By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
“Are you OK?” the surgeon asked her, out in the hallway.
What a question. I surveyed the faces in the institutionally furnished waiting room. No one else reacted. Not one focus strayed from the droning television. No sympathetic shrugs. Not a twitchy eyebrow on those feigning sleep. It was odd. Lack of compassion, maybe? Or perhaps they were too busy with their own fears and hopeful distractions. But I heard him. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t — because she was not the patient, because a busy surgeon bothered to ask, because the question was so miserably revealing.
At least he had taken her to the hallway. Not like the other nincompoops.
Earlier, emerging from the mighty O.R. to deign to a visit with the peons, one doctor strutted in, eyeballed the woman seated at the far wall (the one who had studiously avoided contact with the rest of us, securing her privacy in the depths of a large paperback book wedged hard against her abdomen), and he proceeded to hold court from the middle of the room.
He proclaimed, “Mrs. Bassini, you will be pleased to hear your husband is the lucky recipient of a successful hernia repair. He’ll be up and about in a few days, but, of course, you two should not engage in sexual activity for a couple weeks, maybe three.”
The wife’s tightly tidy appearance suggested she had not been inclined to engage in sexual activity with her husband since well before his little eruption; that, or behind closed doors she became a deliciously dangerous pressure cooker of raging corned beef and cabbage drenched in the salty juices of love. Either way, she now kept her eyes straight ahead, painfully avoiding the rest of us — a reluctant audience to the intimate details of her marriage.
“You can see him in recovery in about an hour,” the surgeon concluded on his way out.
“Thank—,” the wife began but didn’t finish as the last bit of green scrubs disappeared past the door jam. Her color rose as she bowed into her book, eyes unmoving.
I squirmed on her behalf. It was the least I could do.
The takes-the-cake doc, though, was the second one of the morning. He plopped right down in the seat between the young cowboy and me.
I had seen Cowboy on my way into the hospital. He and his gal were flirting in the parking lot by the genital-red pickup that was bigger than my living room. I assumed the truck was a tip that Cowboy was dangling something significantly smaller.
He sauntered into the waiting room after me, his lower lip swollen with chaw, a half-gallon milk jug for a spittoon, and his ten-gallon hat pulled low, demonstrating, as my mother would have said, that he had been hit by the uncouth stick. “A gentleman removes his hat indoors and in the presence of a lady,” she had taught us.
Cowboy did not honor that rule. Although in his defense, waiting room etiquette was ill-defined beyond pretending not to hear others’ conversations — a tall order around here. But I guessed Cowboy might fall short of any standard of etiquette, because the next thing he did was make a spitty brown deposit in his cuspidor, and then he plunked the ptooey container smack in the middle between his polished cowboy boots, spread his knees wide to reveal a noticeably worn patch of denim, and settled in for the wait.
I imagined an Old West directional sign dropping from the ceiling, hand pointing to Cowboy’s crotch. His confident posture caused me to rethink my original assumption about his endowment.
His little lady joined us shortly after the sign dropped, and she was packing a saddlebag of hostility. Levis you couldn’t have removed with a potato peeler, a homemade bleach job abusing her hair, and tattoos from head to swishing tail. The barbed wire encircling her firm biceps was a particularly nice touch. And, like Cowboy, Barbie’s bottom lip was packed as tight with chaw as her jeans with flesh. She, however, fancied a more feminine spittoon, squirting her brown spittle into a sports drink bottle.
Once again, however, my initial impression was squashed when she promptly settled in with the growing group of ambulatory care visitors to enjoy The Price Is Right with Drew Carey, applauding correct answers and commiserating over the failures.
“Sucks without old whatshisname,” Barbie said as another young woman walked in.
The newcomer smiled at everyone and cheered, “Hey, Price Is Right — cool! I love this show! And yeah, Bob Barker was great, wasn’t he? He seemed like a pretty nice guy.”
She sat down across from me laughing, apparently enthused to find kindred fans. Her olive skin and ebony hair shone in the room that had been doused in tones so bland they could not be identified. In the friendly village of Fallbrook, she was probably pegged as Mexican, but she appeared to hail from more Caribbean climes.
I smiled, mumbled something encouraging about the good old days, and figured Puerto Rico, maybe, as she chattered on with Barbie, laughing about past shows and special guests, about the time she took her mama to see the show’s taping — and they’d had so much fun in L.A.
And that’s when the second surgeon came in, plopping his well-fed derriere in the seat buffering me from Cowboy.
“Your wife’s doing fine,” he said, curling his lip at the jug. “I cleaned her out, got it all — uterus, tubes and ovaries.” He relaxed into the seat, looking pleased, and threw his arm across its back and into my space. I leaned forward, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Everything’s gone, and that should help with the pain. She is going to have some bleeding. If she saturates more than two sanitary pads in six or eight hours, call my office. Otherwise, she should be just fine.” Cowboy spit into his jug and the idiot doctor leaned into my lap without dropping a beat. “No worries — I did a good job, so I’m not expecting any problems. She’ll be in recovery a few more hours, but you can probably take her home by dinnertime. We like to get them up and running pretty quickly. I’ll need to see her in one week — and no sexual activity for four weeks, maybe more.”
I couldn’t help myself. I looked over to Ms. Puerto Rico, and — glory be! — she looked back, pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, nodding in Idiot Doc’s direction.
“The nurse will let you know when you can come in and see her,” Idiot Doc finished and rose, bumping my shoulder as he swept his arm back into his own space. He didn’t seem to notice that, either.
While we attempted to stifle our reactions to Cowboy’s barren news, a sweetly fragile voice trilled from an elderly woman in the corner, opening her eyes for the first time. “It’ll be OK, young man,” she said, pushing a tendril of white hair back into her loose bun and patting the wrinkles in her frayed housedress.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Cowboy nodded in her direction.
“I had a hysterectomy fifty years ago, before they knew what they were doing down there,” she chuckled, “and it wasn’t too long before I felt just fine.” She leaned over to pull up a tube sock, rumpled round her bruised and withered ankle. Her slant revealed an unfettered bosom as flat as the plates of a mammography machine. “You thank God you still have her, and you adopt. That’s what I always say.” She chuckled herself back into a doze.
I wondered if adoption was a good idea, given Cowboy’s Barbie. Then I figured the biological drive to procreate was a lot stronger than any social convention. And then I decided it was time to take a break. I headed out for caffeine.
The way to the tiny cafeteria was lined with a rogue’s gallery of former community hospital board members, some of them, familiar faces — the brilliant, Jewish lesbian neurologist who finally left town because none of the local practitioners would refer to her; the community gadfly whose penchant for Bermudas without underwear left his elderly gonads notoriously flapping in the breeze on the boardroom dais; the unwed sheriff’s deputy whose tanned, lean body inspired a generation of hopeful beauties into civic involvement; the recovered cancer patient who abstained from attending meetings, but gobbled up the free healthcare benefits he couldn’t buy if he wanted to. Typical small town fare, each mug shot was a fading scandal.
At least they led to coffee.
“Where are the coffee cups?” I asked at the cafeteria’s counter.
“Next to the coffee machine,” a slight figure facing the grill said without turning.
“Oops, sorry! Didn’t see them. My eyes took a hike with my youth.” No comment from the grill, as I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup just large enough for Holy Communion. Then I searched for half-and-half, couldn’t find it, searched again without success, and reluctantly asked, “And the cream?”
A skinny arm, doubled in length by a spatula, pointed to the far end of the counter. “In the ice,” she said from the shadows of the grill’s hood.
I followed the cafeteria tray rails to the ice, where yogurt, milk cartoons and a stainless steel tub of coffee whitener laid half buried. Whitener, not cream, a distinction it seemed unsafe to make under the circumstances, so I whitened my coffee and asked, “How much is it?”
The short order cook looked over her boney shoulder and peered up at me. She was all hairnet and sorrow, pressing a grilled cheese sandwich into submission, maybe the only power she had. “Never been here before?”
“Just to wait, not for coffee.” I smiled, a paltry cover for the fact that I knew I was annoying the hell out of her.
But then an amazing thing happened. She released the sandwich and turned straight to me, her hands resting on her semblance of hips and a smile usurping her unhappy face.
“Well then, here’s your good news for the day, Sugar,” she said, suddenly animated and beaming. “It’s free!”
“Free? Really? That’s nice!”
“Yep. Coffee, tea and ice water,” she said in a singsong voice, “all free, all the time!” as though it was the most important — the happiest! — damn message she had ever delivered.
I wondered if I should take her home with me and fatten her up in front of Fried Green Tomatoes, give her a chance to discover greater pleasures in life. But having done her duty well, she returned to subduing the grilled cheese. And she was whistling.
I wandered back to the waiting room, reading the signs along the way that repeated every ten steps or so, directing me to cough into the crook of my arm and wash my hands obsessively to prevent the spread of influenza.
With the image of a germ-riddled milk jug in mind, I stepped into the room to find all the same faces, some reading, some chatting, some dozing at the TV, some staring off into a fearful distance.
Ms. Puerto Rico said, “Hi,” as I returned to the seat that had become mine.
Cowboy welcomed me back by spitting into his jug and placing it in the empty seat between us. He had apparently tired of bending over to reach the floor.
Ms. Puerto Rico cleared her throat and looked at me, her nostrils flaring in disgust, and I had to laugh despite the brown muck perched twenty inches to the right of my thigh.
“Hey, who’re you here with?” she asked.
“My daughter, but it’s a simple procedure, no biggy.” I shifted as far left as the chair allowed. “And you?”
“My mama. But she didn’t tell me anything, just that she had to have a little procedure and needed a ride home.”
“Wow! That must be disconcerting.”
“Oh, it’s the way she is. She says God has more important things to do than listen to us complain, so she never shares any of the bad stuff. What can I do? I just wait for her to nudge out her stories in little pieces, but she’s always pretty cheerful anyway.” She laughed and shook her head.
“Is that where you get it?” I asked, and she laughed again.
“Yeah, Mama’s Puerto Rican. She says Puerto Rican women are resilient — and they love to laugh.”
“And they love to cook,” I offered. “At least my former in-laws did. They made the best Puerto Rican food — pasteles and fried plantains are my favorites.”
“And chicharrones — we’ve got to have our fried pork skin!” and Ms. Puerto Rico was laughing yet again when another surgeon came in the door.
“The daughter of Mrs. Santiago?” he asked.
“That’s me.” Ms. Puerto Rico turned to smile at him.
He gestured toward the hallway and said, “Let’s talk out here.”
Everyone looked at Ms. Puerto Rico.
Her laughter stopped. Her smile stopped. She stood and followed him out.
The doc said something about “bronchoscopy” and maybe “sooner” and “Are you OK?”
There was a pause, and then, “Yes, thank you, I’m fine,” and after a silent moment, she was standing in the doorway. “Hey, where’d you get that coffee?”
“I’ll show you.” I jumped up and walked into the hallway with her, my arm around her shoulders. “It’s down this way.”
“At least he didn’t say she couldn’t have sex,” she laughed, and then she turned into me, and she wept. And when she could, she whispered, “She never told us, not a word. … And she’ll just say that Puerto Rican women are resilient. … And they love to laugh. … We do love to laugh. We do. …
“Hey,” she stood straight, “I could use that coffee.”
“Well, the good news is it’s free — coffee, tea and ice water — all free, all the time, Sweetie. I’m Patsy. What’s your name?”
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
At Fallbrook Art Center
Gray-haired volunteer: Queenie? We used to sing a song about a Queenie — Queenie the cutie of the burlap show. I didn’t know what a burlesque show was.
Note: The song is Strip Polka by Johnny Mercer.
At a writers workshop
My character grew a second head!
– Marcy
Fallbrook Drum Circle with Hula Hoops — Sunday!
Hula hoops?!
Yep, the Fallbrook Drum Circle will meet Sunday 25 July at 3:00 p.m. in Village Square (at the corner of Main and Alvarado) — and they are introducing hula hoops to join with the rhythm of the drums.
If you have a hula hoop, bring it — along with any other instruments you have.
The circle will also begin a new drum raffle, which helps keep the event free and offers a good chance to win a drum.
For directions or information, call Tom at Rainbow Designs, 760-723-1899.
Read more Fallbrookisms…
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Heat roils across my hill as I step into the dog days of summer, plunge into the pool and surface into a shimmer of my youth. The hours barely passed then, as we sought the morning’s flickering shade, splayed under the swaying arms of weeping willows. The grass cooled and tickled, and when the breeze stilled, when dew abandoned the ground and bedecked our brows, when boredom prevailed, we scooted on elbow, heel and ass to peek up just past the edge of the willow, to spy pictures in the sky, to find fancy piled upon fancy in shades of white and blue and wonder. Drifty, dreamy images fluttered by on tendrils of hot air and moisture, visions of summers to come. Now, they are visions of summers past. Vague recollections entice others, memories evoke memories, and I succumb to the warm wave of reminiscence. …
At Tydings-on-the-Bay, the family seeks respite from Baltimore’s stinking markets and steamy Southern Baptist socials. The season’s heaven is as hot as hell, so my father’s 
mother swims in the early morning sun, the rising light, the silence of sleeping progeny. Her ears fill with the water of two hundred fifty years of fishermen’s traps, floating battles of wits and finance, sunken souls. Framed by dusty lace and handprints, she returns from the edge of land, ankle-deep in the pine needles of last season’s hopes and sighs. She pulls back moth-wing coverlets to wake us for breakfast and draws us from bed with the scent of frying scrapple, grits and green tomatoes. We pray for her watermelon rind pickle as she repositions the tortoiseshell combs that hold her endless hair in place and her world together. …
Harmony buzzes — a chorus of lawn mowers, insects and low flying planes. The grass is yet moist with tears of another day’s passing, another day closer to replacing steamed crabs and corn on the cob with brown bag lunches at the big kids’ school. But for now, summer flowers play pub to bees and lipstick to girls who yearn to be women. We dress in fairy gowns of weeping willow and woven clover, with tomato breasts and berry-stained nails, and we smoke cornhusks when no one watches from the kitchen window. We hide along a stream’s bank, escaping plebeian Cheerios, taunting big brothers, demands to be something other than our dreams. We imagine gossamer barges and honeyed rosebuds, the grace and wisdom that will one day be ours. …
Inner tubes with six-pack anchors voyage across a watering hole. Once boys and girls, now barely adults, we plot the world’s salvation: Love and revolution are the answer — or is it revolutionary love? This is our wholesome debate as cows bellow to the music of a generation wading through sparkling ripples of change. We feast on homemade cheese, the sprouts of provocative vision, the final summer of our youth. We dive to the murky bottom one last time and surface with the muck from which our species first emerged. It oozes between our fingers and we know the very world is in our hands. …
Wafts of ocean breath curl round limbs entwined in sweltry sand. We draw long strokes of air and each other, tremble at the touch of fingertips, the sun, the lees of a million million waves, the ebb and flow of unanimity. Tears mingle and meander the joy and sorrow between us. Romance has blown in before a ferry of tourists, binoculars perched on the ship’s rail searching for secrets, cameras poised to frame history — but will we have one? Passion crosses over them like an angel over blood-marked doors and alights dangerously in our lovers’ arms as we crest with the waves. And by summer’s end, all evidence, save the love, of a couple walking hand-in-hand is shifted by the tides to someone else’s strand. …
North Iowa Tea Party Billboard
We watch the glue of an inflamed mob bubbling beneath the sky-high images of Hitler and Obama and Lenin. The three are falsely strung together by practiced loathing, the vitriol of glib puppets who toss the masses bonbons of fear like cheap Mardi Gras beads — in hope of bare-breasted adulation. The mob feasts on the ephemera their idols spew with such self-serving vengeance — dark accusations that evaporate in the sun but linger in unquestioning minds, calls to arms amputated by ignorance, dried tea leaves that swirl out of reach on the hot air of hate. …
And I look back to earth. The quest for grace, the harmony of hopeful discourse, the rhythmic balance of unsullied tides, the common embrace of responsibility for our future — are they such arcane notions? I finger the ancient tortoiseshell combs and wonder if in this time they can hold the world together.
Love,
K-B
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Billboard photo courtesy of Bob Fisher, KRIB.
On Fallbrook’s medical community
Mother 1: The ob-gyn tried to deliver an anti-abortion lecture during my kid’s exam.
Mother 2: Maybe it was just business development.
At Café des Artistes — on Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette
Patron 1: Was Marie Antoinette bisexual in the movie? Did she go after the handmaidens?
Patron 2: Not in that movie.
Patron 1: She did in my movie.
Patron 2: The one in your head?
Read more Fallbrookisms…
July 15th, 2010 in
Abortion,
Fallbrook
White BART Officer Found Guilty of Shooting Unarmed Black Man
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
“My son was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
My son was murdered!”
– Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar J. Grant III, shooting victim
I thought it was my Taser, not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
I thought it was my Taser, not my gun!
– A confused rapid transit police officer
We’d have decided the same for a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
We’d have decided the same for a black officer!
– A jury with no blacks
It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay!
– A public agency facing a wrongful death suit
Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets!
– A black man who knows the outrage of police behaving stupidly
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
– Oscar J. Grant III
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.
At Café des Artistes
Bob: I’ve turned groveling into a strength.
A political conversation
Tree service: I’ll be by to take a look at your tree in about an hour, hour and a half.
K-B: Great, thanks.
Tree service: You betcha.
K-B: Are you related to Sarah?
Tree service: Who?
At Major Market
There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians.
– Said by President Bill Clinton at Senator Robert Byrd’s memorial service and quoted in the Major Market parking lot
Read more Fallbrookisms…
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Reading Internet search terms is as compelling an experience as reading a good novel. I discovered this when my dear, darling website designer did a software thingy I don’t understand, something involving computer magic that captures the search terms that land folks on my site. I will be forever indebted and disconcerted.
The words people type into search engines are varyingly mysterious, obvious, enlightening, funny, sad, perverse, disturbing, frightening and occasionally idiotic. And many of them are just odd enough — or grotesque enough — that I am forced to repeat the search to determine why in the name of whatever the term brought the searcher to my cyber door.
Just last week, an unidentifiable degenerate searched for “7to9 boys/nude.” After learning from the local Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that there’s not much they can do without an IS address, I added the search to the list I obsessively keep and wondered if, given human history, pedophilia could be a distant point on the natural order spectrum. Then I gnoshed on the satisfying notion of cruel and unusual punishment.
Such extreme examples aside, a public review of incoming searches might be interesting, perhaps entertaining, or maybe it will actually encourage folks to think twice before they google something really stupid. So, for your reading pleasure, here are the first one hundred searches that brought folks to ExcuseMeImWriting.com.
Fallbrook Sunset
1. vibes – domestic violence
2. what do most people do for a living in afghanistan
3. Fallbrook magic mushroom
4. i lift my leafy arms to pray
5. dove bullets
6. fear of feminism
7. victor villasenor and gays
8. kids morning ablutions
9. rural kids barefoot
10. i’m a physician and my hands are killing
11. old insane asylums
12. dirty sex words signs and stickers
13. baby be-bop controversy
14. academics vs athletics
15. tomato in the trees
16. beast – profanity?
17. chuck norris 1
18. chuck norris side view
19. dangerous angels
20. is population a excuse for no healthcare
21. jaghori
22. fears about women turn of the century
23. yes! sticker
24. who do i call to oppose health care reform
25. frankau
26. fotos de trupianos bistro in fallbrook
27. feminism quotes in 2009
28. fight in parking lot
29. attention whore sticker
30. woman beaten at suffrage parade 1913
31. me
32. 1920’s insane asylum texas
33. women’s fear of feminism
34. the mel sanger lies
35. obama is the antichrist
36. Hospice dying
37. fear of feminism
38. why is baby be-bop a bad book
39. san diego poetry readings
40. hospice dying
41. Tillman gressitt
42. Creative rainbow
43. writing about typical morning
44. what do most people do for a job in afghanistan
45. who do i call for health care reform
46. Leftover soap chips
47. chuck norris struck lighting
48. chuck norris tough
49. 2009 for marriage yoga for gamini
50. chuck norris gay
51. Don’t be gaycist
52. Fear of feminism
53. who do you call for help with child care
54. Father’s love
55. baby bop’s tea set margaret
56. fear of feminism equal rights amendment
57. can i work overseas and still get california unemployment
58. “pat robertson” married pregnant girlfriend
59. “sarah palin” and “short skirts”
60. individual and typical qualities of chuck norris
61. who do you call when someone is crazy
62. book store in fallbrook, ca
63. religious medical excuse
64. explain health reform bill
65. “women’s equality day” anti Christian
66. can edd find out that im attending college
67. dying mother
68. woman on toilet seat
69. palin writing ability
70. no jews in fallbrook
71. Reasonable excuses for turning in a late…
72. The nice part of living in a small town
73. Excuse for sending late continued claim form
74. Homily minding your own business
75. Health care reform legislation explain
76. Jaghori afghanistan
77. Fathers accused of child abuse
78. How to get father off child abuse charge
79. How to write an excuse me letter
80. EDD federal extension
81. Excuse me seventeen club free
82. Checked wrong box on California unemployment
83. Have interview with edd for sending form
84. Pictures of young homeless addicts
85. Fallbrook racism
86. Fallbrook the friendly village
87. Child abuse
88. Give heed
89. Homeless trucker gay
90. turn of the century intellectuals
91. Submitting your work to MOMA
92. How to get a judge to excuse parent
93. What do I click on in Word that tells me
94. What do the Afghan people want?
95. Fallbrook girls looking to party
96. Fallbrook mayor
97. Fallbrook lychee fruit
98. Fallbrook youth prevention group
99. Writers Read Fallbrook
100. Ann Coulter evil
If you’re curious, you can copy and paste any of the terms into the search window at the top of this page and see what the search engine picked up. Have fun. …
Love,
K-B
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
At the Writing Erotic workshop
The only male student: If men could see a videotape of what happened here tonight, they would be able to get all the sex they want.
Facilitator: What did you like and not like about the workshop?
Student: It was good for me!
Facilitator: Cigarette?
On taking a Fallbrook yoga class
I not sure about yoga: It always makes me feel like I need to clear my chakra or poo, and I’m not sure which.
Read more Fallbrookisms…
July 1st, 2010 in
Fallbrook,
Writing
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Mama, what do angels look like?
This, my small kiddo asks. In the throes of divorce. Of making a game of beans and rice. Of sorrow. Of innocent query and wonderment. This she asks.
How shall I answer? What can I say that would not be a lie passing my lips?
In the speckled dark of a sleepless, starry sky, I sit on our hill as she chases shadows in the warm breeze and a coyote pauses beyond the fence that separates us.
The hill is ours because we love it. I think it loves us. It makes paths for us around the rabbit holes, the tarantula borrows, the grainy mounds of queens and workers in constant toil.
The People say it is a holy place; the altitude puts it a peedy bit closer to the gods.
But I am distracted from the possibility of clutching a deity’s apron strings by whispered anguish calling to me from places I cannot pronounce and some I can.
Will sea turtles discover crude oil lends their shells a fine sheen? Will tar balls become the tender of shrimpers and oyster folk? Will children who play with spent artillery shells transcribe the booming rhythm of war into the next amazing rap sensation?
I search for hope amidst the moonlit carpet of rabbit turds, brown and rich, the prickly stubble of deer grass, recently shaved by a peon’s scythe, the manzanilla, its soothing ways unrecognized in the wild by those who buy it by the box.
The moon catches my girl, catches her dark curls and darker eyes, twirling into a glowing tornado, spiraling up toward the night, up into a future I fret I cannot affect, and my fear pulls her back to earth.
The coyote howls across the hill, and answers echo from a distant canyon. I peer through the grasses to watch her, stymied by the impassable chain-link fence. A border to me, it cuts her world in half. And so she paces, her prey on the other side.
And I chew a manzanilla bud, and rub the tender skin beneath my skirt. The grass makes me itch. It makes me itch because I love to scratch. And so I scratch as I look out over my little town. Indeed it is mine, because we scratch each other.
Why do I love it so here? How dare I raise my child in this place? This place of bitter anger and sweet Peruvian chocolate. Of testicle trees, our avocados, and shocking scarlet bottlebrushes. Of well-repressed, grey-green groves and lusciously chaotic words wending their way behind closed doors, between tussled sheets, into fearful hearts.
The heat of conflict radiates from our bodies, our beds, our lands, entangling the legs of a bawdy blend. And I wonder, what’s not to love?
I lie in the dry grass, caressing the stars, eyes languid and wet, and I sense the loss of something, something I might not have ever wanted.
The coyote, impatient with human encumbrances, glances at us and trots across the border to dine and commune with her own. I applaud her hopeful vision.
My kiddo, delighted with discovering her ability to dance, moves deeper into the dark.
Angels? I call.
Oh, never mind, Mama. I just saw one!
And she spins, spins into the sweeping night. Soars out of reach. She is gone. Gone.
Love,
K-B
© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.
Note: Painting by Kate Gressitt-Diaz.
Fallbrookians on…
Immigration It’s the hypocrisy of our times. Probably 90 percent of our senators have hired illegal aliens.
— Local employer
Education We do want to take away some people’s individuality.
— Former school board member
Fun I won’t play anything I can’t change.
— Anonymous
The Bonsall Bridge The old Bonsall Bridge was a rite of passage for new drivers. Now it’s replaced with a chunk of concrete — no challenge at all.
— 1993 comment resurrected in 2010 as another, larger chunk of concrete slowly becomes the next bridge
Hoochies Ooo, mine is showing. Want to cover up with my rebozo? No, I’m proud of my vagina.
— A mother-daughter moment
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and 
chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.
Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”
As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.
But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.
There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.
And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.
In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.
And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.
Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.
At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.
And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.
He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.
He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”
So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?
Love,
K-B
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Defining Fallbrook
The town of a thousand only Democrats
Off the main drag culturally and psychologically
Blue-haired ladies with private greenhouses
Provincials trying to hide behind their oleander hedges
The Universe Is Like a Good Restaurant
The universe is like a good restaurant
The chef is God
The waiters and waitresses are angels
And they’re all here to serve you
And you –
You’re either seated at a table
Or you’re on the menu
— By the late Al Einhorn
Read more Fallbrookisms…
June 17th, 2010 in
Culture,
Fallbrook
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
There is a practice in some countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in which girls, typically between infancy and adolescence, are subject to the removal of some or all of their external genitalia. This is done with a knife or scissors or a piece of broken glass or, you know, whatever the ritual performers have at hand.
Some folks refer to this cultural tradition as female circumcision, which is a questionable reference, but, if they like to compare things to penises, I can go with that.
In circumcision, some or all of the penis foreskin is removed, leaving the rest of the penis intact. However, this practice is under increasing scrutiny, because it is not actually medically necessary, although it can reduce the likelihood of infection. (For you nasty boys, let me just point out that infection is something a little soap and water — and maybe some fun — can prevent.)
Anyway, the folks who liken the female practice to circumcision are, I suspect, desperately attempting to dismiss it as, oh, inconsequential to our spiffy culture. (A culture that assures I can amble into the local grocery store and purchase twenty-seven different sizes and styles of menstrual cycle absorbent thingies, four distinct brands of end-o female odor products and seven brands of cramp-, bloat- and get-away-from-me-you-irritating-bastard pills.) What these folks fail to comprehend, though, is that what is being done to female genitalia is not comparable to male circumcision.
What’s being done to females is more like lopping off the penis.
Imagine that — and I am serious. Imagine a young boy held down by a group of adults, his legs forcibly spread, as his penis is cut off. The skin is pulled from either side of the boy’s wound and stitched together with thorns or who knows what, leaving just enough of a hole for urination.
Types of Female Genital Mutilation
Now, if we hold true to the comparison, the range of excising done on females — from part or all of the clitoris, to clitoris and labia, to sewing the whole thing shut — means it’s possible the hypothetical male ritual might demand only half of the boy’s penis or maybe a quarter. But I think that’s still gotta really hurt — in more ways than one.
Regardless, if the child survives the shock and pain, the inevitable infections and all the other dire and truly fanny-puckering consequences, he grows into adulthood with his manhood mutilated.
And if this were actually happening to boys in Egypt or Indonesia or Ethiopia or Iraq, we’d be horrified, right? And what if people wanted to do it here, in the United States? No way, right?
Thankfully, boys are not mutilated in this way, and the United States has made the practice on females illegal, regardless of their families’ cultural traditions. In fact, just about every single mainstream U.S. and international medical organization involved in girls’ or women’s health is adamantly opposed to the practice in any of its forms and they call it like it is — female genital mutilation.
Except the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). AAP called it female genital mutilation (FGM) in their 1998 policy statement on the practice. But then its Committee on Bioethics released an updated FGM policy in April that declared “female genital cutting” is really a much nicer term for this thing adults do with sharp objects to girls genitalia. “Mutilation,” the Committee on Bioethics determined, is an inflammatory word, and we surely don’t want anyone swelling up in offence.
Now, I have to bring us back to the penis scenario for just a moment, because I believe most reasonable folks would agree that, if the practice were perpetrated on boys’ penises, they wouldn’t hesitate to call it mutilation. This makes me wonder why the committee — or anyone else — would shrink from accuracy when the female clitoris is being butchered? “Female genital cutting” is just another coddling euphemism for what’s actually going on.
The AAP’s Committee on Bioethics dropped another bomb in its updated policy: The committee suggested that U.S. law prohibiting FGM might be changed to allow U.S. physicians to demonstrate their great capacity for cultural sensitivity by performing a “minor” form of the practice. The committee’s recommended alternative procedure was a ritual “pricking or incising [of] the clitoral skin.” They opined that this would accommodate cultural requirements for a girl’s initiation into her ethnic community while serving as a deterrent to immigrant parents who might otherwise ship their girls back home to give up the whole shebang down there.
After an onslaught of letters from peers and laypeople, the policy was rather swiftly retracted and a “rewrite” is in the works. But consider for a moment the committee’s originally proposed accommodation of this particular immigrant cultural tradition. It is akin to suggesting that we be sensitive to the cultural tradition of stoning women for adultery by allowing the offended man to throw, say, only one medium-size rock at his wife’s or daughter’s head. And I suppose we could consider whacking a fingertip off a thief, instead of a whole hand. That might be a nice culturally sensitive compromise. Now, what sort of sensitivity might we demonstrate toward the cultural tradition of murdering the victims of rape?
OK, OK, ridiculous considerations, all. And it is tempting to urge the members of the AAP Committee on Bioethics and its liaisons, consultant and staff to be the first to spread their legs for some culturally sensitive ritual nicks.
But at the core of this controversy, it is much more frightening than it is ridiculous.
In the United States of America in 2010, we have a group of esteemed, medical professional men and women who talked themselves into believing that it might be OK to cut girls’ genitalia a little as a demonstration of cultural sensitivity and a deterrent to cutting girls’ genitalia a lot.
We can only hope this is not indicative of females’ standing in our culture.
Except, gee, this happened here.
Love,
K-B
NOTE: The Girls Protection Act of 2010, HR 5137, sponsored by Reps. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) and Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), would make it illegal to transport minors out of the United States for purposes of female genital mutilation. You might like to write a letter of support to your elected representatives.
©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
“Are you OK?” the surgeon asked her, out in the hallway.
