Start with Yourself, Kid

The longer I live the more troubled I am by how casually unkind we are to one another. How causally unkind I myself have been toward others.Just in conversation.Just behind their backs.To be funny,  you understand.As if that made it any better.When my sister Nan and I were kids, we heard many a joke at the expense of others around the family table. My sense of it was we thought we were great wits.I see now that my people felt unsure, not good enough, judged by the outside world and this wit was their armor.But still.  People not present were always getting characterized by some witty term. If an old fellow’s hair rose slanting from his head they called him "Stiff Wind" or "Mister Nor’easter." That kind of thing. People not present were always getting ‘acted out’ based on their body language or verbal tics.I impersonated someone at my tenth birthday party, a merry affair with all my young cousins and Franco American Spaghetti for the entree. At one point I made my face look like the face of an elderly family friend whose mouth and left eye drooped due to a birth accident, and felt an immediate shocked silence on the part of my young.  The one 13 even chastised me, gently.You’d think that would have taught me. And it did, mostly. Yet I look back at my first columns from the early 1980s and here are many references to 'a fat lady' , 'old people' and so on. I would never use such terms today and I don’t know why I used them then except that we all felt much freer to speak so.  And the Fat Lady was a figure of fun, was she not? Someone you paid money to go stare at at the circus? So what made us finally feel how sad her fate was? Maybe reading tabloid stories of people so large teams of police and EMTs have to take out the windows or even the whole sides of their houses to get them to the hospital for the medical attention they need?This past week, somebody sent me an email containing terrible allegations about our President  It was a “forward,” meaning that he had not composed it. Still, he had sent it to his whole address book. I thought about it for a few hours and finally wrote him: "Dan, can you take me off this list? I find emails like this so upsetting.” And he wrote back. “I’m sorry Terry. It won’t happen again."It was that easy.So yes I’m going to keep on hoping for civility 'out' there” BUT! I am also going to start policing my own self too and rooting out all signs of unkindness.  I think of Michael Jackson and the powerful message he sent out in this song. Ah Michael, with your demons. How we all still miss you![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Nh84lfvW0]

Keepin' It Light

You have to keep it civil; otherwise things get ugly fast.Like millions of Americans I watched the debate Monday night, but not before I attended a shortened meeting of the book group I’m in with fellow alums from the school I went to. They are all very cool women but the coolest of them might be the one who is soon to turn 90.“I think I won’t join you on the 16th," she said in her email to us a few days earlier. “I didn’t read the book anyway so I’ll stay home and become enraged again watching this new debate.”I could see her smiling as she wrote that. She always smiles when delivering these little quips. It’s the key to aging I think; not digging in and getting too serious.Like millions of Americans I also had my phone on while I myself watched, at the house of David’s brother and his wife, and how could I not look at the chatter on Facebook as I watched?You could tell the Democrats by what they said. “Bully! Let the President speak!” posted one.You can could tell  the Republicans too. “He sure blew the Libya question!" said another.I can’t stand to see people fighting, having grown up in a household run by a mother and aunt who could pull out the long knives and slice each other up before you could breathe in and breathe out again, so I tried to say only neutral things.At one point I remarked on Twitter about how sort of cute it was that Obama had on a red necktie and Romney had on a blue one, an exact flip of their red-state blue-state affiliations.Then on Facebook, at one point, I wrote “Grecian Formula”. It just popped into my head as I looked at Romney.I have no idea if he colors his hair or he doesn’t, of course, but it made me volunteer the information that my husband is the exact same age as Mitt Romney, and his hair is completely white.A Facebook friend who I knew for one year when he was a 15 posted that he would be glad to have any hair at all, but he doesn’t anymore. Easier when the wind is up he said.And then I posted this picture of David holding our newest little baldie…I was bald myself for years and then the curls came in and foamed up out of my head like Jiffy Pop. Maybe that will be her fate too.Anyway this kind of talk kept me from getting all nasty. Why spread that around in the atmosphere when it’s all we can do to deal with the real pollutants. (Tip: when the snow finally does come don’t – DO NOT – gather it in a glass and tip it back - not until it has a chance to melt and you can see what’s really in there!  And there's a topic for much more national discourse!