I Didn't Start the Fire

After taking a detour into education for a few years, about which I’ve already written extensively, frustration, burnout, and terrible pay led me back into IT. My oldest daughter had her sights set on film school at the University of Texas, so I started hunting for gigs in Texas. A friend of mine emailed me a link to a job posting he’d found when he was prospecting for clients because he thought it would be interesting to me. It was. It was a business analyst/product management consulting role, and the tongue-in-cheek tone of the advert appealed to me. I applied.

It turned out that my friend Andy’s wife worked for this company, which is probably why they bothered interviewing an eclectic oddball like me. After a strange but not unpleasant phone interview, they invited me to Austin for the next round. I dusted off my one suit, made a plan to couch surf with an old army friend, bundled the kids into the Jeep, and drove down I-35 full of nerves and hope.

After two days of grueling, role-play and problem-solving interviews, I was tired, frustrated, and discouraged. I gathered the kids from the coffee shop where I’d parked them and headed home to Oklahoma to try to figure out the next plan. So two days later when they called with a job offer, I was more than a little surprised. And hesitant, truth be told. But I needed the job, I needed to be in Texas, and I didn’t have anything else waiting in the wings. I took it.

The next step was finding a place to live, which was a challenge in overpriced Austin with no money in my bank account. I made another flying weekend trip and looked at several really nasty duplexes and houses. One was okay but they wouldn’t take dogs. Depressed, I went out to dinner with a friend at an east Austin Mexican restaurant and shared my woes over a glass of mezcal.

The waiter hovered. “I couldn’t help overhearing. I happen to be a realtor,” he said, as he brought us dishes of flan. He handed me a business card. “Call me tomorrow. I might have something for you.” 

Serendipity? Maybe, but he found me a tiny two-bedroom house in south Austin that was in my budget and had a fenced yard. I grabbed it. I had to get a loan from a friend to pay for the deposit and my moving costs, but I knew I couldn’t remain in a tiny, dead-end town in Oklahoma any longer. And thus began the second act of my consulting career.

That adventure lasted ten years, and I still have a contract relationship with the company, so what I write about from here on out will be sanitized illustrative vignettes to protect client privacy and my ass.

The funny/sad/frustrating thing about being a consultant is that clients call you in when shit’s gone wrong. The best-case scenario is that they’re just short-handed for a big project. More often, they are already in the middle of a mess. A project with runaway scope. An organizational switch to Agile that’s run into the ditch. Monthly fines for non-compliance. A pile of disorganized software requirements and no idea how to tame them. Layoffs and mergers. Stressed people and frayed nerves. A consultant is 80% therapist, at least. You not only have to learn how to remain calm when everyone around you is freaking out. You also have to learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. At least, if you’re like me and think “what the fuck” about twenty times a day you do.

One project that presented a lot of interesting challenges was at a bank in San Francisco. I’d once lived in San Fran, so it was fun to return and stay in the heart of the financial district. So many great restaurants, pubs, and things to see! Thanks to public transportation, I didn’t even need to bother with a rental car. The project was supposed to be straightforward enough. They just wanted to automate some reports that they used in their mortgage banking group. Ha ha.

Except it wasn’t straightforward at all. Do you know what an accountant calls a “report?” A cross-linked Excel workbook with a dozen tabs, multiple interdependent formulas, pivot tables, and graphs. And more often than not, the data in that workbook was derived from another workbook and has gone through maybe five transformations before it winds up in its final form. 

“Okay,” I thought, “This is crazy, but there’s a process behind all this, so I just need to figure out what it is.”

Ever ask an accountant “How do you derive this?” Their answer is, more often than not “I apply my professional judgement.”

Accountants are witches. No doubt in my mind about it.

To make it more fun, I was working with four different departments, and the heads of those departments didn’t agree about what should be done or how it should be done. They didn’t even really like each other very much. It’s pretty awkward when you’re sitting in a conference room and one of your clients starts venting bitterly about another of your clients. “I empathize with your frustration” is as much as you can say, and that starts to sound pretty stupid after about five utterances.

My boss and I took the clients to a happy hour in an attempt to soothe grumpy accountant feelings and get a good team vibe going. “Don’t talk about religion or politics,” he warned me beforehand. We sat down around the table and ordered appetizers and drinks. Then one of the clients leaned across the table, looked me straight in the eyes, and said “So what do these Occupy Wall Street folks want, anyway?” I swear, I didn’t start anything. You can’t blame this one on me.

Back at the client’s office, I just kept on asking questions in the hopes that at some point it would all start to make sense. And I got pretty good at deconstructing Excel formulas. The project went way over schedule and budget. I learned to dread status meetings. But in the end, the client wrote a glowing review of my skills and professionalism, so there’s that. I rode the wave of that good karma for a long, long time.

I’ve been on other banking projects since then, and I always end up with the same thought. “Does it HAVE to be this complicated?”

Dead Ends

We all have jobs that we leave off the resume. Short term jobs. Survival jobs. Dead end jobs. Maybe even entirely different careers that just didn’t work out. I still have an expired Oklahoma teaching certificate in my files, after all. But even these jobs can have moments, or at least lessons, worth remembering.

I moved across the country to Portland at the worst possible time. 9/11 actually happened while we were in transit. I saw the news coverage from the breakfast bar at a hotel. Enron went belly up and dragged Arthur Andersen into oblivion with it. The economy went to shit. Portland was expensive, compared to Texas, and jobs were scarcer than hen’s teeth. I had two small children, a hella big rent payment, and a husband who was suffering from major depression.

My resume ended up in the trash at Nike and Columbia Sportswear and dozens of other local corporations, so after a lot of rejection, I found a local employment agency and went downtown to see what they could do for me. They had me take tests in MS Office and English. That was entertaining. Ever done a mail merge in Word? Well I hadn’t, but I stumbled my way through it. Apparently I was the first person who ever scored 100% on their English test. They were amazed. It wasn’t even that difficult, but whatever. They found me a part-time position with a local court reporting firm. I interviewed and got an offer. The folks seemed nice, the office was close to home, and I wasn’t in a position to be snobbish. I took the job.

The job was essentially to process depositions we had transcribed and package them up for delivery to local law offices. In spite of the ubiquity of computers, most local lawyers still wanted everything printed and bound. My tasks included running and troubleshooting a massive commercial printer, ensuring that printed documents were correct and complete, binding, and labeling for delivery. I also formatted, burned, and labelled the CDs for customers who wanted a digital copy. It would have been deadly dull, but I amused myself (and wasted more than a little of my employer’s time) by reading the depositions. Most of them I’ve forgotten now, but there was one that included a pair of black g-string panties as an exhibit. That one was a real doozy.

My office mate, Amanda, handled the court reporters’ schedules and served as the first point of contact for customers. While the bulk of the work was recording depositions for law offices, we also did meetings for public entities and closed captioning for locally produced TV shows. Printing out the minutes of the local water board meeting wasn’t a very exciting part of the job, and I’m sure the reporters found it dull too. The reporters were all independent contractors, not employees, so they were free to accept or decline any assignment, which made schedule management a little tricky. They didn’t all live in Portland, either, so commute time and availability had to be taken into account. Each reporter had their “regular” customers that they usually worked with.

After a couple of months into the job, I got recruited to help write a grant proposal to obtain funding to provide visual descriptions for local PBS programming. We already did some closed captioning work, but visual descriptions to make programming accessible to the visually impaired is far less common. The proposal was a work in process, but there was still research and writing for me to contribute to its completion. Sadly, after months of work and waiting, the grant was not approved, and the hope of building out an entire new service offering withered.

Sadly, like almost all administrative jobs, the work was necessary to the running of the company but the pay was low ($14 an hour) and there was no chance for the role to evolve or grow. No matter how key you are to successful operations, as an admin you’re considered nothing more than a cost to be managed and minimized. Getting the occasional Starbucks gift card or potted plant doesn’t compensate for the endless grind of poverty and ennui.

I left that job when I left Portland, never to return except as a visitor. The outdoorswoman in me loved the Pacific Northwest, but I needed a future.

One Good Guy

I’ve written about this one before, but it deserves another look.

It was the last job I got via a recruiter. I know recruiters are still a thing, and sometimes they even ping me with opportunities, but recruiting has changed. Back then, it was still often an individual with deep ties to the local tech community, someone who had a fat Rolodex and a memory like a steel trap. I guess Indeed and Monster have mostly replaced guys like Jeff.

The company was called Encompass. It was a nation-wide roll up of specialty construction contractors – electrical and plumbing, as well as some commercial janitorial services. Roll-ups were a very popular business model in the 90s. There was an optimistic belief that “economies of scale” would make any type of business more efficient and profitable.

The Houston headquarters were located in Greenway Plaza next to the basketball arena that is now a notorious mega-church. My office was high in the air with a view south of the Astrodome and the construction site of the emerging Reliant stadium, now called the NRG stadium. Businesses come and go in Texas, but football is forever.

The job, as it was explained, was the management of an ongoing project to implement an e-procurement system that was already in development.

As time went on, I came to realize that wasn’t a completely accurate job description.

But for starters, I was excited to be managing such a big, strategic project. I was working hand-in-hand with the corporate procurement department, as represented by Andy. What Andy lacked in stature he more than made up for with courage and heart, and he turned out to be the best part of the entire adventure. The software development was being done by a tech company located in Atlanta, in whom Encompass had invested a significant amount of money. One of our first trips was to their Atlanta office, to work through outstanding design questions. I don’t think the term “tech-bro” had been invented yet, but this software company definitely had a lot of them. At our round tables, a couple of big problems quickly became evident. One was that their current software product was designed around a completely different purchasing model than we needed. It’s one thing to buy pencils and toilet paper in bulk to supply an office building. It’s an entirely different thing to order expensive electrical components for a multi-story commercial construction project. The other problem that we discovered was that “ongoing design and development” was a mischaracterization of our status. We didn’t have a functional design, much less any code.

Without a clear direction or scope, conversations devolved to debates around opinion. Tempers flared. People talked over each other. As the project manager, I knew it was my job to bring order and sanity to this chaos, but the bros were very bad at listening. At one point I just snapped, jumped to my feet, and left the conference room, slamming the door behind me so hard that the entire wall shook.

Andy told me later that after I exited, the entire room fell silent. “I think we fucked up,” someone said.

So, we left Atlanta and went back to Houston. We figured out that we needed to get input from the business units and procurement managers who would actually be using this proposed system. We got permission and budget to travel to a few key locations. The travel agent, a lady with red lips, hair, and fingernails known as BJ, set us up with tickets and reservations, and we were off. It was this road trip that really revealed Andy’s allyship and character.

You see, construction companies just don’t have a lot of women. And the ones who do work there are usually receptionists, HR, or bookkeeping. In every meeting, I’d be the only woman in the room. And the men naturally deferred to Andy.

“I’m not the project manager. Dino is. You need to listen to her,” he would tell them bluntly. And then he’d shut up and sit down. He gave them no choice.

They started talking. They told us about their processes, their systems, their challenges, and their triumphs. They’d give us tours of their fabrication facilities and show off their newest high-tech welding equipment.

“Why aren’t you taking notes?” they’d ask me.

“She’ll remember every word,” Andy reassured them. “She’s scary smart.”

That road trip included some memorable experiences. Like jogging with Andy in Phoenix until he twisted his ankle and helping him hobble back to the hotel. Like staying in a hotel in Appleton Wisconsin that happened to have no hot water in January. Like driving across Mississippi in a taxi while Andy ordered roses for his wife to apologize for being “a jealous twit.” Like bantering with the hippie-chick bartender in Boulder who explained to us that she didn’t need pot any more since she discovered meditation and could connect with the creative force 24/7.

Back in Houston, we convened in my office and started making process flows. We covered every inch of the walls. Some truths began to emerge that we just couldn’t ignore.

1.     Our branch locations were operating on a dozen or more disparate back-office systems (off the shelf and bespoke) that were not compatible with each other or with the e-procurement system we were proposing.

2.     Some of our branch locations had already developed integrated purchasing and invoicing with their key vendors and had no interest in disrupting processes that were already working.

3.     The base cost of purchased products was a minor consideration compared to the big benefits of vendor services like staging, packaging, delivery, and return of unused goods. Having a long-term relationship with a vendor who provided these was very important to the construction projects. Any systems that disrupted this relationship would be rejected.

As I reported these findings back to the IT director and indirectly to the CIO, reality started to bubble to the surface. The project I was desperately trying to make succeed had been conceived and funded as a pet project by the COO and had been actively opposed by the CIO, who had instead advocated for convergence on a standardized back-office platform. Hiring an IT project manager (me) was a concession the COO made after significant push-back. The CIO neither expected nor particularly wanted my project to succeed.

So, fun.

“What we need,” the CIO told me, “Is to put together a presentation for the board with a complete ROI for the project.”

So, back to spreadsheets and PowerPoint. Andy and I wrestled with the numbers. The numbers didn’t cooperate.

“You can’t use headcount reduction as a cost-savings,” the CIO told us. Back to the spreadsheets again.

The day of the board meeting arrived. In suit and heels, I presented my slide deck. The COO sat and watched me with a cold narrowed gaze.

“This is my last day on this job,” I thought to myself, as I carefully and thoroughly explained why they should cancel my project.

They cancelled the project. But they didn’t fire me. So that was good anyway.

Just Saying No

I was pretty fed up with the problems inherent in working for a company that had no marketing strategy and way too much process. I’d applied for an internal position as a product manager and been turned down because I didn’t wear make-up. I’m not kidding. I met Ed, a former colleague and refugee from big consulting, who was now managing a small advertising firm, for lunch at the Saltgrass Steakhouse on I-10.  Between the bread and the entrée I vented a bit. By the time desert came, he’d offered me a job. Yes, it really worked that way back then, sometimes.

It was a nice little company. The guy who founded it had the office down the hall, across from the room full of artists, one of who was his brother. “Creatives” as we call them in the advertising world, were allowed to wear jeans and long hair and pretty much do what they liked. In the next office the account managers, in tidy suits or skirts or khaki, handled all the project management and put on the respectable face for the clients.

I was the odd one in this crew, neither a creative nor an account manager, but an “expert” on this thing that advertising firms in those days called “new media,” aka the internet. Ed didn’t really get the internet thing, but he knew that times were changing, and he hoped I could help drag the agency into the next decade.

I helped out with some interesting client projects, and I did research and wrote a plan for transforming the agency into a digitally savvy organization, with proposed partnerships with key service providers. I had a couple of smart MBA-student interns working for me who handled the financial modeling. I spent hours reading about internet and marketing trends, chasing down rabbit holes following the visionaries and authors and rebels who were surfing this new technology wave. It seemed like this agency could be a good place to stay, expand on the internet skills and knowledge I’d painfully acquired at my last job, perhaps help guide this little company and its clients into the future while creating a team and a role for myself that would elevate my career.

It was the last time I had that dream about an employer, by the way.

The founder of the company decided to retire and go fishing and sold us off. At first it seemed nothing much would change. We were designing a trendy new office space, a little larger and on another floor of the same building. The rest of the company just kept on keeping on with existing projects and clients. But slowly things started to change. The founder had been the face of the company to the clients, and they didn’t have the same loyalty once he was gone. Finding new clients got harder. The parent company was concerned about the cost of the new office space we were building out. Then one day, a new president showed up to take charge. He was retired from Madison Avenue and looking for a nice little vanity job to keep him busy.

One of my projects was the redesign of our own website. I’d had the fun of walking the line between the artists and the account managers, trying to find just edgy enough to be hip without being completely ridiculous. Website performance be damned, we were going to have half-page portraits with bright red backgrounds on our team bio pages. Twenty years later, I cringe at the thought. I was working with the account managers to solicit quotes from our clients about what it was like to work with us to round out the copy, and the new president thought the process was taking too long.

“Just make up something,” he told me.

“That doesn’t seem like it would be entirely ethical,” I protested.

“Just add something in small print like ‘what our clients would say about us,’” he retorted.

“Every day we advise our clients to be authentic and honest with their customers and their market,” I returned, getting a little hot under the collar. “We should model the same behavior.”

Later, Ed took me aside and said “You can’t talk to him like that. He’s the president of the company.”

“He’s still wrong,” I responded. “And I’m not comfortable just making stuff up and attributing it to our clients.”

“You need to just do what he asked,” Ed replied.

“Well, I won’t,” I answered. “You can if you want, but I’ll have no part of it.”

And that was the end of that. I packed up my stuff and never looked back. The company didn’t last much longer. The parent company just didn’t see much point to keeping them around and shut them down. I detoxed with a few short months of unemployment and daily trips to the gym before calling my favorite recruiter and getting back into the arena.

Murder by Process

It was a great company to work for. The folks were all so nice, the training program was robust, and the work was interesting. It was a family-run business that really felt like family. After a rough 5 years with a big consultancy, it felt like a safe place to land. It was the kind of company that held its own annual chili cook-off, gave every employee a gym membership, where the CEO regularly invited programmers and testers and admins and agents to lunch and listened to them, and you actually looked forward to the monthly all-hands meeting.

The project management team was a good team with a decent manager. We liked each other, helped each other out, and had lots of conversations about doing things better. We were earnest and eager young professionals, most of us holding the title “project manager” for the first time.

We decided that we needed to develop some standard processes and all use the same project management tools to make it easier to track the status of all our work across the different software products we produced and supported. We were in the mode of doing small waterfall/iterative projects, each of us often managing several projects at one time. We settled on Microsoft Project and then turned to standardizing our PM processes and plans.

All of this was reasonably useful, by the way. I enjoyed the vigorous discussions we had and felt that we made solid choices. There were some compromises made but overall, for the types of projects we mostly did, none of it felt too heavy. 

The only problem was that I quickly became the contrarian. I didn’t set out to be, but you know how it goes. I was working with the web team almost exclusively. I started out with a small site design for a subsidiary company. The creative component of web design appealed to me. I liked the team I was working with. My product manager was the wife of an astronaut and given to wildly personal confidences over the salads at lunch. The business analyst was a working musician with a voice like an angel. The webmaster was a fidgety and flirtatious drummer who was a bit of a genius at graphic design. The dev manager was a bass player known for always ordering the largest and most expensive item on the menu whenever we had a team lunch. The QA manager was a handsome Italian-American-Mormon with some weird hang-ups. Over the course of multiple projects, we evolved into a tightly knit, scrappy little family.

For a big internet project like redesigning a site or adding major functionality, the established project processes worked just fine. We had natural and distinct design/code/test/launch cycles of the work. Breaking a big project into multiple releases still worked within the methodology. But our leadership decided that every website task we did had to fall within a project and be managed as such. Adding a link, refreshing some content, building one or two new pages, or other small site-maintenance tasks just didn’t fit into that framework. At that time, self-publishing tools such as marketing teams use everywhere now just didn’t exist, so all website changes went through IT. I found myself wedged into a corner called “do what you’re told and make everyone miserable or do it the right way and get yer ass fired.” Not a fun place to be.

“I need an alternative to our PM process for this type of work,” I told my manager. “My stakeholders are frustrated because things take too long.”

“You’ll just have to bundle all of their requests into a project,” she told me.

“But that will delay our response for possibly weeks,” I retorted. “And there’s no value in grouping tasks together into projects if they really aren’t a project. There’s no relationship between them, so there’s no synergy in projectizing them.” (Consultant-speak oozing out of every pore. I don’t deny it.)

“That’s the way we do things,” she said. “They’re going to have to get used to it.”

Dear reader, they didn’t get used to it. The marketing department loved our work but they hated our processes so much they hired their own webmaster and cut us out of the loop completely. Turns out, about the time I was fighting this battle, something called Agile was crawling out of the swamp. Maybe it would have saved me. Maybe not. More on that later.

Those Old Y2K Blues

Year 2000 projects uniformly sucked. Everyone in IT who lived through the massive boredom of the so-called Y2K debacle has a story to tell. Mine includes the end of my “big consulting” career.

It went like this. The consultancy I worked for was engaged by a big petrochemical company to inventory all of their systems, evaluate for Y2K compliance, and prioritize for remediation. When I first showed up to the endless unadorned beige halls, beige carpets, and brown doors of their office building, our team was literally housed in a closet. I sat on a crate in the corner for a couple of weeks with a computer propped on a cardboard box, pretending to be productive. Eventually we actually got a small conference room to share, and I had an actual desk to sit at, next to Chas, one of those cowboy-boot wearing “my family has a ranch but I’m doing this technology thing” kind of dudes we seemed to have a lot of in Houston.

The partner on the gig was Tommy, a fresh new partner, sort of good-looking with reputation as a party boy. He featured prominently in all the wildest stories that got passed around the office, the kind of guy who hosted an annual crawfish boil, pool party, and drinkathon at his west Houston McMansion where all the men wore Hawaiian shirts and all the women wore bikinis. I showed up in my athletic one-piece suit with a coverup. Clearly I wasn’t playing the game correctly.

On the Y2K project, I somehow ended up assigned to the engineering group, working with a contract Brazilian programmer whose name I forget. Nice kid and quite competent. The engineering software was almost entirely homegrown applications written, used, and maintained by the engineers themselves, and they were quite amused at the corporate assumption that they needed some fresh-off-the-streets consultants to help them manage or fix their systems.

There I was, unwanted and mostly unneeded, yet somehow I was supposed to be impressing the client with my go-getter-super-organized-you-can’t-live-without-me project management. Mostly this involved driving all the way from west Houston to Baytown a couple of times a week to hang with my programmer, who nicely explained what he had done, was doing, and was planning to do, none of which required my input or supervision. But Tommy wanted everything planned down to 15-minute tasks in a spreadsheet which would have been pretty much made up and of no use to anyone. He was a big believer in the official methodology that had been developed for huge mainframe projects and which was too cumbersome, complex, and time-consuming for anyone to actually use, even if they had understood it. None of our long weeks of training included that methodology, so I doubt Tommy comprehended it better than anyone else.

When I was back in the west Houston office, I noticed that, Chas, my friendly officemate, was developing an odd habit of spending hours a day on the phone. At first I tried to ignore this, figuring he had work or personal business that was no concern of mine. But it intruded on my awareness, and it became apparent that he was running some kind of Christian phone therapy service during work hours. With a deep, caring, soft voice he’d express concern and mutter prayers to some anonymous person or other. Knowing Chas as I did, this really stumped me. Wasn’t this the guy who had had noisy sex with the manager of our previous project in a shared hotel room in Chicago during training last year? Everyone heard that story from his roommate. Not to mention teaching every woman on the team how to two-step and jitterbug at the big kicker bar in north Houston? That nice tall blond girl with the fiancé from South Africa got a bad case for him after one of those outings. Well, Chas remained the golden boy on the project regardless of his almost complete lack of getting shit done. After all, he didn’t regularly tell Tommy that putting “sharpen pencils,” “schedule conference room,” and “check emails” on the project plan was stupid. Which I probably did.

One by one the people on that project handed in their notice and went on to other things – NASA, graduate school, Enron. My mentor asked me “how did you go from being a top performer to a marginal team member?” Dude, it has everything to do with leadership, but nobody ever believes that. Shit’s gotta roll downhill, and partners are at the top of the hill. Eventually my recruiter (his phone number was on everybody’s speed dial) turfed me up a nice project management gig at a real estate company and I made my exit as well.

Tommy had a glorious 20-year career with that consulting company. But I’m not jealous about that, because I’d never have been able to play the game that long, nor did I want to.

Chas ended up quitting shortly after I did and went traveling around Texas holding tent revivals. There’s no more enthusiastic evangelical than a reformed rake, or so I hear.

Screw You Specifically

Somehow my first job out of college, I landed a gig at one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. I’m still not sure how that happened. At the time my technology experience was limited to word processing and working a fax machine. Pretty sure I dazzled them with my camouflage and combat boots. Or maybe it was my linguistic abilities. Or maybe it was just my long blonde hair. At my first company Christmas party at the Houston Junior League, one of my fellow first-year colleagues looked around the room and then said to me, “You know, there are no ugly people here.”

Whether I met the beauty requirement or not, I was definitely a square peg in a round hole at that place. At the time, they didn’t allow women to wear pants to work! We’re not talking the 1960s; this was in the mid-90s. Prim little suits with pleated skirts was a far cry from my previous work uniform of BDUs and combat boots.

I learned how to code, in COBOL, RPG, JPL, and then C+. I worked on a project for a big corporate merger trying to integrate wildly disparate systems. (Why do people insist on doing that?) I learned a lot, found that I actually enjoyed and was pretty good at programming, and had fun with my teammates who were mostly smart, cool people.

A couple of years into this job, my husband and I decided it was time to start a family. After a normal amount of time, I got pregnant with our daughter. When I finally got around to telling my team, their unified reaction was “Great, you can be the designated driver!” Um. Thanks?

I planned to take 6 weeks off when the baby arrived. The company didn’t offer paid family leave, so that was a couple of weeks of saved vacation time plus unpaid leave. However, after my daughter was born, I was blown away by the responsibility, the love, and the challenges. She was an extremely sensitive and colicky baby who spent most of her first year screaming. To say it was stressful would be an understatement. When I took her to the local grocery store, they opened a new cash register just to allow me to bypass the line and get the hell out of the store. When I went to the local taqueria, the waitstaff would dance around the restaurant with my baby in their arms, trying to calm her enough that I could eat the lunch they had brought me. When my neighbor (and mother of 4) baby-sat her, she said “Wow that is a really difficult child.”

The 6 weeks went by really quickly, and I knew I wasn’t near ready to return to work. So I contacted my mentor and arranged to take 6 months more leave. That time at home with the baby was a life-saver. I healed, I learned how to be a parent, I learned how to juggle childcare and all the other things a full-time parent has to get done in a day. I found friendship and support among my older neighbors who had been there and done that. And I was able to find a day-care that seemed reasonably well aligned with my budget and philosophy. But when my leave came to an end, I knew I wasn’t ready for a full-time schedule. In fact, I really had no interest in going back at all. Coding and designing software seemed a lot less important than it ever had, which honestly wasn’t that much to start with. But the bills were piling up. My previous project manager said he’d be happy to have me back part-time, so we arranged that I would return on a 3-day-a-week schedule. He was one of the good guys, a chap from Ohio named Chris. I don’t remember a lot about Chris except that he drove a Trans-Am which I thought was pretty sweet until I had the misfortune to drive him home one day after he’d had a few too many. What a pile of rattling junk that car was! Later, he married one of our colleagues on the project, which totally surprised oblivious me because I had no idea they had a thing going.

Going back to work was still a really hard transition. “They” say that babies in daycare cry for a little bit, then settle down into the new environment. Not so my baby. She cried non-stop. For days. It nearly killed me. It nearly killed the day-care workers too. They were at their wits end with this baby. I hated every minute I was away from her. But finally she started to adjust. At the end of the first year, I moved to a 4-day schedule. That was really ideal because it gave me that one weekday to handle all the family logistics without having to take PTO, while still providing a nearly full-time income. Honestly I did just as much work as I had on a 5-day schedule, so it was a bargain for my employer, which I was well aware of.

The local office, seeing how well this was working out, and getting pressure from other employees who wanted to work part-time, began crafting a policy. Possibly they saw a competitive advantage in being able to provide the flexibility that would help retain good employees. This was a long time before WFH or flex became common, so it would have been a big selling point for them. But the managing partner of the company, a guy who once bragged in a meeting how his teenaged daughter was in the hospital AT THAT MOMENT having surgery but he was just so dedicated to his job he was in a conference room with us instead, got wind of this radical happening down in Houston and put the kibosh on the whole idea. No one under the level of manager was to be given a part-time option, ever.

Between this and the horrible Y2K project I had been assigned to when my other project ended, I’d had enough. I quit that month. When a guy who has hundreds of thousands of employees decides to fuck with your life in particular, it’s time to go. Besides my daughter is way more important than any job, ever.

Exceptional Lies

 Many folks have come to see that “American exceptionalism” is a toxic mind-set. A philosophy that somehow the folks who live in the U.S. are freer, better, more rugged, more enterprising, and morally superior by virtue of our beautiful country and superior form of government. It’s a belief that somehow each of us carries an awesome destiny and purpose just because we are born here.

Open-minded travel to other countries proves this is a lie. It’s not that the U.S. doesn’t have some awesome qualities. It’s that other countries do too, and many things better. We also have a lot of flaws, but pointing that out disturbs our self-image, so we tend to ignore them. So why does this myth persist? And why are those who point out its unreality so roundly vilified? What do we get out of believing ourselves to be “exceptional?” And what does that really mean to us personally?

I’m not even going to try to debunk the myth of American exceptionalism, by the way. Lots of smart people have already done that. If you’re reading my blog, you’re probably quite familiar with them and their arguments. No, I’m going to talk about the personal side of things.

You see, most of us are taught from toddlerhood onward that we are exceptional. That we must strive and achieve. That we must outperform our peers. That we are made for greatness. Proud parents trumpet our achievements to friends and family. Anxious parents monitor our report cards and berate us for a poor mark or even a mediocre one. We’re signed up for sports and dance and orchestra and we’re coached and tutored and cheered. If you’re a parent, you’ve probably done all of these things. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that greatness is always externally defined. Worry about earning that validation takes the joy out of everyday living, fills us with anxiety, causes us to lose touch with our inner selves, and discourages us from doing the fun stuff in life.

An example. My oldest daughter went to an Irish dance performance at our local library when she was in middle school. She enjoyed it a lot and subsequently looked up a lot of Irish dance videos and determined it was something she wanted to learn. I found a local teacher and paid money I didn’t have for her to take lessons. We moved to a larger city and she found an Irish dance school there to join. She progressed quickly and showed an easy talent for learning the complicated step patterns.

Cool, right? But the problem is, the worldwide Irish dance community is built entirely around competition. There’s a highly structured progression – compete at a local feis, win 1-3 place, then progress to a regional competition, again placing 1-3, and so on, with the target being competing at the world championship in Dublin. Teachers and schools gain cache (and therefore more students) by producing champions. In the ever-spiraling strain of competition, fancier costumes and more intricate, challenging footwork is encouraged. Dancers spend thousands of dollars on glittering outfits and risk permanent injury from risky moves that put incredible strain on their feet and legs.

If you just want to dance, not participate in all this nonsense, there’s really no place for you in the Irish dance community. Dance as a celebration, as a community-based activity, as an exploration of Irish culture, as an expression of physical joy, is lost in the competitive furor. So folks like my daughter, who love Irish dance but don’t want to (or can’t afford to) play the competition game, just stop dancing.

“It’s such a shame she quit,” people tell me. “She was really good. She could have been a champion.”

And so it goes. Whatever we do, we’re supposed to excel. And excellence, of course, can be monetized.

I play violin. When was a teenager, I was quite good. I played solos and I played in competitions. It was expected that I would continue my music studies after high school. But I looked forward and saw how intensely competitive the landscape was. I didn’t want to end up teaching music in some middle school. I wanted to play Carnegie Hall, but I knew what the odds were. I gave away my instrument and joined the Army.

Recently, I started playing again. I’m happy to play second in our community amateur ensemble. I’m having fun and making music and getting better. My goal is to hit most of the notes and support my fellow musicians. I’m learning some reels and jigs to play for my daughter. Maybe we can just have fun with it.

We don’t even have to make a YouTube channel.

Thoughts of a Veteran

 It's veterans' day again, with the usual excessive flag waving and maudlin expressions of gratitude. On this day, lots of people recommit to the idea that veterans should have health care and benefits and housing. They don't necessarily vote for the politicians who get that done, but it's a fine, feel-good sentiment. Here's the thing though. As much as I appreciate "take care of veterans," the truth is that I don't deserve anything that every American doesn't deserve. I don't want Americans to take care of me. I want them to take care of each other. 

When I was in the Army - 

I always knew that I’d have a place to stay. It might be a bare-bones barracks room. But it would be clean and comfortable and free. And if I had a family to house, there was some on-post housing and housing allowances for those of us who had to rent “on the economy.” There was even a warehouse of home furnishings that you could borrow so that you didn’t have to buy a bunch of furniture and schlepp it around the globe.

I could get three squares a day at any chow hall. If I lived in the barracks, I’d have a meal card and eat for free. But even if I had my own apartment, I could still get a chow hall meal for a couple of bucks.

I always knew that I’d have access to health care when I needed it. I didn’t have to fool with insurance cards and deductibles and HSA accounts. I just went down to the clinic and saw a doctor or nurse or dentist as needed and got whatever medication they prescribed at the on-site pharmacy. Wherever in the world I went, my medical records went with me, so I didn’t have to worry about records requests and delays and paying fees to access information that belongs to me.

When I moved from one station to another, I knew that my belongings would be packed and shipped to me, whether this was a couple of suitcases and a bicycle or an entire household. My travel expenses were also paid for.

If I were stationed in a foreign country, I could rely on support for things like auto registration, driver’s licensing, and navigating the local real estate market. For families with children, on-post day-care and schooling was provided.

Wherever I was stationed, I knew that there would be a PX/BX where I could buy essential products, a commissary where I could get my groceries, a barbershop, a post office, a gym, a dry cleaners, a community center where I could have a soda and a game of ping pong with my colleagues, and a club where I could relax and have a beer and listen to music after hours. Often there would be even more infrastructure – a ski shop where I could get my skis tuned or buy discounted lift tickets, an auto-shop where I could get my car fixed or borrow the tools to do it myself, a dark room where I could develop and print my own film, maybe even a movie theater or a bowling alley. All of it affordable and accessible.

Each place I was stationed, I was assigned a sponsor who helped me get settled, made sure any paperwork or training I needed to complete was done, took me down to the supply room and the armory to help me get equipped, answered my questions, and showed me around. I knew when I showed up to work, I’d be given the tools I needed to do my job.

Training, both on-the-job and formal, was built into my schedule. I knew I’d have the chance to learn new skills and advance in my career. So long as I met minimum requirements, additional schools and certifications were always available.

Everybody, whether private or general, had 4 weeks of paid leave. Plus, extra days off were given for things like donating blood or volunteering or acing the PT test or just because local leadership felt like it.

The military goes beyond providing for the minimum, essential services. Why do they do all of this? Because they know that people are more effective and more motivated when their needs are met. Not living in fear of homelessness or hunger or medical bankruptcy is the bare minimum. We also need community and recreation and fitness and challenge and growth. With those things, we can excel, we are motivated to reach for more, and we can endure the hardships of our lives and our jobs with grace and resilience.

Everybody should have that.

The Middens

 

On the front porch, between two deck chairs, is a wobbly gray wooden table I rescued from the barn. When I went out today to set my coffee on it for my morning caffeine interlude, I saw a small pile of broken, dusty bits of glass from old bottles and jars. Renee had been working in the garden and dropped there the latest assortment of trash they dug up. It’s a growing collection of jugs, rusty bits of plows, and broken gin bottles. I’m not sure why they keep it all, but it may become an art project one day.

American farms are scruffy. Growing up in Texas, sagging barbed wire fences, rusting farm equipment, dilapidated peeling farmhouses, and weedy farm roads were normal to me. Then I traveled to and lived in Germany, where farms and villages really do look like postcards or fairy tales, with geraniums and whitewashed walls and tile roofs. Nowhere the abandoned farmhouse sinking into a ruin of briars and splinters. Nowhere the sagging rusty roofs collapsing over last years’ hay bales and bits of crumbling iron. Nowhere the field full off mechanized farm equipment in various stages of disrepair. It was all impossibly tidy.

Now in middle life, I have acquired my own slice of American rural heaven. Thirty-six acres of woods and meadows with a double-wide mobile home and a motley assortment of outbuildings. Not big enough to be a working farm by modern standards, but it probably was a hardscrabble 40-acre spread 100 years ago. The only remnant of what may have been here before is a stone foundation wall half buried in front of my mobile home, traces of a basement maybe. And everywhere the detritus left by 20 years of occupancy by the previous owners, who clearly had that rural mindset “never throw anything away – it could be useful someday.” Even though the dump is just down the road and free to use.

I’ve been here a bit over a year now and I’ve barely begun to clean it up. Now that the heat of summer is beginning to ease, I’ll snag the truck keys and prioritize trips to the dump. Some of it may go on marketplace “free to a good home.” You never know what people will want.

A pile of at least 40 old tires.

A tractor tire and rim that’s about as tall as I am.

Rusty barrels with neither tops nor bottoms.

3 old intermediate bulk containers (IBCs).

A riding lawnmower that doesn’t work.

Scraps of siding, guttering, and roofing materials.

An obround steel tank for fuel storage.

A couple of broken push fertilizer/seed spreaders.

2 cheap electric cooking ranges.

The metal ends of an old school desk.

Scraps of barnwood and lumber which may or may not be reusable.

Old partially rotted fence posts.

Various lengths and sizes of PVC.

A metal truck bed tool box.

A bent metal canopy holder with no canopy, nailed and zip tied to my deck.

A rusty broken metal thingy in the middle of the pasture with a tarp tied to the top which the previous occupant used for feeding hay.

Scraps of wire fencing.

About 50 pieces of rusty rebar.

Several dog shelters made out of pallets nailed together and covered with asphalt shingles.

That’s not even counting the half-buried drifts of trash still to be discovered and hauled out of the woods, once the leafy undergrowth has been stripped bare by winter. Last winter we dragged or carried another half dozen tires, bags of cans and bottles, and lengths of rusted barbed wire from under the fallen leaves. As we build trails and explore our 20 acres of forest, I’m sure more middens will be discovered.

And then there’s all the other work to be done, the building and repairing of buildings and fences, the clearing of fallen trees and overgrown pathways, the plowing and planting and tending of the vegetable garden, the planting of fruit trees and flowers, and the care of bees and beasts.

None of which actually pays the bills.

Starting

I haven’t blogged for fun in a long while. I’ve been really busy doing life, and I also write tech blogs for money, so a lot of my writing energy goes into things like “how IOS-14 is going to change your marketing strategy.”

For those of you who know me well, I left Texas over a year ago and ended up buying a little farm in the Piedmont area of Virginia, where I spoil horses, grow tomatoes, keep bees, and sweat a lot.

I also quit my day job and started an online art gallery which I named Kraken Fine Arts, which is a raw new start-up at this point.

Pre-pandemic, I had this cool vision of running my own little business, which included creating an amazing space where customers and collaborators would feel welcomed and inspired. But during a pandemic, that wasn't going to happen. So I started my business online. I registered my company online. I battled Shopify and created an online store. As soon as I was fully vaxxed, I traveled to Texas and back to meet with artists and gather artwork, which I cataloged and framed and stored in my house until every room is bursting at the seams with art framed and flat, shipping supplies, mat cutters, extra frames, tape guns, rolls of glassine, and receipts.

Running your own business is NOT THE SAME as advising other people on aspects of their business. Not at all. Sure, I’ve advised Fortune 500 clients on systems and processes, but as a solopreneur, I have to do everything myself. And doing it on a shoestring budget means not calling in an expert or a consultant to handle the stuff that’s hard or un-fun (like accounting).

I follow other art galleries on social media and observe what works well for them and what doesn’t. One thing that seems to emerge is that a lot of other people don’t think about or react to art the same way I do.

I have a house full of quirky art. Most of it my kids made. Some of it was painted by friends and extended family. A couple of pieces were given to me. And a few I bought from strangers. Each one has a story, a complex web of memory and feeling that I re-experience when I look at it.

This piece is a great example. My youngest child made this. We had moved to Austin in 2011 when I took a job at Seilevel, and I had to switch from home-schooling to something else. I found a small alternative private school which they attended for two years. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but there were some good things and experiences. One of them was a mosaic project that the kids did, which included visiting a local mosaic artist, making a guerilla-art mosaic in a public park, and creating their own little mosaics. This is the result.

But this one school project extended further. My older daughter interviewed the mosaic artist for a college class, which included borrowing and learning to use my audio-recording pen. We Googled and sought out other public mosaics and art installations to photograph. And my youngest is still creating mosaics today. They have bins full of broken tile and glass, and when the other projects they’re working on get frustrating or they’re losing creative momentum, they’ll bust out the mosaic supplies and create something entirely different.

When I look at this, hanging on the wall of my living room where it can catch the light from the window, I remember all of that. I remember the teacher, Caitlin. I remember the old east-side house and garden where the school was located. I remember the hopes and frustrations of that move to Austin and all the changes in our lives. I remember my child struggling to “fit in” to a school environment, even an unconventional one. I remember the impossible commute to get my child across town to school every day before and after work. I remember how the people I met through that school became the nucleus of an extended network of funky, liberal, artistic, activist friends that I continue to treasure.

Sure, I’d probably remember all those things without this piece of art to remind me, but it concentrates and focuses the memories. It’s become part of who I am.

Other people see it on my wall and say “that’s pretty” or “I bet that’s hard to dust.” They don’t see what I see. They can’t. But that’s okay. Every experience with art is unique.

I don’t understand people who have art because “it looks pretty on that wall” or “the colors coordinate with my décor.” I mean, there’s no invalid reason to buy or have art, so it’s not a criticism. I just hope that over time, they start to attach stories and memories to it too.

To a Black Farmer

All month, I’ve been posting articles in my work Slack about Black History Month. There are a lot of
amazing people and accomplishments to celebrate, as well as an inconceivable amount of trauma and grief to understand. But somehow what gets missed are the stories of all the ordinary people living ordinary lives within the time and place that they were given. So for this last day of Black History Month (Is it ironic it’s the shortest month of the year? I’ve always wondered about that.) I want to talk about the ordinary life of a man who made an extraordinary impact on me. His name was Roland Wyatt.

My family had just moved from Richardson to Celina Texas. Celina at the time was a tiny, poor farming community in a rural county. It was many years away from becoming a rich, conservative extension of Dallas. My parents had indulged my lifelong dream of owning a horse and decided that we needed a little more space. So we bought 7 acres with an ugly orange brick house, packed up the mid-century modern couch and the chrome side tables and the books and moved off the paved road. To say we were misfits in the community would be a gross understatement. My dad, a beatnik atheist engineer, still drove his Torino to Texas Instruments every day to design weapons systems for the military. My mom, a feminist housewife with literary pretentions, decided that if we were going to live the farm life, we might as well have calico curtains and can tomatoes and jelly and buy a shotgun. My sister, who was 16, was pretty good natured about changing schools and having to share a bedroom with her little sister, but Celina high school was a terrible culture shock. She survived by commuting to Dallas for part time jobs and socializing. 

Roland lived in town with his wife and his two grandchildren, in a ramshackle unpainted wooden house on the wrong side of the tracks. He farmed some of the land around us. I don’t know if he actually owned any of the land, or if it was all leased. After he introduced himself as our neighbor, he offered to cut and bale our hay field for a percentage of the hay. We had good Bermuda grass and no farming equipment, so that was a win-win. I loved watching his tractor chugging across the field, one day laying the waving grass down into rows, another day gathering the dried grass into tidy little rectangles that dropped out the back of the baler. I watched the ease with which his lean grandfather’s arms loaded and stacked the bales onto the back of his old truck. 

I had a blue child’s bicycle, the kind with a banana seat and streamers on the handle bars, that was pretty useless on the limestone driveway and road of our new home, so I gave it to him for his granddaughters to use. He was delighted and invited us to his house to meet his family. As we sat around the table together, he told us about his daughter. She lived in the shack next door, but she was lost to heroin addiction, which is why the grandchildren lived with them. He didn’t say so in front of me, but I realized later that his daughter must have been paying for her habit with prostitution. Concepts that I was barely aware of and didn’t understand, at the age of 10. The next week in school, one of the kids mentioned, spitefully, that they’d seen our car “over the tracks.” I didn’t understand why that was supposed to be a bad thing, but I was smart enough to recognize racism when I saw it. I also knew quite well that no one else in town had invited us into their home or made us welcome, so I cheerfully told that kid to go to hell. 

One side of our pasture bordered a creek, and it didn’t take our horses long to figure out how to cross it and go adventuring. After a couple of trips down the road to retrieve them from Roland’s wheat field, my mom turned to him for help. A couple of days later, he drove up with a truck full of barbed wire and fence posts, and within two days had strung a tight, straight fence between pasture and creek. Having since struggled with my fair share of fence building, I know just how hard a job it is, but he made it look easy. 

The year I turned 11 was 1977. There was a farmer’s strike that year. Farming productivity was high and consequently prices were depressed. The endless conundrum of farming is that, when the weather is good and the yields are high, farmers go broke and lose their land. Demanding a fair price for their products, some farmers banded together and called for a strike. There was even a farmer’s march on Washington DC. Locally, the farmers drove their tractors in from the fields and parked them around the square, refusing to work the land. I remember driving around the square, seeing all the green tractors lined up tire to tire, wondering what it was all about. Even the children parked their toy tractors next to the big machines and played on the square – to them doubtless it was a grand adventure. But Roland didn’t join the strikers. My mom asked him about it. 

“I’ve been a farmer all my life,” he said. “Farming is all I know. I guess I’ll just keep on doing that and let these other fellas parade around town.” 

The Johnson grass and sunflowers grew tall on either side of the gravel road. Choked with white dust, they crowded the roadway and blocked the view. One day I came home from school and saw that the verge on both sides had been neatly mowed back several feet. Roland was at the house, drinking iced tea and visiting with my mother. 

“Road looks pretty good, all mowed back like that, doesn’t it?” he asked me with a twinkle. 

“Yes it does; it’s very nice,” I answered politely. 

“Who do you think mowed it?” he asked me. 

“I don’t know,” I answered in my suburban naivete. “The county?” 

“Oh lawd, honey, no,” he smiled at me. 

“You did it then,” I finally understood. 

He just grinned. 

“It’s real nice,” I added, a little lamely.

My most spectacular memory of Roland was the Christmas day when he rolled up to the house with a stock trailer containing a weanling Hereford steer, a perfect little red and white bovine chonk. I knew it was for me. I hope my parents paid him for it. It’s entirely possible that they didn’t, knowing my parents. 

I named him Quinto. He lived in what had been the large vegetable garden, well fenced and just the right size for a paddock. Cows, I was soon to discover, are a lot different than horses. I tried. I really did. I haltered him and groomed him, but I also had horses to raise and schoolwork to do. He got fat and glossy but remained stubbornly untrained. 

When I was 12, my parents divorced and sold our little rural paradise. My dad moved into an apartment in Dallas. My sister moved to Dallas too, to live with a friend. My mother and I and the horses moved to Denton. Quinto got sold, all but one of the dogs got rehomed, and the horses were pastured on a big empty field outside of Denton that belonged to the broker my mom worked for. Gone forever were my early mornings walking out of the kitchen into the dawn to feed my horses and listen to the meadowlarks rising up into the light. And of course, I never saw or heard from Roland Wyatt again.

Many years later, I’ve found my way back to the country life that I learned to love in those short years. I wake to a chorus of song sparrows, and rain or shine, before breakfast I’m in the barn, feeding my horses. When my lean arms tire of stacking hay bales, when I’m tightening the wires of my fences, when I’m dropping spring’s seeds into trays of soil, when I’m spreading manure across the pasture, when I’m raking out the chicken coop, I remember Roland. I wonder sometimes what he saw in this pale, misfit, city child that was worthy of his generosity and teaching, or maybe it is just the nature of people like Roland to be generous teachers. Either way, I count myself as lucky to have known him.

Dachau

His name was Norton. He was one of those oddballs that one is kind to, the way one is kind to stray dogs and pushy children, because the world is better for a little kindness. We’d been sent on a couple of assignments together, so hanging out in Heidelberg or Mönchengladbach or pulling 12-hour shifts during a training exercise counted as a sort of bond.

During the last few months of my assigned time at the 204^th MI BN in Augsburg, my husband had already moved back to the states with the dogs, I was staying in a friend’s apartment, and my free time hung heavily on my hands. So when Norton said “you should see Dachau before you leave” I agreed to a Friday excursion with him.

“You’re going to Dachau?” asked Tom, the blond Midwesterner on my team. “You know, the Holocaust is a lie. They hide the truth, but that gas chamber at Dachau was never even used.”

Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D./Global Photo Archive/Wikimedia Commons

“Tom, go fuck yourself with a cactus,” I replied.

I’ve never let professionalism get in the way.

Usually I remember things very clearly, like photographs or video in my head, but there is much about that day that has disappeared into the fog of time. I think Norton drove. I may have already shipped my car back to the states by then. I remember reading a lot of plaques in German. I remember a stark metal sculpture like black ink against the gray sky. I remember thinking how odd it was to see cheerful little beds of flowers planted over the ashes of the bodies that had been dumped on the ground. I remember the gas chamber with its sign clearly stating that it had never been used. I remember the row of ovens, heavy gray metal canisters of death, doors open so that visitors could not pretend not to see and understand.

It was a drizzly chill day, as it often is in Germany. But one gets used to the weather, dresses for it, disregards it. The cold seeping into my bones as I stood in that place had nothing to do with the weather. Grief and sympathy for the suffering and despair, but over that, the heavy awareness of the evil that caused the suffering and the knowledge of how many, like my overfed colleague Tom, would, in spite of all the lessons of history, gladly enable or even perpetuate such evil if given the chance, while steadfastly insisting that evil doesn’t exist at all.

There’s not much to do at Dachau. One walks, reads, looks, thinks, stands there in the rain feeling like there should be a thing to do. You are helpless to change the past. You are so immersed in the present that you cannot even see it. So you say “never again” as one does, without quite knowing what that commitment means.

By silent consensus we decided it was time to leave. We walked back to Norton’s car, unlocked the doors, got in. He started it up and pulled out of the parking lot.

“So, a beer?” he asked. “I think I need a drink.”

We ended the day’s adventure at a Gasthaus, hands wrapped around glasses of Spatenbräu, nibbling at a sausage plate. This too, this Gemütlichkeit, warmth and beer and the blue and white flags of Bavaria on the walls, are part of the culture that had murdered millions of Jews and tried to violently take over the world. The waitress, sturdy in her Dirndl and practical shoes, brought us another beer. Were her parents and grandparents victims or perpetrators, resistors or enablers? There were no bystanders. Germans know this. The rest of the world would do well to stare into the open door of the oven and learn that lesson too.

Not a Patriot

There’s been a bunch of really vile human beings labeling themselves as patriots lately. They’re loyal
to a country that doesn’t exist, a fascist state where men are men and women are pretty and guns and money are plentiful if you’re white and the rest of us are just targets for their lust for rapine and blood. Not a pretty place, the America of their dreams.

Whatever a patriot is, I’m clearly not one.

My ancestors sailed to this place before it was a "country." They fought in every war. They founded cities and plowed farms and built houses and branded cows and sweated and gave birth and died and were buried in graves from Yorktown to California and all points between.

At the University of Oklahoma, the son of a dustbowl rancher and the daughter of kings met and married and had me. They brought the secrets and trauma of generations to an unhappy home and eventually divorced, leaving me a latchkey child who walked home alone after school and listened to The Who and The Cars and Led Zeppelin as loud as my transistor radio would go.

I escaped into the Army where I low crawled and sweated and worked my way to a sergeant’s rank, traveling around the world and spying on the USSR in the senseless game we called the Cold War.

I raised horses and I raised children and hiked and biked and drove the roads and trails and forests and deserts of America. I slept under a sky full of shooting stars while park service mules grazed beside me. With trembling legs I stumbled over stones and boulders and sloshed through mud and manure to stand on mountains covered with spring flowers and icy cold creeks and a million black flies biting. I’ve crawled out of an frosted tent on a frozen morning to wrap numb fingers around a metal cup of steaming coffee and watch with silent awe the morning dance of deer and birds and prairie and sky.

Now in my middle years, I watch my children grown and facing an uncertain future, and I remember me at 19, full of life and power and dreams as wide and wild as a Montana morning, and I hover between tears and rage. Rage at the ever-diminishing horizon for opportunity and joy in a broken economy in a dying world. Rage at the greedy bastards who stole that from us. Rage at all the people who refused to see the obvious until it was probably too late.

And still I do my work and raise my horses and tighten my fences and plant the seeds and gather the eggs and stack the hay and force my not-quite-as powerful-as-it-used-to-be-but-still-game body onto the treadmill or rowing machine or bike and try to quiet my mind with burning lungs and sweat.

Tonight I’ll go to bed and read some silly mystery until my body finally forces my brain to sleep.

I’ll get up tomorrow to a purring lap cat. I’ll drink a steaming cup of coffee and pull on my barn coat and walk across sparkling frosty grass to the eager morning neighing of horses. The sky over the barn will be pink and lavender and full of birds.

But the joy that should be there will be flattened and forced. Because hate and greed and ignorance are winning. Because my children cannot dream and fly.

I’m an American, but I’m not a patriot. I’m just a human being. Standing here on a muddy frozen farm in Virginia.

A human being who’s forgotten how to cry.