Debra J. Dickerson
DEBRADICKERSON.COM
Doing Michel Martin's "Tell Me More" Tomorrow
If, of course, I don't figure out a way to blow this like I did with Don Imus.
Those of you who don't know Michel's work, you're missing a treat. I've admired her for years and was delirious to finally get in the studio with her to watch a real pro do her thing. The segment is an interview with the author of this book, to which readers of this blog might just think I can relate. It's called Starting Over: 25 Rules When You've Bottomed Out. The author ended up homeless with four kids under the age of seven when she sued her husband for divorce. Can't imagine what Michel thought we had in common, especially since the author's kids are all but grown now and, as we speak, she's the successful CEO of her own firm.
My kids are 9 and 6. They still believe in the Tooth Fairy and I'm the CEO of Empty Wallet Enterprises.
So. Anyway.
Been Awake for Hours
All tech issues resolved on my end. Everything's working fine and I'm wide awake. This time yesterday, I should have been on hold, waiting to go on the air with Don Imus but I screwed up.
What a difference a day makes.
Some Ugly Comments from Brothers in Inter-Racial Relationships
Not sure why they're just now getting around to slamming me, but there you go. Some were just too ugly to post and I'm using a pretty long spoon on these. Enjoy?
Their bottom line: something's wrong with black women. How original.
In Which I Blow Off Don Imus
I was supposed to have just finished doing Imus but major technical difficulties on my end. Major.
I've been doing this for nearly 15 years now and have never missed a gig before, so please excuse me.
My Two Cents on LeBron James @Salon
Enjoy . Since I have to get up at 6 am tomorrow to wake up for Imus at 640 am tomorrow, I should have been in bed hours ago. I'm too old for this sh...stuff.
Doing Imus Tomorrow/Tuesday at 630 am.
Will be endeavoring to explain why y'all should chip in towards my third book. Wish me luck.
OK. Maybe I AM Losing it
My Mom taught me and my five sisters needlecrafts from an early age. So how did I go from tea cozies and chaste prom dresses to Patricia Waller?
What can I say? These speak to me. (Check out the artist's site above, but here are a chosen few from HuffPo
Also, must be said, far too many of you don't know the difference between knitting and crocheting. See: the writer of the HuffPo article.
Coupla examples:
Who Killed Bambi?
Bunny
Accident 3: Shark
Brother, Can You Spare a Cone?
Really, I'm feeling pretty good. Well, there is the insomnia of late. Only slept from 5-7 am 'last night'. Not sure why. All I know is that this is how Lindsay Lohan must feel after her idea of partying. Sandpaper eyelids and a feeling of being deep underwater.
So, I'm tired but not depressed. I'm even feeling quite purposeful what with my blitzkrieg job-applying and the cheeky stunt I'm pulling to fund my next book. Whatever happens with that, whatever flak and schadenfreude I'll have to deal with, it feels damned good to simply take action.
When the going gets rough, I remember to savor the moments of grace.
Here's a rough moment: I take the kids to a nice playground most evenings. And, most evenings, my worst enemy -- the ice cream truck man -- shows up to rub my kids' faces in their poverty. While everyone else bumrushes the truck, I have to explain to Lefty and Miss Thing that we can't afford ice cream, that's there's Wal-Mart mega packs of ice pops at home. They do their best to hide their disappointment while I bury my face uncomprehendingly in my book, pretending stoicism.
When I look up, both kids are holding ice-cream truck cones. A sweet young family, young enough to be my kids and grandkids, have bought 'the poor' kids cones.
My children and I are objects of pity. Recipients of charity. Again.
I want to confront the sweet, young dad, and tell him to stuff his ice cream. I want to order the kids to throw the ice cream in the trash.
In short, I want to behave shamefully.
Instead, I force myself over to the sweet, young dad who watches me approach uncertainly, wondering whether he should have gotten involved.
I thank him as graciously as I can. I sit with them for a minute and play with their adorable infant. He and his lovely young wife relax and I do, too because I would, and have, done exactly the same thing. What goes around comes around.
When I tell Skippy about this later, her eyes go wide in horrified sympathy. She worldlessly squeezes my arm. There is nothing to be said.
Afterward the park, I take the kids to Wal-Mart for much needed, carefully selected grocery items. Intended to pay for them with my only method of savings: never throwing away receipts or removing tags from items until they're used. When times are hard, and they usually are, I return the unused items for whatever else we can do without less. Like food.
My how I used to exult in my kids rapid growth. To my shame, when I'm at my lowest, I can hate looking at those doorway height markers and instead see only the new clothes and shoes I'll have to somehow procure. When I find myself thinking that way, I launch into the 'Lefty is a giraffe! Miss Thing is a giraffe!' song I made up. They shout back, "NO. I'M. NOT! I'M A [fill in a ridiculous animal here]" We do our corny choreography, dance like dorks and laugh. The world realigns itself.
But Wal-Mart, as usual, is a zoo. We've been cooped up all day, carless in the Atlanta heat, and the kids take advantage of my careful shopping to get wild. The ice cream truck humiliation has me depleted and shopping with the $25.67 refund card is depressing. Needless to say, by the time we've waited fifteen minutes in line at one of the two open registers (20 were closed), I'm at wit's end with the kids. Then it gets worse.
I have the receipt from the returns in my hot little hands. My purchases total exactly $24.63. Tax included, thank you very much. Yet the clerk assures me that the card doesn't contain enough money. How short am I? He can't tell me. I should have told him I was using a store card. So the nightmare process of figuring out what to return begins. What good is bread without butter for the toast they consume by the loaf? Peanut butter or jelly? The claritin which allows me to breathe normally or...never mind.
It's a recreation of that scene from Terms of Endearment when Debra Winger runs short at check-out, her kids are acting out and the cashier is New York City-rude. John Lithgow saves her but the kids and I are on our own.
Unemployment lines are shorter than the ones at Wal-Mart, with all it's unmanned registers, and those snaked behind me are audibly angry at me and my unruly kids.
I want to cry. I want to give up. They kids won't settle.
But I hold on. I hold on to moments of grace.
Here's one: the last thing that happened to me before I escaped NY was running into a former student from my year teaching journalism at SUNY. I was renting a car (another act of charity from a friend) for the drive to Atlanta and the impossibly young clerk who brought it around kept staring at me, clearly working up his courage for something. He looked familiar but I couldn't place him. The classes were huge.
Finally, he worked up the courage to remind me of who he was, then tentatively told me that this was his second job. His first is a job at a small paper in neighboring Troy, NY. I 'atta-boyed' him to death. Way to go, paying his writing dues by working two jobs! Gave him my email address and told him to keep me posted. He positively beamed.
Here's another: Skippy was driving us around to run some errands when I noticed an i-Pod'd young man of about 26 broiling in the heat and humidity that is a Georgia summer. He was holding one of those signboards for a BIG MATTRESS BLOW-OUT sale. He couldn't have looked more miserable if he were breaking rocks on a chain gang and my heart broke for him. If he was making more than minimum wage, I'll eat my hat.
He made me flashback to my early years in the USAF. Flushed with early success, I was riding high as a Korean linguist serving about 50 miles from Seoul. I was quite full of myself. A bunch of us GIs went on a bus trip to the capital and, from behind, I spied a man pulling a handcart uphill through Seoul's Mad-Max traffic. It was filled with long, thick pipes that looked extremely heavy. It was 1981 and S. Korea was still decidedly Third World. Open sewers and the like. It's daughers forced to prostitute themselves to callow young GIs .
Master of the obvious, I said to my seat mate, "That looks heavy." What I meant by this was: "Aren't these peasants interesting?". What I also meant was, "My, aren't we Americans so smart to be beyond such silly ways of doing things?"
Then our bus pulled even with the man, our eyes met through the window, and I saw the look of pure agony on his face. Agony. I'm not sure that I, or even the bus, registered to him in his pa
He was not a young man and pulling that load was, quite simply, killing him.
I was disgusted with myself. He was not an anecdote. He was a person with an incredibly, unimaginably difficult life. Five minutes out of my own poverty (by way of the USAF), I was looking down on someone who had it so much worse than myself. I've never forgotten the look on that man's face.
So, thirty years later, as I observed that young man despair in the sunshine, I felt nothing but sympathy and admiration for his willingness to take any job to survive in this economy.
"Skippy," I said, then just pointed at that miserable young man.
Wordless again, all we could do was honor his struggle by seeing it. Acknowledging it.
Then, out of nowhere as we communed silently with him, his face became another one entirely. Out of nowhere, a smile utterly transformed his face. It made him beautiful. I was stunned.
Then, I felt hot air on my back. Lefty had rolled down his window. He had spotted the man, too, and was waving and yelling, "Hello! Hey, how you doin'?"
The man waved and yelled joyfully back at my beautiful son.
Lefty made that man's day.
Another moment of grace.
Even a Stopped Clock...Unlikely Bedfellows...The Whole Schmear
I'm a hard core, unapologetic, pro-choice supporter. So check out the following and guess where I'm going with this.
Via HuffPo: "Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle has moderated a host of policy positions in her transition from a primary candidate to general election contender battling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. One thing she has not backed away from has been her insistence that abortion should be outlawed universally, even in cases of rape and incest.
In a radio interview Angle did in late June, the Tea Party favorite re-affirmed her pro-life sensibilities (rigid, as they are, even within Republican circles), when she insisted that a young girl raped by her father should know that "two wrongs don't make a right." Much good can come from a horrific situation like that, Angle added. Lemons can be made into lemonade."
Guess what? Angle is right. She's wrong, of course, about lemons/lemonade, etc. but right in that the anti-abortion, so-called "moderate" position is hypocrisy that only helps support the pro-choice position.
I've always gone squinty-eyed at those anti-abortion believers who carve out exceptions for rape and incest. If an unplanned pregnancy is not the kid's fault, then it never is, and it has an ironclad, irrefutable right to be born whatever the circumstances of conception. Why should those two situations, however heinous, make a difference? Either all future life has a right to be born or it doesn't.
So, points to Angle for being consistent and even downright brave (though she may be only another loony woman-hater. Women are the worst, you know.)
Here's hoping she's sane enough to force her opponents into a debate on why rape and incest are different viz choice. Having that argument, I believe, will make more folks understand that it shouldn't take the end of the world for a woman to demand control over her own body. While rape and incest are heinous atrocities, being forced to bear children that you don't want to have is awful, too. Especially in a world which gives less than a damn about women's lives, professions or choices, or what happens to the 'have nots' once they're born. So, forcing decent folks to admit that rape and incest exceptions cannot be squared with an anti-abortion position will bring us that much farther to them questioning their basic right to control our bodies.
If abortion is wrong when the condom breaks or when you couldn't be bothered to use one, then it's just as wrong when there's rape or incest. Either it's about the fetus or it's not.
Be a Patron of the Arts: Support an Independent Author
For those of you who've been asking how you could help, here's how.
I've decided to self-publish my next book (see: post-internet implosion of journalism and publishing) and am asking the reading public to help me do so.
I've started an event on Chip-in. Check it out here and thanks.