July 2, 2004

• Burn, Burn, Burn

  Wednesday, the light outdoors was orange and surreal.  The sky was
  brown.  Today (Thursday, because I’m starting this before midnight
  here, but I know it won’t be posted until Friday) the smoke/cloud cover
  was thicker and there was less light, less color to everything. 
  No real sunshine reaching the ground for a week or more has put a chill
  in the air.  I hear a little edge of fear in some people’s voices
  when they talk about the wildfires.  Many of us have friends and
  family in the Interior where those fires are.  Many are being
  evacuated.

  Particulate matter in the air here under the smoke plume leaves cruddy
  little deposits in the corners of our eyes, two-leggeds and
  four-leggeds alike.  I suppose the feathered ones flying around
  out there and being quieter than usual have crap in their eyes,
  too.  Front page of the Anchorage Daily News today had a picture
  of a hot shot crew up near Fairbanks, taking a break in camp, looking
  smoke-grimed and exhausted.   Colorado is sending us 150
  firefighters, since they currently have no fires there to fight. 
  Thanks, guys.

  Locally, a ban on open burning led the fireworks stands to voluntarily
  take their rockets and other aerial fireworks off the market. 
  When conversation at the neighborhood general store (at Camp Caswell, a
  campground down the highway a few miles) centered on the fires, the
  owner told me that people have been coming in asking for campfire wood
  and they’ve been saying they don’t have any for sale and telling them
  about the burn ban.   State troopers and park rangers, who
  generally spend a lot of time figuratively putting out fires, have been
  doing it literally lately.

  It was my night to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting.  One of
  the women asked me how I was doing in the smoke and all, and I patted
  my pocket and said I’d been using my inhaler a lot.  She grinned
  and lifted her shirt tail, showing me the inhaler tucked into her
  waistband…. the sisterhood of the wheeze.

  At the end of the meeting, I walked out onto the porch and into the
  middle of a silly argument.  The sun has been no more than a hazy
  red-orange disk for days and daze, and there it was, barely glowing
  through the smoke cloud, right where it’s supposed to be that time of
  day this time of year.  One woman was insisting that it had to be
  the moon, that it wasn’t bright enough to be the sun.  I added my
  voice to those of the others trying to reason with her.  The
  moon’s in Sagittarius, nearly full, couldn’t be anywhere near the sun,
  and besides, I said, “the moon’s not bright enough to show through the
  smoke.”  Her heated reply was, “I’ve seen the moon plenty of times
  in the daylight.”  I went and got in the van.  Why
  bother?  Let her have her delusion.  I was in too good a mood
  to get involved in silly arguments.

  Greyfox didn’t open his stand today.  He spent the early part of
  the day doing his laundry and catching up before the big holiday
  weekend with the sort of work that needs to be done to run a business,
  but which doesn’t directly result in any income:  organizing
  stock, calling wholesalers about defective merchandise, etc. 

  This afternoon when I got there we went to lunch together and to a
  couple of thrift shops.  At the first stop, he bought five videos
  for resale.  At the second stop I found a few small items and was
  ready to leave when he called my attention to a coat.  He said
  he’d been looking for one for himself, but this was a woman’s coat and
  had, “the finest hand,” he’d ever felt in a coat.  He has taught
  me that term, my clothes-horse old man.  Since knowing him, now I
  know that “hand” means the way a garment feels to the touch.

  I let him lead me to the coat, I tried it on, and I let him buy it for
  me–a grand total of $6.00, for a full-length (to my ankles) dark brown
  double-breasted silk trench coat with a zip-in wool liner.  
  I’m laughing out loud as I write this.  He was so pleased to have
  found it, and I was at least that pleased to bring it home and put it
  in my closet.  Right now, I’m back to feeling that triumphant
  pleasure, but for a while this evening I was burned up, totally pissed
  off, speechless with indignation.

  I spent a good portion of my drive home letting the curves in the road
  and the jazz on my radio soothe away the slow burn I’d been doing since
  the checkout line at the supermarket.  I had vented to Greyfox,
  who waited for me in the car as I picked up a few items, and he had
  said if it had been him, he’d have talked to the manager about
  it.  That thought hadn’t even occurred to me, although I did
  stifle an urge to punch, slap and/or throttle the clerk who checked me
  out of there.  As it was, she got away with it, the bitch. 
  Maybe I’d better explain myself….

  There were four checkers working.  I had only three items, so I
  could have gone to the express lane, but it had the longest line. 
  Two other lanes each had heavily laden carts being emptied and other
  big loads waiting behind them, so I took the one where I saw a young
  girl pushing an empty cart through and the checker just finishing up
  bagging a big order.  The girl was with her mother and several
  siblings.  The kids were asking for various things from those bins
  the stores place there to catch the eyes of impulse-buyers.

  I could tell they’d been fed before they came to the store, because
  there was none of the whiny, irritable, out-of-control behavior I often
  see in kids at the supermarket, whose parents apparently don’t know
  shit about low blood sugar.  These children were asking politely,
  and their mother was refusing calmly.  I was impressed.  The
  woman had a plastic card in one hand and a couple of slips of paper in
  the other, and I heard her ask the clerk which way she wanted to do
  it.  This clerk often has a sneer on her face, but it was even
  more pronounced than usual as she told the woman that her food stamp
  total was six hundred and something.

  The daughter who’d been helping to push one of the carts exclaimed at
  the total and her mother told her, “It takes a lot to keep you guys
  fed.”  None of them looked as if they’d been going hungry, but
  they all had the soft contours of people on high-carbohydrate
  diets:  lots of cheap pasta, grains, beans and rice, not so much
  protein or fresh vegies.

  The mother swiped her food stamp card through the reader and put it
  back in her purse.  The clerk had laid a big ring of keys on the
  scanner and looked annoyed as she told the woman she’d have to swipe
  her card again because the scanner had apparently been trying to read
  the code-strip on a tag on the key ring and the card-swipe didn’t
  take.  Calmly, the woman got her card back out and swiped it again.

  With nothing better to do, I was just standing there observing her and
  her family.  She was tall, statuesque, graceful and gracious, in
  plain but clean and neat clothing, with understated make-up. 
  There in that noisy place surrounded by children making unreasonable
  requests (though they did so quietly and politely), coping with
  inefficiency and rudeness from the clerk, she was unruffled.  This
  was no placid cow of a woman who didn’t know how to be ruffled. 
  She was a queen who wouldn’t allow herself to stoop to behavior beneath
  her dignity.

  The kids were clean, well-groomed, well-behaved and working together to
  organize and deal with four cart-loads of groceries.  I got the
  impression the woman was quite young, and I was trying to get a close
  look at her face, to see just how young.  I guess she felt my eyes
  on her, because she turned and made eye contact.  I smiled
  sincerely and got a sincere smile in return.  I guessed her age at
  mid-to-late twenties.  Then she had to turn back to the impatient
  clerk who was ready to handle the non-food part of the order.

  I suppose the slips of paper the young woman had were some sort of cash
  vouchers, because she signed them both and the clerk took them and
  handed back a few dollars cash.  Seeing it, one of the little
  girls said, “Oh, can we go to…” and the mother replied, “No,” as she
  put the money in her pocket.  “This goes in my gas
  tank.”   As the clerk folded up a yard or more of cash
  register tape and handed it over, she said in a snotty tone of voice,
  “Today you saved $129.45, Ms. ____.”  The girl who had exclaimed
  over the total exclaimed again, “One hundred twenty nine!?!”  Her
  mother smiled at her and said with evident pride, “I know how to shop
  the sales.”

  The stately young mother and her sweet kids began wheeling away their
  month’s groceries and the clerk raised her voice to almost a shout… a
  whiny, snide half-shout, dripping sarcasm:  “Eenjooy your holiday
  weeeekend, Ms._____!”   As my few items traveled the conveyer
  belt and I shoved my basket through, the clerk raised up on her
  tippy-toes and looked past me at the two people in line behind me, who
  had apparently seen that this was the shortest, fastest-moving line and
  grabbed it.  The clerk whined, “Why’s everyone getting in my
  line?  There are three other checkers working.”  She sounded
  aggrieved that any of us would dare to expect her to do her job.

  Then, as she turned and looked up at me, the woman’s voice changed, and
  just as polite as can be she asked me, “how are you?”  I answered
  sincerely, “grateful that I don’t have a big family,” as I took a last
  look at the back of the tall young woman and her helpful little brood,
  because I knew that I would never have been able to have remained as
  regally unruffled through that experience as she had.

  Then the despicable little wretch leaned over toward me and whined,
  “but she didn’t have to pay for any of that… it was all food stamps.”
    My lips clamped tight, I censored the first response to cross my
  mind,  “Who the fuck do you think you are!?!”   Doing my
  best to emulate that calm young single mother, I just stood there
  dumbfounded as the sawed-off little fireplug-shaped runt
  continued:  “She does this every month, and she always comes
  through my line.”  By then, I’d already thought of three other
  things to say to her, none of which would have been proper. 

  I kept my mouth shut as she went on telling me about how she’d had the
  good sense to stop after her two boys were born, and on and on in that
  vein.  I was remembering those few years when Doug was little and
  he and I had been on food stamps and what a mixed blessing it had been,
  being able to feed us just barely adequately, but at such a high cost
  in time, aggravation and humiliation.  I used to refer to those
  trips into the welfare office for interviews, “fighting the dragon.”

  I know there are many working people in this country who resent paying
  taxes to support people like that beautiful young woman and her alert,
  intelligent and polite children.  I suppose that was part of the
  motivation for that sawed-off little Caucasian bitch’s rant, too. 
  But that wasn’t all.  For her, I’m sure that race was an issue as
  well.  That stately and statuesque young mother was brown, you
  see, the color of sweet coffee and cream.  And, truth be told, I
  think there was some envy involved as well.  The runty little
  grocery checker never had been and never will be one tenth as
  gorgeously, impressively regal as that lady she was dissing, and those
  two boys she was bragging on probably weren’t nearly as polite or as
  alertly aware as that lovely little brown family, if they’re anything
  at all like their mother.
  

  • 6:25 am
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