
#11. On second thought, do not speak to anyone about anything - If you give your fellow workers advice or directions, you're being mean or bossy. If you look the other way when they, for example, leave their labor patient to go shopping, you're ineffective. If you work faster to help everyone when it's busy, you lose your cool under pressure. If you disagree with someone, you have a personality problem. If you write someone up, you're picking on her. If you meet with the unit manager to discuss your shift, you're brown-nosing. If you don't meet with the unit manager, you're not sticking up for your shift. If everyone loves you, you're too soft. And remember, at the end of the day, it's all your fault.

Manifesto

I don't believe in junk mail
low fat
or talk radio.
I don't believe in democracy.
I don't believe in grudges
but I applaud burning bridges.
I don't believe in busing
or forced integration
but I believe in racial harmony.
I don't believe in affirmative action,
an insult to people of color,
and I think the best way to get a job
is through perseverence and education.
I don't believe in networking
bureaucracy
catholicism
jurisdiction
mass production
stipulations
institutions
corporations
sly and covert operations.
I don't believe in the psychic hot line.
I don't believe in the welfare system.
I don't believe in trial by jury.
In these days of exploding populations,
I don't believe it's anyone's right to have as many children as they can bear.
I don't believe in anti-choice.
I don't believe in public schools.
I don't believe in smoke-free anything.
I don't believe country music
should have been allowed to escape from Nashville.
I don't believe in personal violence
but I believe in violent change and violent art.
I don't believe in television or recreational vehicles
or Oprah Winfrey and I believe
that both military intelligence and rap music
are contradictions in terms.
I don't believe in drugs but I do believe in
drug addicts.
I don't believe in marriage and have my doubts about monogamy.
I don't believe in lying, I don't believe in blaming your childhood,
I don't believe in saying "I can't" because I've found that
I can.
I don't believe in Florida or littering,
although littering in Florida isn't quite so bad.
I don't believe we were all created equal
but that doesn't stop me from wishing we were.
I don't believe in Black rage, White supremacy,
or Indian casinos.
I believe in William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Allen Ginsberg
and life imitating art.
I believe in rocking the boat
and upsetting the apple cart.
I believe in truth, kindness, books, and
solitude.
I believe in freedom of the press, freedom of speech
and freedom of movement.
I believe our only salvation lies in rock and roll
and a complete change in the way
we view the world.
I believe
in going home.

Guilty Thoughts

I was raised Catholic and I learned early on that guilt is not such a bad thing. Guilt is good. Guilt is natural. Guilt builds character. This view of guilt was reinforced when I became a wife and mother. It is a proven fact that all mothers feel guilty about a huge variety of things. In fact, to encounter the sources of most of my guilty feelings, I don't even have to leave the house. I feel guilty about spending time at work and not with my family, I feel guilty about spending time with my family and taking a day off from work, I feel guilty about housework, about dialing 411 and not looking up the number, about sleeping, not sleeping, throwing that water bottle into the trash instead of recycling, about calling a certain pizza chain known to contribute to the anti-choice movement instead of cooking a healthy, politically correct pizza at home. On a good day, I can get a lot of character built before I even have my second cup of coffee. I feel guilty about having that second cup of coffee.
Now, I don't think I've cornered the market on guilt and its accompanying angst by any means. We have Woody Allen for that. However, I've learned that the joy of motherhood is usually and rather quickly tempered by a load of guilt. Sometimes the guilt even arrives before the baby, as in "Could that second strawberry margarita I drank the night he was conceived cause him to crave alcohol later in life"? But most often, guilt arrives and grows along with one's child.
Furthermore, mother-guilt can cover a multitude of sins. If we slap junior's hands for playing with the stove, are we creating a future axe murderer? Are we thwarting the creative desires of a sensitive child who was destined to become a master chef? Yes, rationally we know that we're probably only saving little fingers from being burnt. But one always wonders - did Jeffrey Dahmer's mother deny him access to the kitchen?
And what about buying things for our children? We want our children to grow up to be content individuals. We want them to understand that richness is not what we have but what we are. However, if everyone else in the third grade has a Hannah Montana backpack and your daughter is telling you that her entire future happiness depends upon the purchase of this item, how many of you could say no?
Another interesting characteristic of mother-guilt is its longevity. My son, Scott, is 35 years old. I remember as if it were yesterday, a winter morning when he was two. I was getting ready for work. He was whining, and had been all morning.Toddling to the foot of the stairs, he began to cry and I snapped "Oh, be quiet Scott!" A few minutes later, I picked him up and discovered he had a fever and a slight cough. By the next day, he was in the hospital with croup. The memory of that little red bunny-suited figure at the bottom of the stairs is burned into my psyche. My son swears he doesn't remember it, but I do. Oh, I do.
I'm not alone in this. Most mothers seem to have these moments, even my own mother. My brother Peter was on the Deans List in college, was president of a company, was, and is, the type of son a mother can be proud of, the type of son that should cause a mother to pat herself on the back and say "Well, I did a good job with this one." Our mother looked at it a little differently though. Like a lot of kids, Peter went through a period in the eighth grade of talking back to his teachers, throwing spitballs and generally being an adolescent boy. After receiving another phone call from his teacher, our mother looked at him and declaimed, "Peter, you are the plague of my life!" Our mother could never tell this story without getting tears in her eyes. Peter insists he doesn't remember it, but that didn't matter to our mother. She felt that her son became a successful, happy adult in spite of that flaw in her mothering.
So, it seems, we'll always be carrying that emotional baggage. But I submit to you, that this maybe makes us better parents, and if not, at least we can experience the pleasure of passing guilt on to our children. A mother's legacy, if you will.