MindSpinner

By late July, another of the crabapples in my back yard looked as if it would have to go. The Japanese beetles had devoured most of the leaves, leaving only a few scattered bleakly across its branches. Whether the beetles or last year’s deer damage were to blame, the tree looked mostly done for, despite the fact that I had watered it through the summer’s drought. But this week, with beetles scarce, water sufficient, and temperatures moderated into the 80’s, the crabapple bloomed. The whole tree is covered in the delicate pink and white flowers of spring, unfurling right beside the fruit of this season - the nickel-sized blushing apples. Those out-of-season blooms and new green leaves suggest simple joy at the opportunity to thrive after a long season of pestilence and duress. It made me think that life’s springs can come anytime, quite out of season, whenever one finds opportunity and the sense to make the best of it and bloom.

I believe in the sanctity of human life, I really do.

This means that I don’t believe in throwing lives away in senseless wars.

This means that innocent Iraqi civilians’ lives are important just as are the lives of my former students now stationed in Iraq.

This means that a human life is important even after it clears the birth canal. Therefore, educational opportunity is critical, and that doesn’t just mean the opportunity to be tested under NCLB. This means that Erica who is working at Kroger but longing to go to college ought to be afforded the opportunity to do so, because the Ericas and the Erics across this country are our future, and their opportunities or lack thereof amount to our national destiny.

This means that reducing the number of children living in poverty in our country is a responsibility that belongs to us all, even if it costs us - gasp! - money.

This means that, as far as I’m concerned, if we as a society mandate the birth of every child conceived, even those whose parents are not in a position to provide for children properly, then we as a society are morally obligated to ensure that those children’s lives are worth living, that we regard those lives as equally sacred when they need medical care or social services or education, and regardless of race, social class, or eventual sexual orientation. I cannot help noting the utter hypocrisy of moves to ban abortion working hand in hand with moves to cut taxes and then bemoan the necessity of slashing services. The fact is that we are not, in this country, a village intent on caring adequately for all of our children (witness increasing rates of child poverty in the U.S.). Some of us are apparently intent on sounding very holy so that we can feel ourselves holy or get ourselves elected, but we do not put our money where our mouth is. We cut taxes and line our pockets and somehow fail to notice that lots of people seem poorer and more vulnerable as a result, especially our children.

Nonetheless, I’m not going to paper over ending an incipient human life with the words “terminating a pregnancy.” Frankly abortions in the second trimester and beyond become more troubling with each day of fetal development.

However, any notion of the “sanctity of human life” also means that the life of a sixteen-year-old girl is just as important as - no, more important than - incipient life created when egg and sperm fuse inside her womb as a result of an ill-advised tryst in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. The sixteen-year-old’s life has taken shape, is realized. The .1 mm blastocyst is simply not yet sentient life, though it has at least a 50% chance of becoming so if left undisturbed.

Everything taken together means that emergency contraception, as far as I’m concerned, is a boon, not a travesty. Some unwanted pregnancies can be prevented before conception actually occurs, others while an embryo is yet an undifferentiated ball of cells rather than a fetus whose ability to feel pain we must hotly debate. If a “morning after pill” (actually administered anytime during the first 72 hours after sex), can reduce the number of (later) abortions performed, then so much the better. In opting for emergency contraception, women would be exercising choice before the stakes rise with growing limbs, emerging heartbeats, and developing brains, and well within the earliest stage of pregnancy, when nature itself often ends pregnancies spontaneously.

Dictating national morality is a religious conservative’s fantasy, not the stuff of reality. We can urge celibacy and restraint to our young people, but we cannot ignore the fact that many of them will be sexually active anyway and thus need access to information, contraception, and emergency contraception/abortificants, as well as alternatives to abortion, such as adoption.

There are no perfect solutions this side of heaven to the problems of unwanted pregnancy; there are only choices that lead to more harm done or less. I see less aggregate harm done in a world where women have early, informed choices regarding contraception and reproduction, including the opportunity to deploy emergency contraception without a doctor’s prescription. Consequently, I am frustrated this morning by the FDA’s delay in approving the sale of the so-called “morning after” pill.

Did you ever think of what you’d do with your days in a parallel universe where there is actually time?

I think I got my “next action” list down to 15 items once this week. It’s swollen again into the 20’s. Meantime, I’ve been thinking about Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own. And I’ve been thinking about Issa in Between the Acts, weaving a stream of poetry in her mind as she navigates the business of her days, while books authored by men shoulder each other for space on the shelves of the gentleman’s library.

In my own life the endless “next action” list mostly is a matter of earning a living, or something ever slightly short of one, and taking care of a family. Woolf posits that, in order to write, a woman must have money and a room of her own. I’d take it farther than that.

I once helped the father of my children shut out everything else, excepting his job, such that he could write a dissertation in a year. I haven’t his singlemindedness. I will always be taking care of everything else. Self and mind are never fully consolidated and focused. I function in my life like a garden spider (the ordinary brown sort, not one of those striking and horrific yellow and black ones) looking after her web, constructing and reconstructing it, repairing damage, anchoring a part of self to every care, near and far, and navigating endlessly across strands at once strong and frail, here, then there, ever tending.

To write, one has to take a break from web-tending. (Maybe one even has to have the assurance that someone else will do the tending for just a little while when the web is both intricate and largely unprotected.)

To write, one has to have time to collect the self, to be still and let thought come into focus. Now that school has unfurled its annual procession of hectic days, collecting thought and self seems a hopeless luxury, except perhaps for an hour or two on a weekend morning.

So when that weekend morning comes, I am compelled to imagine this parallel universe where there is time for all things - for writing, for painting, for tending my garden, for slow, friendly conversations, for adventuring, for reading. (Witness the mind shooting out in all directions of desire - some admittedly not stated - at once.)

Today, though, when I contract wishing to a single idea, I know one thing I’d shoot for (though it’s never just one thing, with me). I’d devote time to thinking and writing dangerously. I’d like, specifically, to endanger empowered stupidities; I’d like to deconstruct rhetoric that makes puppets of God and everybody and language itself. I’d like to expose that which masquerades as “good,” but only masks quite the opposite.

Problem is, I’m out of time. I’ll have to settle for popping a load of dishes into the dishwasher instead. Given the state of the kitchen, that’s its own worthy cause.

It doesn’t take a war to cut short a young life. A wreck will do. Or a brain aneurism. Or drowning. Or - this time - lightning. Dead: one sixteen-year-old boy and the horse he was riding.

I still have Josh’s memoir on my hard drive.

When you teach, every one of your students walks out your classroom door with a piece of your heart. Enough said.

It is 1997, in a pet shop on Lawndale Drive in Greensboro, North Carolina. We are, at this time, a family of four, all gathered around a display of baby ferrets. We are collectively smitten. We buy one, a little older than the others, lighter colored, one disinclined to bite - a female my daughter names Buddy. A year later we will buy another, a larger male, Mr. Packers.

It is 1999. Buddy wins a prize at the school pet show. We have a picture of her in her proud owner’s arms, wearing a tiny hat topped with a bell. She wins a talent award for retrieving an ink pen. All her life she has absconded with ink pens and hoarded them under her favorite piece of furniture.

It is 2001. We are no longer a family of four. The two ferrets move with the children and me.

It is 2004, in August. We are living in a new house, one of our very own, except, as my son reminds me, it really belongs to the bank. The builder hasn’t got the last register in place over the vent in the living room. Buddy disappears one day. We search and search and find her three days later when I finally think to look in the crawl space beneath the house. I open the door and she comes running into the light.

It is 2004, in October. The ferrets are enjoying a day in their cage out on the deck in the crisp fall air, only come afternoon we find the cage door open and my son’s beloved Mr. Packers gone. My son looks for his pet for days. We still say that maybe somebody found him and is taking good care of him yet. We do not say he was likely killed by a neighborhood dog.

It is early spring 2005. Buddy has lost her hair, the baldness beginning at her tail and finally extending almost all the way up to her shoulders. She is thin and feeble. We think she will die but she doesn’t. She grows her hair back and gains weight, looking almost healthy again.

It is summer 2005. Buddy comes out to play, but she’s too old to romp up the stairs like an animated slinky. She chirps and hops a little and then finds a place for a nap. We talk about the fact that she is very old, for a ferret, and will probably not be around too long.

It is today. The cat slips out of the house, leaving the door ajar. Buddy follows. My daughter finds her lying in the yard some time later, heat stroke in progress. She tries to cool Buddy, tries to get her to drink. By the time I get home from school, life has gone. My son and I dig a hole in the hard clay near our tiny dogwood tree in the back yard. My son asks to be the one who shovels the dirt over the small body, which is wrapped in a square of scrap fabric. He does this as if he is making a soldier of himself, and this shoveling of dirt into a grave is part of the process. Together we lay a large flat rock from the stone path over the grave. My daughter does not come out of her room.

I throw away the sleeping bag that hangs in the ferret cage, along with the small table cloth my daughter laid Buddy on when she had done for her ferret all she could do, a table cloth I bought when there was only a couple and not a family at all. I wash the food and water bowls, clean the cage and store it in the garage. I tell myself I’ll take the cage to the Humane Society another day, and that, in November, I’ll cultivate the soil around the rock and plant some bulbs.