Overeducated Waitress

New site for overeducated waitress (for now)

2009-04-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

To my loyal seven or eight readers...
Sorry for the tremendous lapse in blogging. Turns out planning a wedding, working full time, revising a book manuscript for peer review, and continuing to have some semblance of a personal life involves a fair amount of juggling. Here's hoping the adorable picture of Assata using two pillows to prop herself up on the couch will help you to forgive me.

I am going to be blogging from a new address for the time being... doing an experiment using a different hosting site (wordpress instead of blogger) to see if I prefer that way of doing things. I will keep the overeducatedwaitress.blogspot.com address, and will likely use it in the future, but for the time being, overeducated waitress blogs can be found at

http://sarahalisabethfox.wordpress.com/

much love...
Sarah

Sunny days and strange nights.

2009-02-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

February dawned exquisitely in West Seattle. 3000 miles east in Puxatawney, PA, a gang of middle-aged white male business owners hauled a groundhog out of a stump and hoisted it into the air,

then announced we were going to have six more weeks of winter.
Meanwhile, temperatures in Seattle came floating steadily up out of the 30s. Thick grey fogbanks burned off by late morning, and the sun fell across our hilly neighborhood like a soft blanket. Honeysuckle started blooming alongside our house, attracting swarms of softly humming bees.

A local goat wandered off from home, and was taken into protective custody by the Seattle Police Department until its owner came to claim it.

The sun, the goat, the honeybees.... its all been a little surreal. Walking Assata down the hill to Lowman beach on Monday, I had to shed my hat, gloves, sweater, scarf, and hoodie, until I was following her across the driftwood and beachrocks bareheaded in shirtsleeves. She poked her way across the beach to visit some gulls, who all rose up into the air at once, backflapped a dozen yards, and settled back into the water. She stood ankle-deep in the small waves, watching the gulls with her head cocked. I saw a seal slipping through the waves, and a giant freighter slowly chugged past out in the shipping channel, with two giant cranes (the ones that look like massive, angular dinosaurs) bound for the port of Seattle around Alki point.

(Assata watching a less water-phobic dog-friend at Lowman Beach)

Walked home in the glowing sunshine. Noticed birdsong as we walked the sidewalk up the hill through the ravine. Got ready for my five-oclock waitressing shift.

Set out on my customary walk-to-the-junction, a gentle uphill mile trek to the business district of our neighboorhood. My mother, who grew up in Seattle, says our neighborhood reminds her of hers in the 1950s and 60s. Lots of small family-owned businesses, largely non-corporate, old signs, familiar faces. As I neared the restaurant I work at, I saw a news van parked nearby. Walking closer, a spotted a pile of flowers on a table in front of the bar next door to ours. One of my co-workers came out and stood next to me in front of the table.

"someone got shot out front last night, after you left work," he told me. "He ran into the bar next door and collapsed, and he died in the hospital this morning."

(images thanks to WS Blog).

"Look," he said, gesturing behind him. "You can see the bullet holes in the wall."

That night, the restaurant was quiet. My only real tip income was from a large table of journalists and staff who'd been laid off from a local news network that day, and had decided to rendevous one last time for beers before going their separate ways in search of work.

Every now and then, Seattle PD officers walked by out front, "foot patrolling" to make the neighborhood feel safer. A news crew camped out on the sidewalk and accosted passerby to see if they were grieving for the man who'd died.

Walking to yoga the next morning, breathing deep and glorying once again in the crisp sun-lit air, I trailed my fingers across the filled- in bullet holes in the wall of the restaurant next to mine, a wall I walk past 2 dozen times a week, walking to the vitamin store or the used clothing store or the yoga studio or the farmers market.

I thought about how strange it was, how quickly it had happened and how quickly all evidence of the event had been erased from the sidewalk. We expect children in far-away countries to die in ugly and senseless wars. We expect strangers and people we scarcely know to succumb to cancer and die in car wrecks. But we never expect that death will draw near to the people we love, or to us, or to our daily routines.

I didn't know this young man. My heart goes out to his family. But I can't help but think the event was lost on the rest of us: as a society, we fill the bullet holes with putty and paint them the same color as the rest of our lives.

I feel safe as ever in my neighborhood. I keep on glorying in the sunshine, taking my dog to the beach, walking to work and yoga, and saving tip money for our wedding. Reading the West Seattle blog, my heart ached at the sight of the young man's picture, holding his niece. Sunny days and strange nights, as the economy teeters and the wars continue and the country waits for "Change."

Once, clouds of them filled the city streets.

2009-01-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

On the last day of our January visit with our grandfather in Milwaukee, my sister Emma and I go with him to the City Museum downtown.

The wind is bitterly cold. Grandpop wears gloves while he drives, but takes them off once he parks the car. People call him Smoke. He tells us he's not sure where the nickname came from, but he's had it since he was a kid. A friend of mine surmised that because his name is Morris, one of his friends must have pulled the "Smoke" from the association with Morris Tobacco. He was the first child in his family born in the United States, a few years after his parents immigrated here from Russia. He grew up in Philadelphia, which is where he met my grandmother Frances, and raised my father, Howard, and his sister Ellen.

The rivers in Milwaukee are frozen, a novelty to us northwestern girls. We find parking, and wander into the museum. Drink coffee and hot chocolate in the cafeteria, then make our way up the stairs, under a giant whale skeleton covered with white lights for the holidays. We are drawn almost immediately to the butterfly room. Stepping through the double glass doors, the warm humidity envelops us. There is piano music playing, and a small waterfall. Plants and trees crowd around, pressing at the walls and brushing our shoulders, and the windows face the street.

Outside, the bitter Wisconsin wind sweeps snow off the sidewalk drifts and swirls it into spirals. A schoolbus stops at a stopsign, then lumbers through the intersection. Pedestrians tug their collars higher around their necks and lean into the wind.

Inside, we begin to shed our scarves and coats. There is an utter absence of wind, only the movement of thousands of luminous butterfly wings.

We walk so slowly we are scarcely moving at all, gazing at the tiny, soft bodies, the shimmering colors and intricate patterns on their wings.
We watch them fly and hover and rest. Some land on us, clinging to hair and bright scarves.

"When I was young," Grandpop says, "clouds of butterflies would appear in the city. Not just monarchs either, every color. Clouds of them. Of course, you don't see that anymore." I see it in my mind: a gang of young Jewish boys playing stickball on a cobbled 1920s Philadelphia street. Women in dresses and hats pass by carrying shopping baskets, and horse-drawn delivery carts make their way up the streets, bearing coal or ice. A sudden swirl of color and movement in the sky, thousands of butterflies, oranges and reds and pinks and purples and blues, hurrying between the buildings. The boys stand still, craning their necks, shielding their eyes against the sun, watching the living cloud pass by.

We stay in the small butterfly room for a long time. They feed on sponges soaked in sugar water and fruit juice, and land on tiny chunks of watermelon and apple. I watch a large one, brown on one side and shimmering blue-purple on the other, fly up against the window, over and over, and wonder if they mourn for their migrations, for larger spaces. I wonder if they remember the stories of the days when clouds of them filled the streets. For now though, they live in a tiny utopia, replete with all of the problems and advantages that come with an engineered habitat.

We glory in them, speaking in soft voices and watching carefully where we step. Emma spots one dying on the pavement, and searches for a twig, which the butterfly weakly clings to. She deposits it in a plant. "I didn't want it to die on the pavement," she tells us.

When we leave, we take turns spining slowly in front of three mirrors, to make sure that none of them have hitched a ride to the Big World on our clothing.

I think: I will remember this when I am old.

VII, by Wendell Berry

2009-01-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997

thanks to ma for sending this along

Winter blooms

2008-12-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

As we were gathering our things to head home the day after Thanksgiving, my mother handed us a small ceramic pot with a narrow green shoot.
Paperwhites, she said,
they're lovely when they bloom.

She's always started winter bulbs, as long as I can remember... sitting on the sunniest windowsill of the house, growing with incredible audacity in the warm room during the cold months. We brought it home, and set it on the kitchen windowsill.

Sure enough, it grew visibly, and daily
and this week it burst into bloom...
Daring to blossom in the coldest of Seattle weather,
since it doesn't know any better,
having lived all its days indoors.

Nuclear Homeland (Or; My First Arrest)

2008-12-01T11:02:00.000-08:00

The image that occupies the header of this blog is of particular significance. Snapped in the Spring of 2008, facing northwest in the Nevada desert, it captures a moment in which the sun was rising behind me, and the moon was setting in front of me. The lights on the highway in the bottom left are the cars of workers, heading for this gate:

Welcome to our Nuclear Homeland. Exhibit A: The Nevada Test Site, where nearly 1000 nuclear weapons have been detonated since 1951, many of them two, three, and four times as large as the nuclear bombs we dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This photograph was snapped the day before the others, in roughly the same location. Its me, and friends Jon, Steve, and Jerry, moments before my first arrest, for what I'm proud to say was my first major act of Civil Disobedience: trespassing on the Nevada Test Site, which is technically the property of the Western Shoshone, not the United States military. (That's me in the middle, holding my sandals and an envelope full of photographs. Going barefoot into the highly toxic Nevada Nuclear Test Site was kind of a dumb move. But I'd been walking for six days and sixty-five miles, and my feet hurt.)

There's more to this story.

So much more that I wrote a book about the place. I finished it in October, and called it As it Turned Out, There Were People In All Those Little Communities: A Folk History of the Nuclear West. Still waiting to hear back from the first publisher I sent it to.

Stay tuned for more stories of our Nuclear Homeland and my first arrest. (Yes, I'm planning a second one).

"All good comes to them that waitress."

2008-12-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

I wait tables for a living.

Over the years, I've accumulated a whole basketfull of black aprons, rolled in cylinders and tied with their own strings.
When I unroll one before a shift, I fill the pockets with ballpoint pens, a soft-shelled order book I've been using for six years (in its pockets: snapshots of Ryan and Assata and my liquor and food handlers permits), and a stack of beer coasters. Used to throw in a wine-key too, but I mostly serve beers these days.

Also in my pocket: an associate's degree, a bachelor's degree, and a master's degree. (Yes, I keep the degrees in my metaphorical pocket). When customers get chatty and want to know what I went to college for, I tell them American Studies. I let them consider that for a moment, then deliver my punchline. "Which is why I'll be your waitress tonight."

They love that one.

I first put on an apron the summer I turned 19. Fresh from my first year at Evergreen State College, I showed up at Crater Lake National Park for a summer job in the gift shop a few hours after a server had quit in the dining room. That night, I was wearing my first apron and shadowing a server in the midst of a terrifying fine-dining dinner rush. I learned the ropes quickly enough and spent the summer as a Breakfast/Lunch server. I walked to work from the employee dorms at 5:30 every morning, along the rim of the volcanic crater as the sun rose over the 6-mile wide lake, a view I was lucky enough to enjoy all morning through the dining room windows. I spent my off-hours backpacking with dear friends, sitting around campfires, soaking in hotsprings, driving hours off-mountain to buy beer and swim in nearby lakes.

Weirdly enough, given that I'd always defined myself by my academic success, I began to take pride in my new identity: a Decent Waitress vagabond-type who was most at home in the mountains and on the road. I took it back to college that fall, and lived off the tips I'd made that summer for the academic year. The following June, Crater Lake alum Erin and I struck out for Mt. Rainier National Park, where fellow Paradise Lodge Dining Room servers quickly pigeonholed us as the "hippie waitresses." We did two summers slinging food on Mt. Tahoma (the proper name), began to shy away from the hippie label (it is ahistorical after all), embarked on a few wild early-20s adventures, and finished our respective BA degrees.

Eyeing the job market, we dug out our aprons again.
Erin waited her way from Eugene to Philly to the Oregon Coast. I schlepped my basket of aprons around the PNW, slinging Thai, Italian, and Mediterranean food. Eyed the GRE and a stack of graduate school applications uneasily for a few years, then finally dove in and scored a 2-year fellowship to study history at Utah State University.

As I neared the completion of my degree, I realized I'd had enough of academia, for the time being, and opted not to apply to PhD programs. I returned to the northwest, found a dear old house in a hilltop neighborhood with Ryan, who still had a year of graduate school in front of him, and pulled out my aprons again. Logged many hours as a cocktail waitress in a bar with some good beers and some good people and some wretched drunks. Made enough money to keep us above the water, help finance a month for us to backpack around Guatemala, and see us through the following summer. At which time: I gave notice without regrets, and we set out on a month-long road trip around the western states.

Returning to Seattle that fall, Ryan offered to support us financially for a year, so I could finish overhauling and expanding my master's thesis into a book-length manuscript. When money became too tight in the spring, I found a waitressing job in a matter of days, at a solid local establishment with good product, a conscientious business model, and a stellar crew. I walk to work; I clear 20 to 50 dollars an hour, depending on business, I have a highly flexible schedule, and plenty of time to write (if I practice some discipline).

I've met some of my dearest friends via "the business." One of them, Chrysta, would eventually introduce me to Ryan. A vivacious and extraordinary clothing and fashion designer, she's been supporting her art with her aprons for years; while she's very close to putting the aprons away for good, as Erin has, she embodies a reality I've encountered time and again in the restaurant industry. Your server isn't "just a waiter"---there's an excellent chance he's an accomplished painter [T.S. Pew!], a singular musician [Michael! Ebon!], or she's a stunning photographer [Gretchen!], or writer or gifted journalist [Erin]. Sara waited her way into the Art Institute: now she's an associate at a successful Seattle design firm. Your server may well be a mom supporting her children, or a traveler who's served food in 6 countries and 22 states who'd just as soon see the sun set over a new landscape a few times a year.

Servers witness moments most people miss. 5 years ago, I walked up to a table set for two where a single, middle-aged woman was sitting. There was an envelope on both plates, and a bouquet wrapped in paper in the center of the table. "Is it a special night?" I asked. "Yes," she replied, "its my anniversary." I asked her if I could bring her a glass of wine while she waited for her husband to arrive. She told me she would take the wine, but that he wouldn't be coming; he'd died the week before, and she was honoring the reservation they had made. I had to leave the dining room to cry. I remember every detail. The almost undetectable quiver in her voice. The two glasses of Ravenswood Red Zinfandel. The corner table she sat at, facing the door. The Blackened Salmon Caeser. I told the chef her story, and he comped her meal. When I told her there was no bill, she clasped my hands in hers, with tears in her eyes, and said "God Bless you." She couldn't have been more than 45. They had two daughters, she told me.

One woman took an interest in my background as I waited on her that year, and when I told her quietly I was quitting soon to go back to school, she tucked a fifty into my hand. When I cleared the table, there was a note scrawled on a napkin. "enjoy your new life."

I've reached through raw, painful marital disputes to refill water glasses, and seen parents smack and shake their children when they thought no one was looking. I overheard a tiny woman wearing too many diamonds tell her friends that her husband upped her allowance five thousand dollars that month, since she'd dropped her weight to 115 pounds. I've watched teenage girls excuse themselves to the bathroom for longer than necessary and return to the table furtively wiping their mouths. I've scanned the faces of their parents for some sign of concern, and found none. I've heard rednecks joke about someone killing Obama while clearing their plates, and been groped by business-types while my hands were full of empty glassware.
I've walked home after a 5 hour shift with enough cash for the carpayment, wrangled weeks off in mere moments, and served hundreds of birthday desserts and thousands of really lovely meals.

Its a mixed bag. And while I am striving to create a career for myself based on writing, rather than serving, I do not regret a moment of my ongoing overeducated waitressing career.

Last winter, an exceptional journalist named Kathy Helms passed along a gem that someone passed on to her years ago.

"All good comes to them that waitress"

I've tucked it into that metaphorical pocket along with those college degrees.
So much good has already come my way, and the horizon is filled with unfolding stories.

Obama can't save America. But maybe America can.

2008-11-13T00:04:00.000-08:00

First: let me say this. I am not a complete cynic.

Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" was a beautiful song to begin with. When I hear it now, it brings to my mind, instantly, the sight of thousands on their feet, tears running down their cheeks and proud, exhilarated smiles on their faces, Americans surrounding a young mixed-race man from a "broken home" who made this country deliver on the Dream. He rose to what may have seemed an insurmountable challenge, he spoke words that inspired Ordinary People to believe they could take on the powers that be. And They Can.

Si Se Puede.

He ran a strong campaign. He showed my generation what it feels like to be inspired by a speechmaker. We haven't had much of that. He respects knowledge, he thinks critically, he has courage and a sense of history. He understands that being a patriot runs deeper than flag pins.

But he can't save us; neither can hope.

"Hope keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth... When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power."

-Derrick Jensen

It has been a week since America voted Barack Obama in as the next President of our United States. We watched the results come in with friends last tuesday night, eating vegan "Americana" potluck [Black Bean Burgers, Fried "Chicken" (cauliflower), cornbread and tater tots and chipoltle aioli... recipes to follow later]. For months, Ryan has predicted Obama would win in a landslide, even when the pundits and the nervous progressives got caught up in the electioneering. I often thought he was right, but put little faith in my country's electoral system, which the past eight years (not to mention past three hundred) have revealed as something of a sham, blatantly rigged for the preservation of elite rule. A few weeks before the election, I watched an interview with Noam Chomsky. He agreed with George Will (something that I doubt happens too often) that American electoral politics is more about choosing which elite we want to rule us, than whether or not the elites shall rule.

If you live in a swing state, Chomsky said, vote Obama, but without illusions.

Even though pollsters claimed Washington wasn't considered a swing state, pollsters were also suggesting conservative sleazebag Dino Rossi might actually triumph in the gubernatorial race. Staring at my absentee ballot, I thought about fear, idealism, and the American way. Who do I really want running my country right now? Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente. Some might say my vote for Obama was a vote cast in fear. I believe it was a vote cast without illusions.

I shed a few tears as Obama gave his acceptance speech. I was relieved, and moved.
I honor the significance of the United State of America choosing a former community organizer, a young man, a dark-skinned man, to lead us. I believe he's a man of integrity and vision. And, while I respect Derrick Jensen's take on hope, I haven't given up on that sticky emotion yet. I am hopeful.

But I woke up the morning after the election feeling hollow, and weirdly, not proud. It made me uncomfortable, and I have been trying to sort out this feeling ever since. The election of Barack Obama is a milestone, yes. But it is only one kind of Change. And it is late in coming. And just because it has come does not absolve us for our collective sin. My America has shed the blood of hundreds of thousands since I turned 21. My America has spit on habeus corpus, tortured, lied, profited, desecrated holy books, cast our own people into the streets, starving and bereft of basic health care. My America has made its daughters in South Dakota criminals for demanding the right to control their own bodies. My America has deported legal citizens without so much as a by your leave. There is so much we must make right---and so many things we can never atone for.

The change we think we've created by electing Barack Obama is the kind of change this country should have demanded in November of 2000, when it was clear that George W. Bush had not actually won the presidency legitimately. It is the kind of change we should have demanded in November of 2001, when it was clear that George W. Bush's administration was bent on exploiting the September 11 carnage to precipitate war-for-profit. It is the kind of change we should have demanded in November of 2002. And 2003.

And then we "re-elected" him.

???????

it took us SEVEN years to rescind the Bush doctrine?
I woke up the day after the election feeling embarrassed.

I love my country. I love its stories, I love its landscapes, I love some of its ideals, I love so many of its people. We have potential! But we also have genocide, slavery, internment, the dubious legacy of being the only nation to use the atomic bomb against another country. We shut out Jews trying to flee the repression that would become the Holocaust. We have Vietnam, Iran-Contra, inaction during the Rwandan genocide. But that's the past, people say. Get over it. We freed the slaves, didn't we?

The past isn't just some mythic territory, some two-dimensional timeline people'd by the Who's who. Its the sum total of who we have become. America's promise is just that: a promise. We have to hold ourselves accountable. We were never "the Greatest Country on Earth," and electing Obama won't restore us to that mythical condition. The only way forward, the only sustainable way, now, is True Change. Which means something different to everyone. Won't be easy, but it won't happen if all we do is complain and talk about H-O-P-E.

A few nights ago, Ryan and I walked with Assata through our quiet neighborhood. The air was warm with the promise of rain, and the lights across the Salish Sea [Puget Sound] reflected on still water. We passed a dozen Obama signs still displayed in the dark yards, plastered with wet maple leaves. I wondered what the owners of those signs thought about leaving them out. Are they victory decorations now? Seattle Lawn Hope Art? A few days ago, one of the Seattle papers noted that flag sales were skyrocketing, that people who'd never before displayed the stars and stripes were doing so now. It makes me uncomfortable. Those colors still fly over Guantanamo Bay. Just because Obama promised us change doesn't mean we get it.

A few months ago, Naomi Klein noted: "The campaign's most radical demand is the idea of electing Obama himself. It is Obama--and not his plans for the presidency--that is the ultimate expression of the "movement." If the process ends there, the Obama campaign will become more like the "lifestyle" brands-- the Nikes and Starbucks that captured the transcendent quality of past liberation movements, and our desire for meaning in our lives, to build their own brands."

What happens in six months when no one has universal healthcare? When American soldiers and Iraqi children are still dying in the streets of Baghdad? When another million Americans are out of work and the polar ice cap has shrivelled that much further into itself? Will we retreat again into our cynicism and our televisions and our despair?

I voted for Obama without illusions. On his own, he will be able to change very little---except, hopefully, our standing in the eyes of other peoples around the world.

But the change? That won't come from him.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.

If the American people stand up and Demand the kind of Change they have been claiming they want, Demand it instead of waiting for Obama to deliver it to them, Demand it,
Create it themselves,
we might just have a chance.

The time for a Great Mass Movement is Only Just Begun.

I am a student of American History.
Which means I am cynical.
And hopeful.

ReThinking Thanksgiving.

2008-11-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving is a constructed holiday.

Just like the rest of them... Christmas, Easter, Patriot Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Like the sediment that piles up underwater against a dam that is holding back a river, holidays are accretions of stories and rituals that pile up over the years. We celebrate holidays in particular ways because we have learned these stories and rituals, and we find comfort in their repetition. We look forward to them, we plan and prepare for them, we enact them and recall them with nostalgia. If we're willing to consider these stories thoughtfully, they can tell us a lot about who we are as Americans, and what it is we are truly celebrating.

Problem is, America's never been big on questioning her own stories.

When I was ten years old, I portrayed Queen Isabella in a 5th grade play that endeavored to offer some Thanksgiving backstory. Wearing one of my mother's fancy dresses, I tossed a handful of costume jewelry at another fifth grader dressed as Christoper Columbus. "Take my jewels, Christopher Columbus," I haughtily declared, "and find a New World." Not surprisingly, the play failed to illuminate how he did so, by accident, and heartily set out enslaving, killing off, and infecting with STDS and other infectious diseases all the kindly natives he found there.

Fast-forward a few years. Good, honest Puritan folk travel to Columbus's New World, seeking to start anew in the Americas, a blank slate for enacting values of freedom, liberty, and private ownership, and fleeing the occasional criminal record back home. They did so emboldened by the imperial doctrine of terra nullius, a 16th century philosophy that dictated that any land occupied only by savages (ie, those who failed to cultivate it) was the property of the European nation who claimed it (or, the European nation that won control of it by force). The Puritan Pilgrims weren't much prepared, tho, and some kindly Indian folk, headed by the genteel Squanto, came to the rescue with platters of corn on the cob and a giant roasted turkey.

Its a nice story.

Except, in actuality, it wasn't a nice story. While some indigenous peoples certainly extended their goodwill and local knowledge to the struggling settlers, they and their descendants would soon find that any generosity to the European arrivals was sorely misplaced, as it was rewarded almost universally by violence, new diseases, displacement, and the rapid destruction of the natural resources indigenous communities relied upon for their survival.

In later years, once native populations had been sufficiently decimated to offer no threat to the new United States, we demonstrated that our goodwill could often be as destructive as our outright hostility. In an effort to "teach the savages" about that most hallowed of American traditions, Private Property, we carved up the reservations we'd just confined them to in treaties, gave them tiny parcels, and sold off the remaining land to railroad companies and white settlers. We kidnapped generations of indigenous children from their parents and forced them to abandon their languages, traditions, and cultural identities in pursuit of assimilation. We caricatured indigenous women as squaws or sex objects, and indigenous men as noble savages, alcoholic bums, or cartoon sports mascots.

We gave one generation livestock to teach them about the agrarian lifestyle, then returned a few generations later to slaughter that livestock, chastising its owners for decimating the rangeland. We used alcohol as a weapon against them, then criticized them for not controlling their consumption. Liberals excoriate Native communities that permit logging or mining on their lands, accusing them of being "bad Indians"--- but fail to consider the crushing effects of generational poverty. Colonialism is alive and well in the U. S. of A., and brutal as ever: a mindset as much as a policy.

For many native peoples, "Thanksgiving" is observed as a National Day of Mourning, a tradition begun in 1970 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited a Wampanoag leader, Frank James, to speak at a Thanksgiving event at Plymouth Rock---then uninvited him, when they learned he planned to address the oppression of American Indians.

(Indigenous activist Russell Means)

It makes sense that in the 21st century, we'd all prefer to gloss over that reality and celebrate a feel-good holiday where Indians and Pilgrims sit side by side and share things like turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pipe.

Except there wasn't actually pie---
the Pilgrims didn't have enough butter or flour to make the crusts.

The "First Thanksgiving" wasn't conceived of as a new American holiday at the time---it was a celebration of a good harvest, heading into the winter--- a ritual that's been practiced by cultures that procure their own food for millenium, in every part of the world. Oddly enough, the average American family sitting down to re-enact that harvest feast has no concept of gratitude for good harvests going into winter because we are completely divorced from the production of our food. We can buy what we want to eat year-round, without having to consider the fossil fuels, suffering, genetic engineering, soil depletion, and sketchy food preservation processes that made that January tomato or cheap turkey breast possible.

Thanksgiving offers us a rich opportunity to practice gratitude in the tradition of the harvest feast. Sitting down with family and friends and sharing a meal, lovingly and intentionally prepared, is an exquisite ritual with which to express that gratitude.

First, we have to divest the ritual of the weighted Thanksgiving mythology.

Second: lets reevaluate the traditional fare. Those meat-eaters who've tasted wild or heirloom breeds of turkey express astonishment at how bland the average thanksgiving turkey tastes. I'll admit it--- I'm one of those half-assed vegetarians who's happily made exception for thanksgiving turkey in the past. Don't plan to this year, but I won't judge anyone who does choose to partake. If you are going to serve up the bird, though, please consider a few facts about the industrialized production of turkey meat in this country. In the interest of true Thanksgiving.

Farm Sanctuary reports:

Modern turkeys have been genetically manipulated to grow twice as fast, and twice as large, as their ancestors. Comparing a turkey poult’s growth rate with that of a human baby, Lancaster Farming, an agriculture newspaper, reported: “If a seven pound [human] baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, it would weigh 1,500 pounds.” The strain of growing so quickly makes young turkeys susceptible to cardiovascular disease and can lead to fatal heart attacks. Although this rapid growth poses a serious threat to the animals’ health and welfare, the turkey industry continues to push birds beyond their biological limits.. This continual increase in growth causes commercially-bred turkeys to suffer from crippling foot and leg problems too. According the agribusiness newspaper Feedstuffs , “...turkeys have been bred to grow faster and heavier but their skeletons haven't kept pace..." Catering to consumer tastes at the expense of animals, producers also raise turkeys with abnormally large breasts which prevent them from mounting and reproducing naturally.... Completely unlike their wild ancestors not only in terms of physique but also in hue, commercial turkeys are white, the natural bronze color bred out of them so their bodies are pigment-free and more palatable to consumers....At the slaughterhouse, fully conscious turkeys are hung by their feet from metal shackles on a moving rail. The first station on most poultry slaughterhouse assembly lines is the stunning tank, where the turkeys' heads are submerged in an electrified bath of water. Stunning procedures are not monitored, and are often inadequate, leaving the fully conscious birds to continue along the slaughterhouse assembly line. Some slaughterhouses do not even attempt to render these birds unconscious, as turkeys and other poultry are specifically excluded from the Humane Slaughter Act, which requires that animals be stunned prior to slaughter. After passing through the stunning tank, the turkeys' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, and blood begins rushing out of their bodies. Inevitably, the blade misses some turkeys, who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line:, the scalding tank. Here, they are submerged in boiling hot water, and turkeys missed by the killing blade are boiled alive – a brutal end to an equally miserable existence on factory farms.

If the traditional Thanksgiving story is the gravy covering up the violence of American colonialism, then the turkey is... the turkey.

Its easy to create a decadent, cruelty-free, delicious meal to share with your loved ones. In doing so, you'll be investing the celebration with potent and sustainable values. Lip-smackin' good food, rich with conscience, humanity, and ecological integrity, does everyone good, and much less harm than the traditional spread.

Even if you only replace one traditional component of your Thanksgiving feast with a sustainable, vegetarian or vegan alternative, you're taking a big step.

There's lots of ways to do this. To that end, every few days I will spotlight a tried and true vegan holiday recipe favorite from now until Thanksgiving day. In most cases, you can make your traditional favorites---mashed potatoes, stuffing---with only minor modifications, and I can guarantee you, no one will know the difference. Vegan desserts? Scrumptious, and simple, and again---hard to tell the difference! I'll dish out vegan gravy recipes, and a great way to do that green bean casserole. And, you're feeling like taking the leap: Tofurkey is nothing to fear, Its delicious, and simple to prepare.
Check out Farm Sanctuary's Adopt a Turkey program:

Stay tuned for recipes!

Dog-Child.

2008-11-01T20:49:00.001-07:00

I never thought I'd be one of those people who told a dog to go "get Daddy" or "say hi to Grandma and Grandpa."

It took about 3 minutes. We found her on a family farm in northern Oklahoma, precisely ten miles south of Kansas and five miles down a dirt road. The locusts were humming like power lines, and there was standing water in the fields from summer flash flooding. She was one of two Bernese Mountain Dog puppies left from a litter. They chased each other through the tall grass and quickly disappeared, only to be located under the barbeque, eagerly licking out the greasetrap. I despaired of ever choosing between them. Ryan didn't hesitate. "Look at her eyes," he said. "That's our girl."

(Assata and Ryan, ten miles south of Kansas)

We named her for Assata Shakur, a Black Panther and Civil Rights activist who was wrongfully accused of several crimes in the 1970s, and who escaped to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum. (Assata: The Autobiography of Assata Shakur). Not sure what Ms. Shakur would think about having a dog named after her, but its given us plenty of opportunities to tell folks about a woman of extraordinary eloquence and dedication to the American people. Once we've corrected them. "No. not like Carne Asada. Assata, like the Black Panther."

(post swim in the Sierra Nevadas, on the road trip home, July 2007)

The name means "She who struggles." Our girl doesn't, much.

(Washington state ferry headed into Seattle)

Mostly, we call her The Bean. It morphed out of Assata, honeybee. Which became Assata B, and then, somehow, Bean.
Yes, I am that dog-mom.
And Ryan is that dog-father.

(At Ghost Ranch, one of Georgia O'Keefe's favorite places in northern New Mexico)

And, while they may never have thought of themselves as those kind of people either,
our friends and family are those dog-aunts, and dog-uncles, and dog-grandparents.

The Bean is mighty hard to resist.(in west seattle)

(rallying for elephant rights at the Woodland Park Zoo)

urban garden 2008: recap

2008-10-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

(me, helping Mom in the garden c. 1982)

Sometime in March, Ryan disappeared into the lumber section @ the hardware store. Not certain why we were there originally. Might have headed in to buy a new handle for the toilet (?) or possibly some lightbulbs. I found him pulling down long pieces of lumber.
"I'm going to build you a garden," he informed me.

The pieces looked sort of huge. I tried to imagine them somewhere in our small (but respectable) urban backyard. I thought about the raised beds we'd built together from scratch at our last house, the bags and bags and bags of beautiful organic worm-casting soil we'd hauled in, in time to do an early august planting and harvest greens all winter... and how we'd had to move away and leave those gorgeous beds, without ever getting the chance to do spring plantings and summer harvests.

And while I agreed with him wholeheartedly when he pointed out that we'd made an improvement on that last house for future dwellers that is impossible to put a price on, I still felt a little bitter. Sort of embarrassed to admit I gave him a hard time in the lumber section, but I did. "Where the heck is it going to fit?" I asked. "Do you realize how much its going to cost to fill this with good dirt? Are we going to stay in this house long enough to harvest? Can we afford all the stuff we'll need?"

He saw right through the snarkiness (he usually does).

At home, he laid out the lumber in a gravel patch behind the shed. I braced the boards while he hammered them together, with the dog looking on. We pulled out the weeds that were poking up through the gravel. A few weeks went by before we got around to filling it with dirt. We knew we couldn't afford to buy enough 20 pound bags of organic soil to fill the bed, so in late April, we rented a large (large) pickup from the hardware store and headed out to Maple Valley in the midst of an early spring snowstorm to buy our dirt in bulk, from the compost-managing-folk @ Cedar Grove. Assata rode up front between us like the farm dog she is (despite her year and a half of city-living, her formative months were spent on a small family farm in Oklahoma, 5 miles down a dirt road, ten miles south of Kansas). We plunked down 21 dollars at the counter, and I drove the truck down into a giant dirt field, where a giant loader scooped up a bucketful of "vegetable garden mix" and advanced on us. 2000 pounds of dirt crashed down in the bed of the truck, sagging the cab down around the wheels and setting off the load limit alarm. We gingerly manuevered our way home. Spent several hours shovelling the dirt into the garden frame.

Raked it, leveled it, and molded it into furrows. Shoveled some of the excess into buckets, pots, bins, and a couple whiskey barrels from the West Seattle Nursery to expand our growing potential.

Laid out our seed packets, (sugar snap peas, kentucky wonder pole beans, beets, carrots, tulsi holy basil, lavendar) and transplanted the two tubs full of starts (zuccini, spinach, and cucumbers we'd started from seed in peat pots and yogurt cups on top of the washer and dryer a month before) that we'd been lugging in and out of the laundry room to soak up sun all month. visited the Seattle Tilth Fair (http://www.seattletilth.org/) in the rain with a few hundred other giddy seattlites, gathering up boxfulls of lovely starts---- tomatoes, hot peppers, eggplant, broccoli, summer crookneck squash, butternut squash, pearl onions, walla walla sweets, brussel sprouts, leeks, lemongrass, oregano, sage, pineapple sage... and a few others I'm forgetting now.

Sprouts emerged, and popped leaves, and vines. I spent my mornings barefoot in the teeny tiny rows (so narrow I couldn't actually turn around,) glorying in the appearence of plants from seeds, (astonishing to me every time, even though I've been privy to this small miracle since I was a kid in cloth diapers keeping mom company in the garden). Watered them gently. Clucked encouragingly to the transplants.

And as it all picked up and grew, I began to realize I might have been overly enthusiastic. The "Giant" bed I'd accused Ryan of planning to build was, in fact, somewhat overcrowded.
We adjusted, practiced training shoots and vines up trellises and in circles around tomato cages, transplanting some things from here to there, pulling out unpromising producers to better utilize their space. Made me feel like a real farmer, making the tough decisions. I found I wasn't tough enough to properly thin my beets or carrots though, (their greens are so CUTE), and settled for hoping they would all just find a way to grow on top of each other. (They did the best they could).

(the crowded carrot and beet greens: way too cute to thin).

Sometime in late May, early June, we began eating what we'd grown.

Most of my photos are still trapped on rolls of good ol' fashioned 35 mm film... bunches of giddy green spinach, bowls and bowls of wee cherry tomatoes that packed more flavor in their tiny bodies than a dozen beefsteaks or grocery story hothouse varieties... handfuls of basil and piles of crimson beets, zuccinni every night for weeks, dozens of perfect knobby yellow crooknecks, 6 perfect butternuts the size of Assata's snout, a beautiful little eggplant, sweet finger length carrots and hundreds of sweet sugar snap peas eaten right off the vine...

Its now the 30th of October, and we are still enacting that most decadent of rituals...
harvesting food from our backyard and preparing it for our table.

Put in some spinach and chard seeds a few weeks ago, tho i fear i waited till too late in the autumn. They've sprouted, but we'll see how they weather the cold. There are still 2 hardy stalks of brussel sprouts working at growing those perfect little globes, and more beets and leeks and carrots to harvest. The last of the tomatoes are ripening on the kitchen windowsill there are jars of dried herbs in the cupboards and pickled beets in the fridge. I'm already plotting what we'll start in peat pots on cookie sheets on top of the washer and dryer come February and March.