Long time coming

I checked the date of my last post this evening and realized it corresponded roughly to the start of the Big P's Project SafeSpace, a homeless day center providing shower, laundry facilities, and most of all, a community of welcome and respite for the "residentially challenged" in our city. As the main staff person for this program, a role which often requires me to pull 12-hour days, I should not, therefore, be surprised that it is now August and I haven't found the time to create one single post on this blog. Yet I am--so many issues lately weigh on me and inspire in me just such depths of reflection as would fit perfectly into a nice, meaty blog post, and it's frustrating that I haven't been able to use this outlet to process the challenges of working with marginalized communities. I've missed my little blog, and I missed hearing from those of you who read it!

So the nose goes back to the creative grindstone, and I'll catch you up on some of the happenings of the last few months.

--

April: I traveled to Washington, D.C. for a spate of congressional lobbying with the tri-state Equity & Inclusion campaign, which fights for a just & equitable use of Gulf Coast recovery funds with the ultimate aim of eradicating poverty in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. What can I say--we like a challenge. (See longer post, with many more photos, here.) The Economic Development/Workers' Rights team in front of the Cannon Office Building.

Getting to sit down with Congressional staffers and elicit some interest from a few of them in regards to the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act (a WPA-style pilot program designed to create 100,000 high-quality, non-exportable jobs focused on rebuilding existing and developing new public infrastructure & civic works projects in hurricane-affected states) was an empowering experience. The glimpses we stole into the inner workings of the legislative branch of our government were fascinating, as was the development of strategy to push our legislation to the forefront--who do you target based on membership in relevant committees and subcommittees? Who owes whom favors in terms of sponsoring legislation? What important tidbits can you cull that will help you tailor your pitch to appeal to a representative's home district or personal history? It was easy to see how people get caught up in the game, the powerplays and tactical moves and the win/lose/compromise calculations. And the suits.
But that was also what disturbed me most about our visit--the fact that there is a game to play, when you're talking about real people's lives, the fate of real communities. The fact that in a supposed democracy (although really we live in a republic, a fact that is often conveniently glossed over in social studies class) the people have to travel a thousand+ miles to a 4 acre block of office buildings where the dress code is Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers in order to have any kind of a chance to get a law passed that is vitally important to their survival...well, let's just say that isn't exactly an accessible option for the vast majority of our nation's residents. Which was the great thing about E&I--it gave us ordinary folk a chance to do just that. But it bothers me that I am listened to and taken much more seriously when I am part of a well-funded, large campaign that can fly me into D.C. to corner a staffer in the Senate cafeteria* instead of simply showing up at my representative's local office and trying to get on his/her appointment calendar. The tip of the iceberg...
*(where Senators pay $3 or $4 for a buffet meal for which everyone else has to fork over $12!! What about a discount for Americorps VISTA serving their country on a shoestring volunteer stipend (not me but close)?? Or for that matter, a discount for ordinary, tax-paying citizens who don't make the Senate's yearly salary of almost $170,000??)

Okay, let's not be entirely cynical--let's take a moment for paparazzi celebrity highlights! We saw Sen. Barbara Boxer dress down a security officer who didn't recognize her and tried to make her stand in the metal detector line. Nuh-uh, Mr. Security Man, you don't mess with the Senator! We also watched Dennis Kucinich's wife flit through his office looking dressed to kill and trilling along in her lilting British accent...yeah, so I'm reaching.

Also, a real joy, truly, to spend time with my family's good friend and my advocacy mentor/heroine Cat Cloud, Vice President of Important Things at the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), and her lovely stepdaughter at the brand spankin' new Nationals park, where she helped me score my first ever complete baseball game!




Also in April: Jazzfest. It rawked.
Feathers + SoCo + Babies = Jazzfest.


Like Woodstock, but with more clothing & fewer mind-altering drugs.


Hot 8 Brass Band--one of my fave-o-rites--with Mardi Gras Indians. Sweet.

We saw also Alain Toussaint, Elvis Costello, Al Green, Calle 13 (my new favorite Puerto Rican hip hop/reggaeton/salsa/funk/rap/brass group), and a bunch of swing stuff. And Mamadou Diabate!


May: Our first Open House/Block Party as The Big P! We finally caught our breath from moving into our new offices (in January) and getting SafeSpace and ESL and a bunch of other programs up and running, so we threw a party to celebrate/show off our digs/welcome the neighborhood.

First food & libations: Then dancing ensued:


June: Visit to Hotlanta to see The Fam/The Sister. Botanical gardens, they were beautiful!
Weird poofy trees.

Lovely waterlilies.

Frog and Toad. I mean Leah.


Also in June: Our prayer vigil for immigration reform on the steps of the Capitol in Jackson--read the article about it in the Mississippi United Methodist Advocate.



July: Wow, July was insane. I was out of town every single weekend; came back the last weekend late Saturday night to help build a fence Sunday for our move from the old house to my roomies' brand new house a few miles away. No wonder I'm still recovering.

First weekend: 4th of July in NYC with friends from Habitat, mainly to see the Red Sox school the Yankees on their home turf. Mwahaha. Scored my second ever baseball game--thanks, Doug! (Clarification: I've been to several pro baseball games, but these were the first two for which I've kept score.)
Also trekked to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge (a fascinating feat of engineering!), reveled in the glory of deciduous trees in Central Park--I didn't realize how much I'd missed deciduous forest here in the Land of the Pines. Hit up the Met (my first time there--this
painting of haunted Russian pacifist/activist/writer Garshin, plagued by mental illness, stopped me in my tracks), including a visit to my old friend Cézanne, some QT with the toothpaste thick texture of Van Gogh's sunflowers & Degas' bathing women, and an ogle or two at my favorite French photographers, Cartier-Bresson & Doisneau. A modern photography exhibit introduced me to this gem of ironic composition, "headless" authorities photographing the body-less human head remains of the infamous Cake Box Murder.

Also enjoyed: Afghani & Moroccan cuisine in the Village; REAL bagels with tofu cream cheese (ahhh, heaven--I went there so often the bagel shop men wished me bon voyage and wanted to know when I was planning on returning); and saw the Tony-award winning out of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater. Read reviews here and here. It was excellent--brooding and dark and hysterical and masterfully acted, especially by Estelle Parsons as the strung out matriarch, Violet Weston, and Steppenwolf veteran Amy Morton as Barbara, the eldest of three daughters trying to salvage the family vessel from the rocky shoals upon which her mother has steered it; she ultimately, however, ends up taking her mother's place as the vice-gripped captain of a sinking ship. Highly recommend it.


Second weekend: Our first ever Mujeres Unidas (Women United) leadership retreat! A smashing success involving visioning/mission statement development, communal art project, charades, beach time, good food, great women, and maybe just a smidge of merry-making. :)


























Third & Fourth weekends: a 2,000-mile roundtrip drive to RAGBRAI (The Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) and a visit to my grandma's house in the land where the tall corn grows. Excellent use of Spandex.

I break my sunglasses before we even get on the road. Classy.


"RAGBRAI: Just you, the open road, and 10,000 of your closest friends."



The Cuzins, Day 2 (did I mention we biked about 115 miles in two days?)


Flossie & Leah prepare to take their two-woman show on the road.


Jobby, our little monster thingamabob, shows off the corn we picked from my uncle's sweet corn patch. I ate a lot of that, helped freeze some of it with my sister & mom, and brought a bunch back for lunch for folks at Project SafeSpace. The homeless community of the Gulf Coast concurs: Iowa Sweet Corn surpasses any and all Mississippi corn impostors. Mmmmm.



Alright, now that we're all caught up--look for more focused, subject-specific musings in the near future.


Happy August!

More Azaleas! etc.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Azalea Time

I've been on the Coast a year this past Tuesday, and once again, it's Azalea time, thank heaven!

Feast your eyes:

More to come in white, lavender, and other shades of pink/magenta. They are simply profuse, my friends, and it is only because my digital camera has notoriously short battery life that I have not yet posted more snapshots of these gorgeous things.

A pair of houses I saw driving from church to the beach for my post-service run last weekend:

This house, right next door to the first, and only a few blocks from the beach, still bears the grafitti tattoos of post-Katrina FEMA numbers & insurance claim inspectors.

Perhaps because they sit devoid of the normal furnishings that signify a house taken over by inhabitants, these buildings seem to stand as entities unto themselves--not bare-bones shells waiting to be filled with possessions, but strong, sinewy edifices on the verge of stretching out their pillars and striding solidly off down the road, with purpose, freed of material trappings, never to look back.

This might also be because the one jacked up on stilts has a sign saying "Kosciusko House Movers" hanging out front.


Garden plot update:


My friend E & I turned over two bags of organic compost & two bags of dried live oak leaves into the plot, getting it ready to plant after I get back from our trip to Florida next weekend. I'm chomping at the bit already, can't wait to garrrrrrden! (ooh, piratey.)


A joyous Easter to all, and to all, a good night!

The Fecund Gulf

"O God, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
it is teeming with countless creatures,
living things both small and great.

There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it."
--Psalm 104:24-25

Last weekend my sister came to visit (hurrah for lovely sisters who sacrifice their time and their money to come and see you--and as a birthday present, no less!) and it was fantastically refreshing. We ate too much, we slept in (a little), we got sunburned and bug-bitten. And we got to have those great long conversations where you find you don't have to explain yourself because all the ground work is already laid--you've known each other for so long, learned each other's habits, passions, mannerisms and endearing and/or annoying idiosyncrasies, and so the person you're talking to already gets it, gets you. It's like jumping right back into the middle of a book you haven't picked up in five months, and not having to go back and reread to catch yourself up because you know the story so well. And to think we used to fight about who crossed the invisible line in the back seat of the car...

The other thing we did last weekend was Nature. We saw and experienced so much wildlife that I told The Sis we should be getting our own Discovery Channel show. Here's a little taste:

Saturday we went to the beach armed with cameras and sunscreen and wandered out onto a dock with some kind of shorebirds perched on the end, hoping to get a shot or two (The Sister is a photographer, amongst other things).

While she was on her belly stalking these two smidgeons of birds--who, seemingly incapable of flying far enough to get safely back to shore, just kept edging closer and closer to the end of the dock until they had nowhere else to go--I was experimenting with the effect of my shadow on a school of tiny fish swimming against the current like iridescent grains of rice. Suddenly a great, beautiful heron flew almost directly over our heads. The Sister was trying to follow it with her camera as it passed us, when, lo and behold, a second heron as magnificent as the first came in to land about twenty feet away from us on our dock. Yes, we were laying low, and yes, we weren't really moving, but I was awed that such a normally skittish bird (the same species that takes off from the pond I run by in the mornings if I so much as breathe wrong) would choose to stay this close to humans. The heron (a great blue) just stood there for 10 or 15 minutes, unperturbedly grooming itself, inspecting us, and scanning the horizon for... what? Its partner? Food? Do herons just sit and veg out sometimes with no purpose other than to stand there lookin' good?

The highlight of the visit in terms of comedy was definitely the "heron pretends to be dog by scratching itself with long clawed feet" routine.

I'm a romantic, I freely admit it--but in the tradition of Native spirituality, it felt like the Heron Spirit had deigned to pay us a visit. It felt pretty special.


Next The Sister tried wading out into the water to snap a few photos of a bosomy pelican napping on a pier piling. It didn't seem to feel too enthusiastic about posing; but I got some good shots of my sister realizing she was knee-deep in saltwater holding a battery-operated device!

As she waded back out of the water, we were approached by another form of wildlife: a 2-year-old gabbling incoherently about the little crabs in the reeds--or something. Lest you think he is a little behind developmentally in terms of learning to speak intelligibly, we learned from his grandparents that he is learning to speak English and Portuguese--we just felt dumb compared to a little kid who could tell whole stories about marauding airplanes and spies in two different languages (albeit at the same time).

Later that afternoon we took it into our heads to go crabbing, an adventure which started out at the marina bait shop with a lesson from an elderly black lady who taught us how to tie a lead string onto a crabbing net like she'd been doing it her whole life--which, come to think of it, she probably has; another lady we met later that afternoon was crabbing for "groceries," as she put it. This is one way people put food on their tables down here.

Then off to the grocery store for a pack of chicken necks, one of which we tied to the sweet spot in the middle of the crab net and lowered off of the public pier (see The Pier). When lowered to the bottom, the upper ring of the net collapses flat onto the lower ring, leaving the bait innocently lying on the ocean floor, free to tantalize passing crustaceans. Every 20 minutes or so (we were told), you pull the net up and see what you've captured. Easy enough, we figured--we'll have caught enough in a few hours to give us both a few boiled crabs for dinner, no problem. Heck, let's invite the neighbors!

Four hours later, grand total of caught creatures (drumroll, please):

-1 one-clawed, midget crab too small to keep.
-1 shrimp. Which fell through the net.

Dinner was a DiGiorno's frozen pizza from Winn Dixie.

* * *

I should mention some more, well, impressive denizens of the Gulf we encountered at the Pier. A whole family was fishing and crabbing at the very end of the pier, and amidst the shrieks and laughter and the sound of aluminum can tabs snapping open, we heard a pre-teen voice squeal "It's a dolphin! Look, a DOLphin!!!!" It was, in fact, 3 dolphins (species unclear)--a mother and a baby swimming cheek-to-cheek, so to speak, and a third animal (Dad? Mom's BFF? Godparent?) swimming a distance away. They came within, what, a quarter of a mile of the pier? and then moved back out again, staying in the area for quite a while. We saw them from the bay bridge the next day, as well; because they stayed in the same place for two days running, and because the mother and baby were swimming so close together, we hypothesized that Momma had just had the baby and was sticking in a sheltered spot to help it get used to swimming on its own. I'd never seen a dolphin in the bay before--I'm sure it happens all the time, but all the same, the cetacean sighting along with the heron visit conspired to make me feel we were having an enchanted day, despite the crab fiasco! (I've since been informed, by the way, that crabbing at the public pier probably did it--it's overcrabbed. Next time, The Sis and I will be heading out to the Gulf to a less popular spot to get us some crawly critters for dinnah.)

The next day we borrowed a friend's kayak and hit the wetlands. I am proud to say that it took us almost no time at all before we were smoothly gliding through the water, paddles synchronized in a glowing example of sibling solidarity... well, minus the numerous times I though The Sister needed some help turning and I added my own back-paddling or braking, thus throwing off her careful calculations about how much reverse thrust would be needed to bank a turn. I couldn't resist--I was just trying to help!

But seriously, we executed some sweet maneuvers, including reverse paddling and three-point turns, and we only got stuck once--in someone's front yard! I was unaware that private individuals have docks leading from their houses out into the wetlands, and that, even if you are inadvertently intruding into their "lawn," they will wave enthusiastically and walk all the way to the end of their dock laden with Cokes and cups of ice to cool you down from the hot hot sun. Now THAT is Southern Hospitality!

Aside from mastering the art of the kayak--which can be really euphoric when you get a good, coordinated pace going and find yourself slicing cleanly through the water--the rest of the experience was rather Alice-in-Wonderland. Kayaks sit so low in the water that you end up at eye-level with the reeds and the mud, and the red-winged blackbirds squawking at you that you're invading their territory are actually perched menacingly close above your head, so that you feel they may indeed have the upper hand and it would be best not to incur their wrath. This circumstance also allows you to drift in close enough to observe the minuscule crabs burrowing into the mud anchored by the waving grasses of this water-prairie. At times, the blackbirds and the great blue heron which buzzed our watery foxhole (the same which starred in yesterday's dockside drama??) actually made me feel I was traveling through a rolling Illinois grassland.

The labyrinthine* channels leading off of the main waterway are so precise that you wonder if they weren't laid out by humans hands. Every twist and turn as you navigate their meandering corridors is a surprise; once we turned a corner a bit too quickly and surprised an alligator out of its nest, right into the water beside us. Alligators move fast, so fast that my sister missed the whole thing because my head was in her way (I was sitting in the front). This capacity for speed, coupled with the fact that we were now sitting in a very low-slung plastic shell (which no longer seemed very sturdy) in opaque brown water concealing the whereabouts of a creature whose bite PSI** can be comparable to that of having a small pick-up truck dropped on you evoked a response that can be best summarized by the word:

PADDLE!!!!

We saw neither hide nor claw of this superb predator after it slipped into the water, fortunately--just a whole lot of fish jumping and flopping out of the water (trying to escape alligators?? Trying to grab an insectual snack?), a small <--- green heron (they're about 18 inches in body length), and a whole lot of boaters destroying the wetlands by going so fast through the main channel that their wake violently slammed the fragile reed-laced mud, thus carelessly washing away vital habitat. I felt like painting a gigantic NO WAKE sign in red letters on white plywood and installing it in a prominent location in the marina, perhaps under cover of nightfall in some sort of eco-guerilla action--hmmm, it's dark out now...where do we keep the spray paint?

This intimate tour of an unfamiliar ecosystem was like getting to peer at a Caravaggio up close; maybe beforehand you had a vague notion that the painting was a masterpiece, but you had never really looked at it that carefully. I'd heard how magnificent and ecologically vital the wetlands are; but now, I've stood nose-to-nose with the brushstrokes and discovered for myself this magical world teeming with incredible life, an entire network of organisms that, from afar, only looks like a lot of grass and water--pretty, but unanimated. Ah, how very artful is Mother Nature!

*awesome word, no?

**http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/alligator.html

The Pier

One of my favorite spots around these parts so far is the public pier on the bay near my trailer. I biked down there after work today to watch the fish jump and the sun set and the near-full moon rise. Sea gulls were squawking and fighting over the morsels tossed to them by a man shrimping closer in to shore; a family was fishing down at the end of the dock. I looked up at one point, idly pausing from writing my thoughts in my journal (thanks, Duck!), and happened to spot the king of birds--a great blue heron wading in the reeds. He waded, stood; waded, stood; then flew up to alight on the pier where the shrimper had been a few moments ago. His progress from pier to pier was contemplative, unhurried; eventually he made his way over towards the backwater pond where I usually see him during my morning jogs. He'd been absent this morning, and it was comforting to spy him out on the bay, a missing part of my landscape familiarly restored.

I know you're wishing I'd taken a picture, but some things are infinitely better in person.