Happy Thanksgiving, if it means something to you & my ongoing struggle with litotes
For many years of my life, most years actually, Thanksgiving was Uncle Al. The flystrip over the turkey, the turkey trapped in an oven accidentally set on self-clean instead of “bake,” and while “matters” have made it so the past few Thanksgivings have been spent here in Arizona, every other Thanksgiving of My Old Life, from the time I was a baby, was spent in Iowa.
The loss of the life force I called “Uncle Al” makes this particular holiday feel acutely painful to me. I really admired my uncle. The way he could tell a story, build anything, the way his wild exterior often belied the true tenderness he would always show toward the small things in life — babies and animals, particularly. And I am sad today because I will not again know him as he was in this life. Now he’s an ancestor, and I’ve spent a lot of time since getting sober thinking of my ancestors.
And maybe some of this year’s “holiday season” will be about honoring ancestors.
Maybe my Old Traditions don’t fit my life anymore, and for me that may be the only way forward. Some of my old traditions were really destructive — physically, emotionally, spiritually.
Last year, at this time, I was puking in Flagstaff as I recovered from an Ibrance-triggered Crohn’s flare that landed me in the ED just before a Thanksgiving Sarah and I spent miserably eating Whole Foods’ stuffing and turkey from beige containers, on a mattress, amid boxes in a shitty, overpriced duplex — two middle-aged women preparing to flee a region of our own country because the medical care in northern Arizona was about as good, in 21st Century America, as what a breast cancer patient might expect in Soviet Russia circa 1985.
I said what I said, and “we” should all be thankful this year that I am not a litigious girl. When my hands shake with the memory of what was done (or rather not done) to me “up-the-hill,” I do what one of my students, I’ll call him “William,” and I do. He struggles sometimes, as we all do sometimes, with frustration, and where to put it. He struggles sometimes, as we all struggle sometimes, with where to put our angst. So William and I put our hands in the “prayer formation” and we put them to our heart, and we feel our heart beat against our thumbs and we keep our hands there and breath deep until the heart beat hits softer against our thumbs. That’s what I have young William do when he’s melting down. And that’s what I do sometimes when I’m melting down about what happened, in the past, “up the hill” or not, and my hands won’t stop shaking and my heart is hitting so hard against my thumbs.
As I’ve instructed William to do, I do not move my hands until the shaking stops.
Sometimes, for me, the shaking just will not stop, and that’s where medication enters the picture, and I don’t feel shame for this anymore. I grew up at a time (not so long ago) when there was such tremendous shame associated with mental health issues, and when we are ashamed we hide and when we hide we self-medicate and for me, as it was with some of my ancestors, I liked to hide and self-medicate with alcohol because this way I didn’t have to reveal, much less really look at or discuss, all my human pain.
I was anxious when I was a kid, but that was the American 1980s. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-everybody! Reagan years. I had some kind teachers in those early days, but I was in Catholic school and while Vatican II (still hilarious) changed a lot of things as my friend Alana once told me, “Culture is stronger than reason.”
The Catholics made me anxious. Reagan made me anxious. The Russians made me anxious. I was born female in America in 1976. Maybe I was born anxious. Maybe I was an anxious fetus. This is entirely possible.
Also, Anxious Fetus is totally my new band name.
My “new” band.
As though there’s an “old,” much less, “current” band.
Remember when Anne Sexton had a band?
No? Just me? Carry on then.
I bought this pair of Baoding balls in Chicago when I was nineteen.
In my cinder block dorm room on the shores of Lake Michigan,
I taught myself how to use them, and they moved with me from Kenosha to Chicago to Milwaukee back briefly to Chicago then to Flagstaff and now here, more than a quarter-of-a-century later in Tucson, on occupied Tohono O’odham lands: Baoding balls in Chicago by way of China.
Kids notice all new things — haircuts, small injuries, mismatched socks — and so they noticed the appearance of the Baoding balls on my desk. In the morning, before whole school meeting, I showed a handful of students how to use them, though for most their hands are too small for this particular set.
Later a kid, I’ll call him “William,” noticed (for the dozenth time) the mala beads on my wrist — a set my mother bought after I was given my stage iv dx in January 2020. When I was in my early twenties my friend Lynn first taught me about mala beads, and she taught me that when you meet someone who needs them more than you, you are to give them away.
In this way, the ownership of the mala is a practice in detachment.
I hadn’t been ready to let them go when William noticed them before, and yesterday at the park, I felt suddenly, intuitively, ready; I rolled them off my wrist and told William to “keep them for at least one year, then give them to someone who needs them more than you.”
“How will I know?” He asked.
“You’ll just know,” I said.
He held his hand out in a fist, and I rolled the beads over his knuckles, onto his wrist. “So how do I work these?”
This was a great question. “This is how I do it currently,” I told William, and pinched a bead between my thumb and the crook of my middle finger. “And maybe you say ‘peace’ or maybe you say ‘help’ or maybe you say ‘truth.’” He nodded. “But that’s just the way I do it,” I clarified. “I’m not an ‘expert’ on mala beads or anything.” You have to say this with young kids because much of what adults in positions of perceived authority say or do is received as Absolute Inflexible Correctness by children.
This is also exactly why the education of children is such a serious matter. All children watch, listen, and learn by the words and actions of the adults around them — that includes, now, the adults on YouTube, Twitter, Fox News . . .
Because of the holiday, yesterday we had a lighter load of students which meant more time for me to prepare curriculum and dress up my workspace — tasks that have been delayed or slowed by school-and-medical-and-American-life shit.
During the lunch hour, I was supervising a small group of students in a classroom while organizing papers, disinfecting my workspace, hanging art, when a student voice called from the other room “Gruber, please come do this TikTok with me!”
I hesitated and then walked into the classroom.
“What’s this TikTok?” Recent “events” have made most reasonably sane American educators wary of anything TikTok related.
The kid approached me with her phone and showed me a choreographed dance that was currently a “thing” on TikTok. It seemed harmless and wholesome enough.
“Well, my dear,” I said. “I do not have time to learn that dance, but I can make a TikTok with you real quick.”
“What will you do, Gruber?”
“What should I do?” I asked her.
“Dance?”
“I will just dance then,” I said.
And so she did the choreographed dance, and I did . . . whatever that was. For the curious, my TikTok Debut is below:
And the best part of it was how she and other students laughed during lunch as they played the video over and over. “It gets more hilarious every time,” one kid told me.
In short, reader, I’m really thankful for these kids.
When I was very young, working a summer-temp job in a cubicle as an undergraduate, I swore to myself that when I got “out there” in the world I would find a job that was not in a cubicle, that made me feel alive, that made use of my limited gifts, and if I’m being honest, God has provided that for me.
There’s a young person, another student, I’ll call him Paul, who greets me, most mornings, by saying “Gruber, I want to be with you today.” Other students do this some days, too, but Paul is partial to hanging with me in the morning.
Yesterday, I walked in and was greeted by Paul who said, as per usual, “Gruber, can I be with you today?” My high schoolers, generally, never did this — they’d casually hang out with me in the classroom, linger a bit, but they were far too cool for this level of directness. It’s a young kid thing.
Paul often tells me that he plans to study the cosmos and “also cure cancer for you, Gruber.”
“I will not stop you, Paul,” I say. “And I will be delighted when you do.”
And usually, once other kids see Paul heading downstairs with Gruber, a few other early-morning-arrival students will show up chattily after Paul, and I’ve learned now that while it’s super fun to talk to kids in the morning, I also need this time to get work done, and so I’ve started putting them to work on helping me I organize, clean, run small errands for copies and folders. Occasionally move a little furniture.
They do these things gladly. Sometimes, in return for a special kindness, I’ll buy them a drink in the morning when I’m getting my coffee.
“Gruber, you’re always happy as hell,” Paul said yesterday morning, while a small gathering of his peers moved around my room, shuffling papers, checking on the classroom salamander (it’s not a salamander, but if I called it by the scientific name, none of y’all would know what I was talking about), and I paused. “What?”
“You’re always so happy,” Paul said. “You have problems, but you’re always just . . . like . . . happy. And that’s why I like being with you.”
And the reason I’m telling you this, reader, is that it shocked me to hear this observation. People have noted, at varying points and places in my life, that I seem happy, but more often than not people have noted that I seem quiet, aloof, tired, depressed, nervous . . . and indeed, I have often felt those ways, too. I struggle, as maybe you do, too, reader, with depression and anxiety. The kind that can’t always be turned off with breathing and meditation. The kind I inherited, came by honestly, the kind that was here before (though certainly not alleviated by*) The Pandemic and stage iv cancer sauntered into my little life.
*Is that litotes? I studied the English language for years and never knew that stupid fucking word until I started teaching AP and even then I was never quite sure if I fully understood its meaning. I may never fully understand. And I’m totally at peace with this fact.
The fact is, when I am with the kids, when I am creating, when I am being present in my own fucking life, I am usually pretty damn happy.
Paul’s observation was not an entirely true statement (would that I was always “happy as hell”), but Paul’s observation was a moment of validation for me with regard to the hard work I’ve done, and continue to do, on myself since God busted my head and heart open and said, “Listen, damnit. Listen.”
True listening has been difficult for me. Anxiety, depression, ADD, plus a kind of primal, ancestral reluctance-to-trust makes me the type of person for whom the task of truly listening has often been a Herculean task.
When I say True Listening, I mean the kind that comes from a real place of focus, openness, compassion, curiosity, and trust. Oddly, I’ve always been able to Truly Listen to students — whether they were adults or children — because there’s a peculiar vulnerability to the position of “student” to which I am acutely empathetic. The relationship between student and teacher is possibly as crucial as that between child and parent. Indeed, some of my teachers felt/feel like surrogate parents. Indeed, some of my students felt like/feel like surrogate children — long after they’ve left my classroom. Like recently I saw a post on social media written by a woman who was my student well over ten years ago and I was like“what-is-that-child-doing-out-there-on-the-streets-at-night” and had to catch myself and say “dude, she’s nearly thirty.” Because even with students where I was only their senior by fifteen, ten, or fewer years, they always felt like “my kids.” And even in the cases of Actual Adult classroom students, I have felt a kinship, an ownership over the fact that they were placing, in me, a great deal of hard-to-come-by Trust. (I must confess, I have never felt “maternal” toward a student older than me — that would be objectively peculiar even for Grubs Gruber aka, as of late, Grub-Hub, Groobz, and Grubie.) Even with the older students I understand their vulnerability, I understand the trust transaction that is taking place between us, and sometimes this understanding is a burden, sometimes I wish I didn’t take trust so, so seriously. And sometimes, I’m so infinitely grateful to God that I do take trust so damn seriously. Breaking trust is secularly, objectively, the most godawful, sinful crime one can commit. Even crazy Dante Aligheri would have agreed with me there. Hell (pun intended), I got that fucking notion from Aligheri’s crazy ass.
And I am thankful for my faith in trust.
Even when people are careless with my faith in trust, I must be thankful for my faith in trust. So must you, reader. Keep the light alive — the light of faith in trust.
When I started to lose faith in trust, I drank a lot of booze.
Things happen in an American life that make a person not feel real keen on the matter of trust between persons. Systems fuck us over, rip us off, prey upon our capacity for trust, our desire for trust, our need for trust.
As I study more and more on alcohol and alcohol addiction in America, alongside Class in America, I have come to firmly believe a few things — and note, I have no citations this Thanksgiving, no receipts, no evidence, no sources, to quote Sister Aloysius in Doubt, “But I have my certainty.”
Here is what I believe on this Thanksgiving:
1) Addiction to Alcohol is most definitely part genetic predisposition. And alcoholism is the root behavioral plague of most marginalized peoples in the Americas and Europe as far as I can tell. Alcoholism, as far as I can tell was caused largely by the ever-morphing, oft-malignant organism we currently call Capitalism 2) Capitalist Structures are, for 90% of the human race, the root sickness that causes certain corrosive behaviors — like alcoholism — to occur in the human animal in the first place. Like there was a “first ancestor,” in my case possibly some Irish kid, or German kid, suffering under some landlord, who got drunk at twelve and was like “damn. This shit makes my miserable, meaningless life feel way more tolerable.” And the only reason that kid’s life felt meaningless or miserable was because Feudalism which is just an earlier form of Capitalism which is just some stupid-ass matrix (according to me), and 3) when I lose faith in trust I drink alcohol and when I drink alcohol I die. And when I say “die” I mean this literally and figuratively.
These three beliefs are important for me to revisit, reframe, and reshape, as I enter into a season that is particularly difficult this year because I am in a new land, in a new home, at a new school, in a new state of health, away from, and with a great many matters of the heart, body, and mind. And Life (capital L) is about other people, is about relationships, is about connections, to quote The Muppets Take Manhattan, “Life is peoples. Is music. Is dancing. Is potatoes.” And we can have no truly good things in this life (not even potatoes) if we do not have capital-T-Trust.
And we cannot have Trust if we do not believe in Trust and more than just believe in Trust we must revere and nourish Trust above all things.
You know what I mean, reader?
No? Yes?
Who cares?
Exactly.
Yesterday, I was telling a colleague who is originally from Rhode Island about “Hippie Exposure” because I just knew she would know exactly what I meant, and she did. It’s like radiation exposure, right? I laughed with her. Eventually, there will be side effects.
And so if you’re reading this and thinking “damn, Gruber has got some mad Hippie burns going on right now” — maybe you’re a little right. And maybe just like actual targeted radiation exposure has, Hippie exposure might just be saving my Actual Life right now.
Happy Thanksgiving, if it means something to you. I think it means something to me, still, but perhaps something “new.”
I spent all morning gluing together this piece to share with you, reader.
I am grateful to have this time and this platform to share what is on my heart and mind. I am grateful to all of my teachers (current and former; formal and informal; figurative and literal) who shared and continue to share their knowledge and wisdom with me, and all those who take (and have taken) gentle care of my trust. And I am thankful for the goodness and kindness of nurses and doctors who have cared for me in this difficult year, particularly Dr. Beth Dupree, who taught me, early on in this new life with metastatic cancer, that there was hope and who treated me like a human being in a system that so often treats patients like data points the same way the American education system so often treats its students and so forth . . . And for all the medical staff, nurses particularly. Thank you. The comfort nurses have given me in the past two years, particularly, has been immeasurable, and particularly meaningful knowing that nurses in America contend so frontally with COVID and all the political bullshit that has come from the mess this country has made of The Pandemic.
I am thankful for mercy. The mercy of my colleagues who step forward when I need, for my actual life, to “step away” and care for my fragile body which is no more or less fragile than any other human body but that it has a bit more Ibrance and cancer floating around in it than other human bodies of my age group.
And I am thankful for Sarah, who has taken the burden off me this Thanksgiving, to let me write this piece, drink coffee, listen to good music on the good headphones, laze about in my pajamas while she procures holiday foods she doesn’t even necessarily like — that’s love, folks. And that brings me to a nice landing spot for this post. Maybe it’s the nostalgia I feel around this time of year, maybe it’s the Ibrance talking, maybe I really am sick on Hippie Exposure, but I really have come to believe, more than anything else, that the whole fucking point (f-bombs for my dear Uncle Al) of this life is capital-fucking-L-Life is capital-fucking-L-Love.
And on that note, I’m off to shower before donning my traditional Thanksgiving eatingwear.
