This I Believe

I believe that money is not the key to happiness, or love, or fame or any of the things we tend to think it will do for us.  Having a lot of money, when that was the case, didn't make my life happier, although it made it easier.  Money does buy freedom -- from being hungry, homeless or without transportation.  It means being able to pay the bills on time, not having to worry about how much you spend at the grocery store, or when you need a new pair of shoes.

Money does not make you a good person.  In fact, some of the wealthiest people I've ever know, were less generous in many ways that some of the poorest of my family and friends.  I grew up in a blue collar, working class neighborhood.  My mother stayed at home and my father worked as a public school janitor.  We were poor.  But there were people in the neighborhood who were poorer.  Like the four children who moved in next door the summer I was in eighth grade.  They came to Kansas from Mississippi with their recently-divorced mother, and piled into their retired grandparents' three-bedroom home.

The mother was a cheap-beer alcoholic who spent her days leaning on the fence between our yards.  She chain smoked and sucked down can after can of Carling's Black Label or Hamm's beer, which she bought in cases.  She was, by turns, angry and abusive or teary and philosophical.  She was on welfare.  Sometimes she was too drunk to feed her children, so they came to our front door, asking my mother for help.

Mom stretched her very tight food budget a long way with macaroni and rice.  We never ate at restaurants.  But when the neighbor kids pressed their noses against the screen door, she made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with cheap white bread, store-brand peanut butter and homemade jelly.  When Mrs. H offered my mother bricks of yellow-orange cheese from her welfare commodities, Mom turned it into grilled sandwiches, and fed them to Mrs. H's children.

I won't say this was always done with grace or without complaint.  The bottom line, though, was that my mother -- and less explicitly my father -- could not see someone who was hungry and let them stay that way.  They were children of the Great Depression, who had known poverty and want.  They had, at times, been fed and clothed through the generosity of others, even when those others had little of their own.

Through their example I learned that poverty is a relative concept.  There is always someone else who has less than you do, and the decent thing to do is share with them what you have, be it a little or a lot.  Because of my parents and what they believed, I have learned that money is neither the root of all evil, nor the source of salvation.  It is a commodity, like the welfare cheese my mother used to feed hungry children on those long-ago evenings.  And when we have enough of it to take care of ourselves, we use it to help others. 

Thoughts About the F-Bomb

I just finished reading a funny book, "Let's Pretend This Never Happened," and I really liked it except for one thing -- the pervasive use of the word "fuck" and various permutations of the same, such as "motherfucker."  The author, Jenny Lawson, is obviously bright and interesting, and she's led a colorful life.  But her vocabulary is riddled with profanity; for me, that detracts from the overall quality of her work.

I had the same reaction when I was reading Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."  If you cut out all of the f-bombs and variations on that theme, the book would have been about a third shorter than it was and made for a much better read.  Otherwise, what you've got in both cases is the written equivalent of an ongoing barrage of "fuck" and fuck-like words, which I'm guessing most people would not sit still for. 

So, why do we put up with it in print?  And why are these books lauded as such greats works when their authors apparently have vocabulary limitations?  It's not even as if the word is particularly offensive to most of us at this point in history.  It's so pervasive that it's almost been rendered meaningless.  The only national entity that recognizes it as profanity or obscenity at this point is the FCC, and they're flexible about that so long as fuck isn't used as a verb.  When Bono used it as an adjective during an awards ceremony several years ago, the FCC ruled that it wasn't an actionable offense. 

Perhaps my real complaint is that I see use of "fuck" as the equivalent of what we call an audible pause in broadcasting.  That's the name given to "uh," "um," "er," and other words or sounds uttered as, or in place of, a pause -- a break in the flow of sound and language.  Too many audible pauses in an interview or conversation broadcast on radio or television can negate what the speaker has to say because they're really distracting and you stop paying attention after a while.  Sometimes I change the channel or turn the TV or radio off because I just can't tolerate one more "uh." 

Which all leads me to my parting comment for this post:  If you're smart enough to express yourself well in writing or orally and get public attention for doing so, then you'd ought to be smart enough to figure out that "fuck" isn't really necessary to what you're saying in most situations.  I'm not a prude, and it's not as if I've never heard the word before or said it myself. I grew up with a mother and father who both swore like a sailor's parrot. I'm just tired of "fuck" -- hearing it and reading it.

Wake up, people!!!   Be creative; engage your brain; stop using the F-bomb as a crutch.  Find another word. There are good ones out there that you can us instead and I'll bet you even know some of them.  You're better than this.  Now prove it to the rest of us!

A New (And Not Unexpected) Adventure

Okay, so I saw “The Hobbit” last weekend, and maybe I’ve got the idea of “adventure” on my mind, but it seemed like as good a headline as any. And, by the way, I should probably let everyone know up front that I suck at writing titles and headlines, so don’t give up reading simply because the title isn’t very interesting. Headline writing was not my forte in journalism school.

So, this is my first attempt at having my own blog. It’s one of the things I promised my dissertation advisor — and myself — that I would do to keep me motivated as a writer. And I don’t mean that to sound pretentious. I am and have been a writer for a long time, mostly as a journalist, but also writing short stories and most recently a collection of creative nonfiction essays which comprise my dissertation. In the process, I’ve discovered a passion for writing essays and making observations about life in general and sometimes my life in particular.

For example, this morning I looked out one of my back windows and there was a cat sitting in the heated water bowl I use as a substitute birdbath during the winter months. The cat’s name is Pixie Bob, and he’s been living in my backyard and sometimes in my garage since he was a kitten two summers ago. His mother, Portia, and a few other members of his family also come and go from the premises, which keeps down on undesirable critters like possums and raccoons, but does make me worry about the bird population. So far, however, so good. I’ve never seen any of them go for one of the birds that frequent my feeders, probably because they’re so well fed already between the constant supply of kibble and the daily canned food they get from me.

But back to Pixie Bob . . . I have neglected the water bowl the past few days because I’ve had a series of all-day migraines — nothing like the giant all-day suckers they used to sell at fairs and carnivals, believe me — and hadn’t gotten around to filling it up. But I have left it plugged into the outlet on the side of my house, so I expect it’s warm-ish on the bottom, and apparently this cat is smarter than the rest of them because he figured out that sitting in the empty bowl would keep his backside and his feet nice and toasty. And he stayed there for a long time, looking a lot like one of those Kliban tabby cats that used to be all over greeting cards and calendars and cartoons – a furry, striped pyramid with a cat’s head on top. And Pixie isn’t fat, but he is very fuzzy because he’s wearing his winter fur right now. If the bowl were big enough, he’d probably curl up inside and only come out when he heard me open the back door because that would mean more food was coming to the garage.

So far, none of the other cats has figured out the secret of the empty water bowl and I’m not going to tell them. Let Pixie Bob know what he knows. There’s a heat lamp set up in the garage where the rest of them can get warm if they want to.