 © Steve Grace
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Worry Seeds Click to read Click to |
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© Steve Grace
|
Worry Seeds Click to read Click to |
Worry Seeds
Okay, so I’m a worried mother. Can’t help it. People who’ve lived in our
bodies for nine months—we’ve marked them with our scent and track them wherever
they go. So maybe it’s not a good idea for me to listen to the news.
The other day I heard Noam Chomsky on the radio, reciting the gap between rich and poor. Poverty, he says, is lapping at our shores.
The poor are coming, and some of them are turning into us, and some of us are turning into them. They turn out to be real people hidden in a costume of soot and grime, people who just don’t have time to write a resumé or start a business. They’re too busy being sick or can’t get a bus from Zanzibar to Nordstrom. They creep in and infect our edges, blur the line, tire the eyes with their endless wars and debris. Tidy they are not.
Last night I laid awake, shouting prayers inside my skull to drown away the fear that this poverty is catching, that my children, too, could slip into the ranks of the poor. I saw the image of my son, turned 30, struggling to find a moment to read a book; he and his wife struggling to find a moment to breathe between long, spinning runs down the freeway to workplaces and paychecks; then long runs back up the freeway to home. They are trying to make the same home for their baby they had as kids in the 1960s, when average Americans were the richest people in history. When it took only one nine-to-five paycheck to buy a three-bedroom house with a lawn and two cars.
My son moonlights on weekends, usually, so he and his wife had only one weekend to put in a lawn: create soil, rototill it in the sun, rake it, roll it all by hand. At the end of the blistering day she drove off to work her usual graveyard shift. Even though it’s graveyard, her job requires a college degree. She came back in the morning to take over from my son, who then went to his weekday job.
While my son’s away, she takes on the non-work of mothers, the twenty-four hour work that doesn’t register in the economic indicators: changing diapers, feeding the babe, washing clothes, cleaning house, and trying to find out what the hell is wrong with that child that he won’t stop crying—when she needs so desperately to sleep an hour or two. Please. Just a couple of hours before the night job looms up again, as soon as dinner is done.
So where will my son and grandson go? Will they be fly fishermen, botanists? Or will they be landfill raiders? Entrepreneurship, of course, is the American way. You used to hear that 90% of small businesses fail in the first year. Now you hear we should all be entrepreneurs or "independent contractors"—gleaning crumbs of business like downsized mice, under the table at the stockholders’ feast. Should I worry? Or turn off the news?
Profile
I’m rummaging through the storage room of my bookshop, and I find an unusual book, one the Thought Police haven’t confiscated. A collection of heartfelt sentiments, outside approved commercial formulae. This book is an artifact. Unlike nearly all other thoughtful writing from the late twentieth century, this book has not been turned to ash.
My eye scans the table of contents, and I recognize an author’s name. Joan Piper and I once spent an afternoon at her home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1990s sharing our artistic efforts with a group of writers, musicians, visual artists, and actors. As we watched ferries gliding into Eagle Harbor beyond blackberries and apple trees, I shared my "Trips Through Mine Fields" series of paintings, and she read from her current potboiler about a beautiful, red-headed alcoholic spy. Her book teemed with characters seeking to express themselves. Local author Mike Pryor sang cabaret tunes from the play "Seattle: Land of the Long Yellow Crayon," and Joyce Keller read her poems of Seattle street life—from ballerina girls on the bus to the bag lady with visions of leopards and oranges. Jay Piper amused and shocked us with tales of a sailor’s slave-like existence during Vietnam.
Events such as these were a normal part of life back in the mid-1990s. Ten or twenty of us would gather in homes around Puget Sound for Share-a-Thons, where we ate food and gave praise: we accepted one another’s art works as the gifts they were—leaving it to the world to supply judgment and rejection. In those days it was a challenge to live a creative life in a hostile, mass-market money culture—yet such a life still was possible. It seems long ago.
In the year 2000, The Events began. Now free expression is a rumor from the past. This book is one of the few that survived the Great Fires of 2010. I read this collection three times. I will not tell another soul. Even so, I know that the Monitors have detected me. My time is limited. I will re-read this book until the Thought Police come to my door.
—D.A. Murray
Bio
Joan Piper
Place of residence: Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Birthplace: Chicago.
Grew up in: San Francisco Bay Area.
Day job: Director of exhibits and programs in a museum.
Education: B.A. in English, San Diego State University. M.A. in Educational
Technology.
Books: Poetry chapbooks.
Serial Publications: Professional journals.
Awards: Education Award for African Rock Kopic Exhibit in San Diego Zoo. Bank of
America Achievement Award.
Current projects: Liar Liar Pants on Fire, a novel about a beautiful
alcoholic spy named Poppy. Painting fish patterns on silk—Fishey Raiments.
Favorite book: Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.
Belief: Yes!
Cravings: Travel. Reading my poetry to a group. Lying under a tree.
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