Author Archives: Tata

All In All, It’s All the Same

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Some time ago, Grandpa took a dive and was found on the floor of his apartment. After a stint in the hospital, he moved to a swanky rehab joint where he instantly charmed the staff. That is his way. People love him up! On the other hand, Mom and Tom finally read the tea leaves and emptied Grandpa’s apartment last month. At first, this all seemed scary. Now, we’ve changed our minds. Hooray! Grandpa’s surrounded by people who dote on him madly! Hooray! It’s also frustrating, because I’m three hundred miles away and for some odd reason, he cannot hear the sound of my voice on the phone.

No, really. He hears Tom just fine. Grandpa makes jokes with Daria. He ignores Mom when she argues with him but he overhears plenty. Anyway, he can’t hear me, and when I call he becomes agitated about not understanding who’s on the phone. That is a great feeling I have to say I enjoy like dental surgery. So the other day, I mailed out a bunch of postcards someone more sonorous will read out loud. So far, they all say the same thing:

Dear Grandpa,
I love you!
Love,
Domy

Hopefully this amuses him. Another pile will go out next week, corresponding with my need to clean up my cubicle, where I possess an impressive collection of postcards from places I’ve never been, like Mr. DBK’s current locale, though I’m not very possessive. Thank you, Minneapolis. Say hi to my grandpa!

Lips Oh You the Doors Of Breath

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We had all the weather today. The broccoli plants enjoyed it.

In February, my co-worker and friend contracted an infection and two weeks later an EEG showed no brain activity. The family clung to hope that activity would appear on subsequent tests. For me, it was all over when brain death had occurred, so it was painful to watch her husband and grown children talk about how she was just resting and would be fine, and so much prayer. My head swam. I think it was the backstroke. Every day, I think about her. Our last conversation still brings tears to my eyes.

We walked out of the library in two lady-size huffs.

Tata: – He didn’t have to do that. I mean, nobody has to be that big of a douchebag –

Diane stopped in her tracks to howl.

Diane: I haven’t heard that word in ages!
Tata: I say it all the time – just not in the library.
Diane: Oooh, that’s funny! I’m going to say it all evening.
Tata: I feel we’ve both profited by this conversation. See you tomorrow!

But the next time I saw her she was in a coma and her daughter was reading to her from the Bible. Of course, I wish I’d started swearing sooner. We all have regrets.

One thing I didn’t notice until weeks after her death was that all along she’d given me little presents. In the foyer of my house sits a candle she gave me as a housewarming gift. On my desk is a work-safe photocopy of a prayer I don’t actually believe but loved because it was just so funny. In my desk, I found a magnifying glass she gave me when she decided my job was all detective work. She gave me a music box harlequin topped with feathers and decorated with sequins she said reminded her of me. I wondered if that meant I was a shiny clown on a portable box, but who can argue that? Even the portable part? She gave me mint plants pulled from her mother’s yard and I fully expected them to take over a section of the front lawn. Strangely, this is the gift with an unexpected outcome: the mint died, too. I am absolutely sure Diane would find that hilarious.

Dances While Her Father Plays Guitar

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Some of the stray cats prowl the yards and gardens, but stop by our backyard for a cautious bite to eat. Others, like this giant tom we call Tom, come around for an amuse buche and repartee. His eyes are green, his movements smooth and fluid like a cougar’s. While Pete stood on the back steps with the camera a huge Rottweiler on the other side of the fence barked ferociously. Tom didn’t flinch. He’s a professional, you see.

No Other Troy For Me To Burn

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I’ve been thinking all day about why I stopped doing clinic defense almost twenty years ago. The clinic I’d devoted two years to defending was firebombed and I gave a speech standing next to the charred ruins. For me, something had changed. Domestic terrorists, well-known to the government, were allowed to carry out their threats. It didn’t have to happen, but it did. This wasn’t in Kansas or Texas, where you might expect women’s medical care to be imperiled. No. This was New Jersey. Everyone knew Operation Rescue had it in for us, and in George H. W. Bush’s America, everyone left us twisting in the wind.

Shortly thereafter, my grandmother died, I left the Fabulous Ex-Husband(tm) and launched my illustrious and all-consuming art career. The lessons I had learned were that my vigilance accomplished nothing; that we were each on our own and that law enforcement didn’t give a shit about women. On that last point, I have never been disappointed. Instead of clinic defense, I drove women for abortions because I am not afraid to punch rabid PTA moms in the face while cooing gently to a distressed patient. That is not actually good escort behavior, by the way. Eventually, I couldn’t stand even talking to pro-choice relatives who insisted Roe would never be overturned while they voted Republican. I went home. I admit this: I do not have the strength to argue anymore, and for myself, I don’t have to because after the hysterectomy, I do not have to worry about getting pregnant. Believe it or not, this is not all about me.

I’m long done with candlelight vigils and patience. My standing ankle-deep in slushy mud holding a sign so I can be counted for women’s organizations that care more about donations than resisting Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination is not gonna happen because fuck that noise. I’m done listening to men talk about icky abortion because do I fucking talk about my feelings about prostate treatments? I do not because there’s no reason for me to have feelings about fucking prostates. I DON’T FUCKING HAVE ONE. My opinion is not needed. Perhaps 95% of men have no standing to discuss abortion, and this –

Tiller’s Killer
Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?

– is so far beyond the pale that saying Fuck this fucking guy isn’t fucking enough. But singling out Saletan for a verbal beating accomplishes nothing. I’m done with that, I’m done with all that. I’m done with one more thing: shame, because we can no longer afford it. I have had an abortion. The circumstances are not important. Your sympathy doesn’t interest me. What is important is that I chose to have that kind of medical care, and I do not regret it. In theory, it shouldn’t be any more important than if I’d had wisdom teeth removed. Further, people who think they don’t know anyone who’s had an abortion are fucking kidding themselves.

It’s time for old ladies to stand up. No one is going to come to my house and put a bullet in me for exercising my right to chose, thus it is my obligation to defend that right I no longer need for young women who do. What I’m done with, that’s behind me. I do not know what I will do, but I’m starting here.

Running Up That Road, Running Up That Hill

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Speechless with horror:

WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.

The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was detained some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.

Although Stolz refused to release the man’s name, Johnson County sheriff’s spokesman Tom Erickson identified the detained man as Scott Roeder. He has not been charged in the slaying and was expected to be taken to Wichita for questioning.

There was no immediate word of the motive Tiller’s assailant. But the doctor’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

Long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, including a summer-long protest in 1991, Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, Stolz said. Tiller’s attorney, Dan Monnat, said Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time.

I knew this day would come. Everyone did. Even so, he lived every day courageously in a dark and dangerous time. He is truly a hero, most especially to the vulnerable women whose lives he saved.

See Right Through Your Plastic Mac

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As far as I can tell, I’ve been in physical therapy twice a week since before Christ roamed the earth with his trusty dinosaurs. Mr. DBK asked last week what my complaint was, since apparently I complain with great enthusiasm but few specifics. My bad. Back when the sports doctor stared at my X-rays and turned pale, he saw three separate problems: an S-I joint wildly out of alignment, arthritis in the hip joint he’d expect to see in a person approaching retirement and the whole hip was twisted to the left. The X-ray didn’t show two angry muscle groups staging their own protests. On the one hand: it was a tremendous relief when contact with the medical profession didn’t leave me frustrated and the professional scratching her/his head. On the other hand: FUCK! It sounded like I was looking at hip replacement. Let me tell you something about replacement hips: they dislocate with flexion greater than 90 degrees. That would certainly leave a mark on my illustrious career as a dirty whore.

It would have been hypocritical to write about greener living when I was driving everywhere. I came very close to buying a cane and I probably will in the next year or so, but with a lot of therapeutic work, a few adaptations and a stream of obscenities in my wake that’d make a sailor proud, I can now walk to and from work most days. Hooray and all, but I’m not prepared to get back on my carbon footprint soapbox yet until I work out why one muscle group won’t fall in and the therapist is frustrated. So: twice a week, the therapist sticks her elbow into knotted spots near my rump that would elicit screams if I were a normal person, but I laugh. Someday, this will be a rip-roaring story. Why wait?

Pete and I are shopping for an umbrella clothesline like Pete’s mother had. It was second base when we played kickball in his backyard. That was a great thing: hitting your head – clang! – on second base. Drying clothes outdoors is good for us because it’ll save gas and electricity. One of the tenants hang-dries her clothes inside her apartment, which is just silly. We can benefit, she too. Clotheslines run between $50-$100. Soon, I think!

Another thing we’re working on is a leaf shredder. We live under huge old trees and in the fall, Pete counts on raking up at least a dozen of those municipally distributed bags of leaves, while I thank Kali there’s a halfway decent chocolatier in town so I’m nibbling so-so bonbons while he’s working that hard. So anyway, it dawned on me that if we shredded leaves we could stop buying mulch at Lowe’s. Hooray and all, I bet I could get a mowing attachment on a Segway, if I put my mind to it, but I might need my mind later. It would be silly to lose it now.

Hear Me You Don’t Even

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New York fucking Times:

Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament

What what what?

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court choice, has a blunt and even testy side, and it was on display in December during an argument before the federal appeals court in New York. The case concerned a Canadian man who said American officials had sent him to Syria to be tortured, and Judge Sotomayor peppered a government lawyer with skeptical questions.

“So the minute the executive raises the specter of foreign policy, national security,” Judge Sotomayor asked the lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, “it is the government’s position that that is a license to torture anyone?”

Mr. Cohn managed to get out two and a half words: “No, your hon- .”

Judge Sotomayor cut him off, then hit him with two more questions and a flat declaration of what she said was his position. The lawyer managed to say she was wrong, but could not clarify the point until the chief judge, Dennis G. Jacobs, stepped in, asking, “Why don’t we just get the position?”

This sounds really familiar, but I can’t fucking place it –

Other lawyers, though, are not so enamored. In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges, she has gone from generally rave reviews to more tepid endorsements. Among the comments from lawyers was that she is a “terror on the bench” who “behaves in an out-of-control manner” and attacks “lawyers for making an argument she doesn’t like.”

Ringing a distant bell – so, so close –

“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

I remember now! It was Mrs. Ornstein’s tenth grade English class.

BAPTISTA
Gentlemen, importune me no farther,
For how I firmly am resolved you know;
That is, not bestow my youngest daughter
Before I have a husband for the elder:
If either of you both love Katharina,
Because I know you well and love you well,
Leave shall you have to court her at your pleasure.

GREMIO
[Aside] To cart her rather: she’s too rough for me.
There, There, Hortensio, will you any wife?

KATHARINA
I pray you, sir, is it your will
To make a stale of me amongst these mates?

HORTENSIO
Mates, maid! how mean you that? no mates for you,
Unless you were of gentler, milder mould.

KATHARINA
I’faith, sir, you shall never need to fear:
I wis it is not half way to her heart;
But if it were, doubt not her care should be
To comb your noddle with a three-legg’d stool
And paint your face and use you like a fool.

HORTENSIA
From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!

GREMIO
And me too, good Lord!

TRANIO
Hush, master! here’s some good pastime toward:
That wench is stark mad or wonderful froward.

Nothing’s as fresh as seventeenth-century sexism. Also: they suck as theater critics if they don’t know what play they’re seeing. The least the New York fucking Times could do is demand that these fuckers write their poison-pen OpEds that pass for reporting in iambic pentameter. Truly: that’s the least it could do.

Updated to reflect common understandings of sentence structure and moral sloth.

Of the Memory Of Late Nights

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Indoor Furry Overlords passing notes in French class.

We’ve been feeding the outside cats because they keep the squirrels and the birds out of our gardens. Sort of. Two bluejays have adopted the tree in our backyard from which they heckle us and the cats. The cats are taking it pretty well. They give the squirrels a run for their money, gnaw the heads off field mice and prowl around the place like a pride of lions – at least until the skunk turns up.

A Borrowed Dream Or A Superstar

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Miniscule cat and stiff ursine friend.

This morning, I woke up at 4 out of a sound sleep, lying flat on my back. Tiny Drusy was perched on my chest and we were nose to nose. My right hand was petting her. I’d been keeeessing her in my sleep. Because I loooove the Princess Drusy, even in my dreams.

Man, my subconscious is SO CORNY.

Sometimes You Picture Me

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How did you spend your Memorial Day? Pete and I drove up to Hacklebarney State Park, hiked through the woods and along the creek banks in the mossy cool of a sun-dappled morning. The air smelled fresh and green. We met people walking the other way on the trails and everyone smiled. Leashed dogs capered in the creek to the frustration of fly fishermen. One of the most striking elements of hike was that people of all kinds greeted us with the same unguarded eyes. We took pictures like this one, rested on benches, and hiked off trail up rocky embankments. It was a test for my hip that my hip passed, then we ate sandwiches. On our way home, we stopped at the rose garden for a sunny walk, then we ate sandwiches. At home, we sang along with Pete Seeger while we prepared dinner, which turned out not to have a speck of meat in it. Essentially, we communed peacefully with nature, then ate it. Hooray!

Between the hike and the rose garden we stopped at a farm store. Pete got out and walked toward the building. I ran for the goat pen and stopped short. About twenty feet in front of me stood two benches. One one, a teenage boy slumped facing away from me, completely oblivious. Between the two benches stood a fully grown male goat, staring at me. I turned around and said, “Pete, get the camera.”

The goat trotted off to this tree, climbed up and started munching on the leaves about ten feet to my left. I’m just out of the frame here. I was overjoyed! A family of picnickers grabbed its little children up off the ground but nobody panicked. I looked around to see if employees had noticed the escapee but for a while no, I was standing there on the lawn between the stray goat, the picnickers and the parking lot, laughing like the goat was wearing last season’s cargo shorts. I mean, really. Finally, an employee appeared, walked past me and lunged at the goat, who appeared to say, Whoa, dude. Like, dude! and bolted for the chicken enclosure. I said, “That goat appears to know you.” He nodded and took off after the goat. For the next ten minutes, the goat bolted here and there and the employee gave chase. I almost swallowed my tongue! Inside the pen, baby goats capered with other kids. Their frenetic little tails gestured madly. I turned back toward the parking lot and realized the teenage boy on the bench was playing a video game and never noticed the goat standing next to him. I was at gamboling distance, but the boy was two feet away and saw nothing. Then we bought spinach.