Mother's Day, Mothers' Day, Happy Birthday Birth Control Pill

So, you'd probably have to be living under a rock not to know that today is Mother's Day, and today is also the 40th anniversary of the Pill.

One of my more successful writing prompts in Composition classes is to have students consider all the inventions of the past 50 years and to write about which one has had the most impact on society.

Yes, I, too, could make a case for the personal computer, a strong case, but birth control put squarely in the hands of females? That one might win for me.

Of course, you still have to see a doctor to get the prescription, so the birth control isn't solely in the hands of the sexually active female.

Still, the right and the ability to control one's fertility has radically changed the course of women's lives. At least, for women in the industrialized nations.

Over at The New York Times, the always wonderful Nicholas Kristof writes a piece where he declares that we should make this a day that celebrates all mothers (moving the apostrophe over a space, from Mother's Day to Mothers' Day). We could do this by donating a portion of what we would have spent on our moms to social justice networks that make the world safer for women, especially women in developing nations:

"Happy Mother’s Day! And let me be clear: I’m in favor of flowers, lavish brunches, and every other token of gratitude for mothers and other goddesses.

Let me also add that your mom — yes, I’m speaking to you — is particularly deserving. (As is mine, as is my wife. And my mother-in-law!)

And because so many people feel that way, some $14 billion will be spent in the United States for Mother’s Day this year, according to the National Retail Federation. That includes $2.9 billion in meals, $2.5 billion in jewelry and $1.9 billion in flowers.

To put that sum in context, it’s enough to pay for a primary school education for all 60 million girls around the world who aren’t attending school. That would pretty much end female illiteracy."

He goes on to talk about what we could do with the money left: we could improve women's health care and reduce maternal mortality. It's startling how many women in poor countries still die in childbirth. Heck, it's startling how many women in our country still die, or come uncomfortably close to dying, because of health complications brought on by pregnancy.

I'm lucky. My mom doesn't need much material stuff, and she's not the type who demands presents to prove that she's loved. We've all moved from giving each other presents in my family to making donations to worthy causes. Nicholas Kristof is a champion of those causes.

Your dollars do more to create social change when they go to the third world--so little money can create such good. Today is a good day to donate: in honor of your mother, in honor of past mothers, in honor of women everywhere.

Riding the Greyhound Bus Across America

One of the great things about being with very old friends (meaning you've known them for a long time, not that they're 102 years old) is that they remember things, which often makes me say, "Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about that."

My journaling, which has now migrated primarily to blogging, has always tried to capture all the details which I won't remember later, as well as to record ways of life that are passing or have passed. Some day, there won't be many people around who will remember the joys of a record store or a book store. Will they read my writing and remember? I don't care. I read my writing and remember, and that gives me a joy that is more sweet than bitter.

My old college friend who is visiting this week has several times talked about her Greyhound bus trips across America. I never took one, but I remember the deal. You paid a chunk of money (I want to say it was $99) and you had a certain amount of time to travel anywhere that Greyhound went. Like a Eurorail pass, but over vaster swaths of countryside.

You might say, yes, like a Eurorail pass, but with less glamour. We've always in this country thought that trains had more class than buses. But frankly, I remember riding the Greyhound from Washington D.C. to Charlottesville, and it was much more comfortable and less shabby than the Amtrak which travelled the same direction.

I remember when I was preparing to finish grad school in 1991, and the MLA convention was in San Francisco that year; I was in Columbia, South Carolina. I knew that if I got an interview, I'd have to figure out a way to get out there. I was a desperately poor (but debt free!) grad student, and decided that maybe I'd get one of those see America passes, if I got an interview.

Of course, 1991-92 was, until the events of the past two years, the worst job market ever. So I had no interviews, and didn't need to spend money I didn't have to get to San Francisco. I got a full-time job at a community college later in the year and felt lucky.

I still feel lucky, even though my career hasn't worked out quite like I envisioned. Like the rest of grad school America, I dreamed of getting a job in a small, liberal arts school. Now I'm the Chair of a smallish, liberal arts department. It's not a total disconnect. And I still feel lucky.

A good writer would bring this essay full circle back to the Greyhound bus. Greyhound bus as metaphor for . . . hmmm. There are the obvious ones, the paths that life takes, the things we see from the Greyhound bus that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. Feeling lucky because one can scrounge up the money to travel by bus, even if one can't go the glamorous route of train or plane? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Archiving Tweets and Assembling Manuscripts and Other Thoughts about Media

In this story in The Washington Post, we learn about the plans of the Library of Congress to archive Twitter tweets. My first response was, "That's ridiculous." But the article makes compelling points:

"The purview of historians has always been the tangible: letters, journals, official documents.

The purview of Twitter, on the other hand, is the ephemeral: random spewings that some argue represent the degeneration of society. Would a Founding Father ever have tweeted his crush on Evangeline Lilly?

But on the other hand, says Michael Beschloss, historian and author of Presidential Courage,
'What historian today wouldn't give his right arm to have the adult Madison's contemporaneous Twitters about the secret debates inside the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?'"

The article goes on to talk about how rare it has been for ordinary people to write about their ordinary lives, and how much historians learn from the rare people who do (think Samuel Pepys' diaries). And of course, we don't know right now what will be historically important, as we save all those tweets: "But the more interesting possibility is that there are tweets whose value we do not yet see. "'Somewhere in [the digital world], we don't know where,' Cohen says, 'there is a kindergarten photograph or a link to a personal blog of a future president.' Somewhere, there are tweets that foreshadow enormous moments in history. We just haven't learned what they are yet."

I still have no plans to join Twitter. I don't do a good job of writing updates on Facebook, and I'm not sure that Twitter tweets would be high on my to-do list. I don't need one more thing to feel guilty for neglecting.

No, I want book length publication. Terry Lucas posted two great reports on an AWP presentation here and here. Still no answer to my pressing question: at what point does one abandon the manuscript or revise it so substantially that it's no longer the same manuscript?

Actually, I've answered that question for myself. I've made a list of all the places I haven't sent the manuscript yet, and if by November, I still have no publisher, I'll take it with me on my writer's retreat at Mepkin Abbey, and rethink the manuscript.

I did the last major revision somewhere around 2005 or 2006, and since then, I've continued to write poems that fit the theme of the manuscript. I suspect that some of those newer poems are significantly better than the ones in the manuscript, but I haven't spent time with all the poems to give the matter serious consideration.

If I revise the manuscript so substantially that it's a different manuscript, can I keep the same title? I love my title: Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site. Do various publishers remember the titles of all the manuscripts they receive? I can't imagine it. But just to be safe, I suppose I could mention something about substantial revision in a cover letter.

Of course, to listen to some commentators, print as we know it will be gone in 10 years (listen to this Marketplace story, where the commentator can't imagine that we'll even have airport newsstands in 10 years; everything we want, we'll purchase on our Kindle-like devices). In some ways that makes me feel panicky. In other ways, I know that my poems have been making their way in the world, in all sorts of vehicles (paper, electronic journals, websites, animation of sorts). Ten years ago, I couldn't have imagined how beautiful electronic journals could be. Now, I wonder what we'll create in the next 10 years.

Beard on Bread and Everything Else

I learned about hospitality from watching my mother. She invited everyone to share meals with us, from her musician friends, to students who couldn't make it home for the holidays, to various church members--and of course, the friends of her children. Sometimes she would make an elaborate, multi-course, French meals. Other times, we'd simply share whatever we were going to have anyway: lasagne, chili, or my sister's favorite, tacos.

One summer day, when my sister and I whined about how bored we were, my mom said, "Let's make bread."

It was the summer of 1978 or so. Through various college students and interns who served our church, we'd been introduced to vegetarian dishes and whole foods ways of eating. Mom had a copy of Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet, and we made Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread. I still have that cookbook, although I don't use it anymore; the recipes are a bit too earnest and 1970's for me (very chewy, very beany, with very little in the way of seasonings that I like). But that bread recipe holds up. In fact, the cookbook's spine has split, and the book splits into two at that recipe, which tells you how often I've made it.

I fell in love with bread baking that day. I loved the way that the yeast transformed the flour. I loved the slow process, the way I really couldn't go wrong. I loved the feel of the dough in my hands. I loved the final product. I loved that the seminarians coming to dinner raved over the bread we made, and we ate every crumb of every loaf.

From that early experiment, I continued to experiment with bread baking, and it rarely let me down. I checked baking books out of the library, and received them for presents. I remember the day in Knoxville, Tennessee when I bought Beard on Bread. The clerk said, "Oh, you're going to have fun with this book."

He was right. Decades later, after a kitchen remodel that left me a little afraid to use my brand new kitchen, I returned to that book to make a few loaves of cinnamon bread. Some people smudge their houses with sage, but I baptize mine with bread dough!

Today is James Beard's birthday, and those of us who love good food owe him an enormous debt. We could argue about which chef most changed the course of cooking in the twentieth century, and I could argue that James Beard would win that title (I could also make a strong case for Julia Child). James Beard incorporated a variety of cooking techniques and ingredients from around the world, and he showed us the way. He didn't insist on recipes that forced us to spend hours in the kitchen, although if we wanted to, he'd give us those recipes too. He taught us to use local ingredients, and to cook on open fires, and about the joys of hors d'oeuvres and every other type of food.

I don't bake bread as often as I once did. It's interesting to reflect on how the bread landscape of our nation has changed since I first started baking bread. Once upon a time, you couldn't get sourdough bread outside of big cities. Now, most cities and towns have a supermarket that carries it, at least most cities east of the Mississippi (I confess to not having travelled enough through the western states recently enough to be sure). Now, I have two French bakeries within walking distance of my office. If I don't have time enough at home to bake, there's no shortage of bread to buy.

Perhaps today, I will return to my bread baking roots. Perhaps today, I will take that battered copy of Beard on Bread off the shelf and make cinnamon bread. Maybe I'll dig even deeper and make Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread.

The Oil Spill and Local Eating

This week, an old college friend and her friend are here to visit. We've had long, fascinating conversations. She's living the kind of life that I assumed I, too, would live when I graduated from college and could live however I chose. She raises chickens (she has a permit!), which give her a few eggs each morning. She does intensive gardening. She bought an eighth of a cow from a local farmer. She just started her latest adventures with bee raising. Any day, I expect to hear that she's bought a goat.

In short, she's living the kind of life that Barbara Kingsolver describes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That book made me want to sell everything I own and move to a farm. But the housing market was crashing all around me, so I stayed put.

It's probably wise. I like the idea of raising my own food, but I don't know that I'm really suited to it. I love planning and planting the garden, but I don't like keeping up with the weeding (similar to quilting: I like planning and buying the cloth, but the long slog of work in between the planning and the finished quilt often feels unmanageable to me). I've had successful, weedy gardens, but I don't know that I'd want to count on my efforts for all my food. I've seen what one violent thunderstorm or an early frost can do to a garden.

And while I could probably raise chickens, I don't know that I could slaughter them. It's one thing to collect eggs, but it's another to kill animals. And even if I decided not to slaughter them, they still require daily care. I wouldn't keep chickens for the same reason I don't have pets: I travel a lot, and who would take care of the animals?

The oil slick spreading in the Gulf also led us to talk about the true cost of our food. My friend does a good job of eating locally. Of course, in the Carolinas, it's easy to eat locally. Plenty of people are still practicing the kind of farming on a small scale that my relatives on my mom's side used to do (and one or two still do). There are plenty of roadside stands and local markets, and plenty of farmers who will sell you part of their own butchering.

Down here, it's much harder to eat locally. When I first read the Kingsolver book, I thought, that's it, I'm only going to eat food from 50 miles away. That doesn't leave me very much. Even most of our citrus trees have been cut down in the futile attempt to contain the citrus canker disease. Even if I widened my circumference to 100 miles, there's not much farming left down here. Everything has been paved over for housing developments.

And if I have to drive 50-100 miles to get my locally grown food, am I really lessening my carbon footprint? No. If I have to truck in lots of soil to grow a garden, am I lessening my carbon footprint? Certainly not at first. But as I nourish that soil, through composting, eventually it's cheaper from a carbon standpoint to grow my own food.

I stopped gardening years ago, when I calculated the true cost of my home-grown vegetables and decided it was cheaper to go to a farmer's market. Of course, that was years ago, when I lived in a state that had farmer's markets. Down here, we have green markets, which are more like craft fairs than farmer's markets.

Ah, living an authentic life. When I was in college, I wouldn't have imagined it would be this complicated.

On to Happier News: Results of the Poetry Give-Away

Many of you were kind enough to enter my drawing to win free books. Thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon, the poet and blogger who put the whole initiative together. I'm happy to announce the following winners:

The winner of a copy of my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard: Carl Palmer.

The winner of The Moon is Always Female, by Marge Piercy: Diane Lockward.

Thank you all for playing. While I don't have enough chapbooks to give away, I'm always happy to consider making a trade or giving you a blog-reader special. Just contact me via e-mail to talk about the possibilities.

It's hard for me to believe it's May already. I'm ready for the pace of this year to slow down a bit.

In Which the Apocalypse Girl Discovers She's Married to Apocalypse Husband

I got home yesterday, and the first thing my spouse said was, "The reefs are gone."

I said, "Already?"

I turned the car off on Friday, as oil was expected to wash ashore, and I hadn't heard a news update since. I knew that the coastline of Louisiana and points east and west were doomed, but I hadn't really thought about our own coastline.

Of course, the Gulf of Mexico is a big bowl; oil will wash out of it. And there are currents that could take the oil all the way up to the Chesapeake Bay. And now that they're talking about not being able to cap the rig for 90 days, I wonder if it might go further north.

The reefs haven't been in good shape for a very long time. The last time I went diving, in August 2009, it was the day of the hottest ocean temperature ever recorded at Molasses Reef: 91 degrees. The reefs have been under attack because of the heat and the acidification of the oceans, not to mention all of us divers who love to go down and see them--we unintentionally cause distress just by our presence. It's hard not to brush against the coral.

I've known that we didn't have much time to dive; it's one of the reasons I got certified. But I hoped we had a few decades. I'm optimistic, for an Apocalypse Girl. I hoped that we would find a way to save the reefs.

Now, I fear my spouse is right. I'm usually the one who leaps to apocalyptic predictions. It terrifies me that he's the one predicting doom.