An old joke that reminds me of my mother

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An older lady gets pulled over for speeding…

Older Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?

Officer: Ma’am, you were speeding.

Older Woman: Oh, I see.

Officer: Can I see your license please?

Older Woman: I’d give it to you but I don’t have one.

Officer: Don’t have one?

Older Woman: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.

Officer: I see…Can I see your vehicle registration papers please?

Older Woman: I can’t do that.

Officer: Why not?

Older Woman: I stole this car.

Officer: Stole it?

Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.

Officer: You what?

Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.

The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.

Officer 2: Ma’am, could you step out of your vehicle please!

The woman steps out of her vehicle.

Older woman: Is there a problem sir?

Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.

Older Woman: Murdered the owner?

Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.

The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma’am?

Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers.

The officer is quite stunned.

Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.

The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer. The officer examines the license. He looks quite puzzled.

Officer 2: Thank you ma’am, one of my officers told me you didn’t have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.

Older Woman: Bet the liar told you I was speeding, too.

Death, destruction, renewal and change

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted.

The winter has been awash in deaths, expected and sudden, of friends, families, and acquaintances.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                    Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
–T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, Four Quartets

A lesson in perspective

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In May 2011, I went to a vacate of four illegally subdivided apartments. One of the tenants said to me, “You helped me when I was burned out several months ago.” I confessed that I didn’t quite remember, as there had been a lot of responses between then and Saturday. (I also find that it’s not healthy to dwell too much on the jobs once I’m done.)

But when I pulled out my list of Metrocards to give out, there was her name. She had been burned out of her apartment Christmas Day, and over Memorial Day was being put out of the illegal apartment her landlord had placed her in.

I left being grateful for my apartment, for family, and for my large and supportive group of friends.

On my aunt’s wake

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(This was written in 2007.)

I am Mary Elizabeth again for a night.

In the O family, the “patronymic” I carry is “Mary Elizabeth, Sister Catherine’s brother John’s daughter.” Or, “Mary Elizabeth, Jeremiah and Mary’s son John’s daughter.”

Dad was one of twelve children, and his sister my Aunt Peg was herself the matriarch of five children, 26 grandchildren, and at least half a dozen great-grandchildren to date. My brother and I were far and away the youngest of our generation, because Dad was 51 when i was born. I’m in an especially odd position because I’m old enough to remember many of Dad’s generation who are gone, but young enough to be accessible to the next two generations. Last night there were four (maybe five?) generations in the same room, and the oldest of my grandparents’ grandchildren was there. He’s 77. The youngest is my brother–39. It was good to have them in the same room.

Talking to relatives takes on this weird Russian-novel complexity, because all the references change depending on who I’m talking to. Usually I was referring to “My father your grandmother’s brother.” One cousin told me that when she first exposed her husband to The Family, he got totally confused when listening to her talk to my brother (a generation “up” but still the same age) about each one’s Grandma–who were daughter and mother. Kim says she paused to say to her hubby, “It’s okay, dear. When we get home, I’ll pour you a stiff drink and explain it all.”

Lots of photos, lots of stories. The latest ones I hadn’t heard were all of my bartender uncle Frankie (all the brothers did this but Frankie was the legend), who apparently worked (and drank) in every bar in Irish Yorkville. There was something about him bringing a horse into a bar on York Avenue; setting an obnoxious Italian barfly (and the relevance, according to this cousin, was “What was an Italian doing in one of our bars anyway?”) up with a crossdresser (in the 1960s); going AWOL to MC a show in WWII that headlined Bob Hope.

There aren’t too many stories of my dad. One cousin said, “Your dad never drank much at all–he was unique in this family.” He was also unique in living past 65 (way past), and having no major health problems until his last year. The alcohol gene apparently just got lost there, because my brother doesn’t like the taste at all, and I like it with food.

How much does your life suck?

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A moment for perspective:

  • Do you turn on a faucet for water that can be drunk, used to brush your teeth, bathe?
    780 million people do not have access to clean water.
  • Got a private place to take a shit?
    1.1 billion people don’t.
  • If you’re a woman of childbearing age, do you have access to your choice of feminine hygiene products–when, and as many as, you need?
    Hundreds of millions of women do not, and it’s a big reason young girls miss a lot of school.
  • Tired of reading bad news? The good news is, you can read, especially if you are female.
    785 million people are illiterate. Two thirds of them are women.
  • How are you doing financially compared to everybody else?
    That’s everybody, globally.

On the turning year–turning away from chaos

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Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

“East Coker”, Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot

This has been a season of loss, fear, anger, and shock.

Children are dead by a gunman, who is also dead, having murdered his mother. (How many deaths? Many count 26, for the schoolchildren and their adult protectors. There are two other souls gone in this, which we cannot, must not forget.)

Children on the verge of a new life in a new country have been turned back by political maneuverings. Parents, longing and preparing for years, have been shocked by the pre-arrival loss of the young lives they have striven to bring home.

Friends and acquaintances have succumbed to illness. The spectres of unknown diagnoses and tenuous futures are haunting others.

Churches have been burned; emergency workers assassinated; well-meaning helpers have turned on each other with judgment, partiality, and dogmaticism.

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” If this list of horrors were to be expanded to encompass a view of all of current human existence, surely the only possible response would be a soul-killing descent into χαος–the yawning abyss.

What is a human, and a humane, response, that human kind can bear?

The great American practical theologian, Fred Rogers, said this: “Look for the helpers.” Hear and watch the stirring of every great soul around you who offers a blanket; a bottle of water; or an ear to those who have worked too hard and seen too much destruction and despair.

Stand up. Put out your hand. Open your ears and your heart. Look within yourself.

You live, you breathe, and you have some gift–some action, some offering of space, time, will–that you can offer, which no other creature who lives, has lived, or ever will live, can ever offer to those in need.

Examine your world, your “complicated pattern of dead and living.” What lesson / pain / wisdom / knowledge / joy have you gleaned thus far in your life, that you can redeem and transform by using for the good of another?

Recognize it.

Give thanks for it.

Put it to use.

And you will have engaged in tikkun olam–“repair of the world.”

Or, in the words of a Christian mystic:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion
is to look out to the earth,
yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good
and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.

St. Teresa of Avila

Some videos about the Red Cross work that doesn’t make the news

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG0AtYeMufA&list=PLeC8i7LdqNeoxboNJ9_iN4Vy9JJ47EGu_

http://newsroom.redcross.org/2012/12/13/video-the-red-cross-responds-to-sandy-and-everyday-disasters/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yufZP-LZrk&list=PLeC8i7LdqNeoxboNJ9_iN4Vy9JJ47EGu_&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4FnJGaneg&list=PLeC8i7LdqNeoxboNJ9_iN4Vy9JJ47EGu_

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2KgmlKUsRA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQMxdKfSvEs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4Ws8_CrW0&list=PLeC8i7LdqNeoxboNJ9_iN4Vy9JJ47EGu_

 

 

Another personal vent

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(Since people seem to need to be reminded–everything on this blog is personal, from me, and not a reflection on any organization, entity, or any other carbon-based life form in this or any other universe.)

I see from meeting minutes here that Occupy Sandy is currently not helping individuals with direct money aid. (toward the end of the document)

I also see here that less than ten percent of money donated to Occupy Sandy has been spent on recovery.

Two things:

  • The first is that I do admire the transparency and documentation around Occupy Sandy’s work. I have donated money to Occupy and am happy to have done so.
  • The second is that the longer the work goes on, the more concern there is with process, procedures, and analysis. That is the nature of groups.

My frustration is that while Occupy Sandy is lauded as doing a “better” job than established relief organizations that are loudly derided and demonized, it is not subject to any of the same calls for speed of spending and individual assistance that the others are. I am not saying that any of these calls are appropriate or realistic–most of the time, they are not!

It just seems that Occupy can do no wrong and FEMA, Red Cross, and others can do no right. This is not helpful for anyone, and it is particularly damaging to cooperation among the actual human beings who are doing the work.

There is plenty of work to do, and plenty of opportunities for growth for all.

TANSTAAFL, or Administrative Overhead–Even for Occupy

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Occupy Sandy Spreadsheet screen shot

Occupy Sandy is doing spectacular work and has been a good example for relief aid in urban areas. Their publicly posted spreadsheet is a model of transparency.

But anyone who is claiming that every penny donated to Occupy Sandy is going to direct aid, is mistaken or deliberately misrepresenting the truth.

There are indeed administrative costs that are coming out of donations. $30,505.24 to WePay and $20,805.77 to the fiscal sponsor (Alliance for Global Justice).

So that is $51,311.61 that was donated that did not go directly to supplies for survivors of Sandy. Based on the donations to date of $622,555.95 (the amount on the Occupy Sandy WePay page at 4 p.m. on 12/8/2012), that means that 92 cents on every dollar donated has gone to services.Which puts OS exactly where the Red Cross is, according to the independent evaluator Charity Navigator.

The Alliance for Global Justice, has a rating of zero stars from Charity Navigator. This is quite a small organization (budget just about $1.5 million), and therefore may not have the liquidity to spend on building substantial policies, procedures, and financial controls. So it is possible that this rating may not completely reflect the reality within AGJ; I have linked to their website and the Charity Navigator report so that people may read for themselves.

I think Occupy Sandy has made wise decisions on spending money on these fees. It is appropriate to engage a reputable donation processor. It is appropriate to obtain a fiscal sponsor.

However, I think it disingenuous of those who would deride more established organizations for spending money on “overhead”, to ignore the realities of donation management.

(TANSTAAFL=There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)