Grace

I am prior military, a Ph.D scholar and globetrotter, fighter for civil rights and political causes, but nothing frightened me as much as the helplessness childbearing would bring. To better prepare for this passage I kept my mind clear and body strong by working out, swimming twice a week, carrying a full teaching load, etc. I was prepared for childbirth, but not quite the C section we had to revert to. Not only was the birth radically different than I’d expected, the immediate healing process was as well. I came to deeply appreciate the nursing staff who sat me up (because I couldn’t sit up on my own – here I have a child to care for and I can’t sit up on my own!), kept me comfortable, checked my vital signs every hour the first night, gave me my first shower and smiled and doted on my new child as if they hadn’t seen thousands before. I loved those women for their proficiency and their kindness. I’ve never felt so vulnerable in my life: stitched, helpless and bleeding.

You know there is a nursing shortage right now. No-one wants to pay nurses what they’re worth and nurses are leaving the profession in droves. Some cite the crazy hours that ruin marriages and turn family life into a desperate relay race with childcare providers. Some cite miserable treatment by doctors and other hospital staff. Others cite the overwhelming and heartbreaking needs of patients in understaffed hospitals. I do know this: a nurse with an AA makes sometimes twice as much as a school teacher in the same neighborhood and it’s not enough to keep these people on the job.

We’re losing teachers left and right for the same reason: the money is not worth the constant personal humiliation, the exasperation of the work, the workload, the unruly children whose lives teachers are daily expected to transform despite daunting socioeconomic conditions and abusive parents and the exhaustion attendant with trying to change the world when you can’t even afford a decent lunch. Yes, but (many non-teachers say), the pay is for a “shortened” work day and summers “off,” but people don’t realize the extra hours of grading and course planning off the clock that will many times extend a work day into the double digits. As to the couple of months off, despite the fact that most teachers teach summers, any job that regularly required ten-hour days would normally either allow for substantial breaks in between projects or simply pay better. As it is, our nation’s teachers are voting with their feet – they’re taking their talents elsewhere. I know three school teachers in my immediate social group. They are each leaving their jobs for other schools, other countries or other professions entirely. And I won’t even touch the position of the local professoriate whose pay is commensurate with a well-trained legal secretary, but who are supposed to write a book every three years and teach 4-5 classes each semester, whose students disdain homework, whose buildings run with roaches and sewage, whose few superstars set public perception of pay and perks (like assuming all musicians are wealthy because Mick Jagger has amassed millions) but whose administration measures performance on student retention. No, that’s another rant altogether.

Two unique elements of these professions unite them. For one, they require a little more compassion to be effective than accounting or engineering and for another, they are traditionally (and still today mostly) filled by women. That both professions require years of training and are currently in dire need of willing employees suggests that the ladies have finally gotten wise and/or taken the advice of those who said “if you don’t like it, get the hell out.” Those who stay to stem the tide of disease and ignorance, must bear the derision of those who think they are stupid for staying in jobs that pay so little. Neither of these profession’s charges are generally kind. Patients who are sick or in pain are not always the most genial people. Students or parents who are convinced that their failure must be the fault of a flawed system frequently take out their frustration on the teacher as the most immediate representative. The irony is two-fold. That person is still in his or her profession because “helping people” is crucial to his or her ethos. The nurse or teacher must not only field regular abuse from patients, children and parents, but then must explain themselves to friends and family who suggest that they “do better.”

When did grace become the quality of the sucker?

I suggest that those in professions requiring compassion continue to leave their jobs for less vexing and better paying work. Nurses, teachers, social workers, service personnel, administrative assistants, etc. need to remember that this is the free market of a capitalist system, after all, and the only way to improve conditions is to continue to resist substandard pay and treatment. If our own compassion is used against us, it’s time to get with the tough-love, to refuse victimization and to speak with our feet. To all the hurt, helpless, homeless, hopeless and horror-struck, I’m sorry. Sometimes there’s no saving grace.

Tango

I best remember an old Lit Theory Prof of mine, Dr. Jamieson of California State University, Sacramento, not for enlightening me about Derrida or Nietzche, getting me confused about the Frankfurt school or vaguely aware of Adorno, but for dancing at my wedding. Okay, obviously he was instrumental in my neophyte interest in, and understanding of, the different schools of Lit Theory, and indeed ran a theory study group on Sundays, but it was probably more the way he ran his intellectual and personal life together at the seams that most impressed me. He e-mailed last week about Connor's arrival. He also gave some news of himself – he's reading Proust again, plowed through some political commentaries, was learning the Argentine Tango with his lovely wife, Leticia, who is currently teaching at UC Berkeley.

The Tango. It even sounds sexy. As a dance form, it's very open –
Argentinians go to Tango like some folks go to coffee. Absolute strangers can meet and, one leading and the other following, with a repertoire of myriad varying steps, turn a café into a ballroom. When Dan and I married, the only thing (okay not the only thing, but the primary thing) I wanted was to Tango. I didn't really think about it much then, I just thought it caught the spirit of our relationship well.

The thing about Tango, that which makes it devastatingly sexy, is not the hands on the small of the back, the kicks and flares and arches of feet or back, but the tension between the two dancers. It's a mix of seduction and resistance, of desire and derision, of push and pull and of long, languorous, sinuous stretches and sharp snap of knee and head. It's so hot it's almost corny unless done right. Movie versions abound: Sean Connery and Kim Bassinger in "Never Say Never Again"(1983), Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez in "Shall we Dance"(2004), and Antonio Banderas and Madonna in "Evita"(1996). Banderas shows his chops again in "Take the Lead"(2006), as a teacher who teaches his kids this deliciously tactile dance as their way out of . . . what? Poverty and powerlessness? I haven't seen it yet, but I'll tell you Dan and I did tango at our wedding. His sister got us lessons and we'd ride the subway every Tuesday into midtown Manhattan at 5:30 and in the ratty, tattered, sun-drenched summer evening at the dance studio take lessons from a short yet timelessly beautiful Argentinian woman named Marta.

We learned a lot about ourselves that summer. We found out that Dan is very good at it, unless very drunk, and I am very bad. The problem is that I insist on leading. Marta scolded me repeatedly. Indeed at the moment of truth at our wedding, Dan whispered in my ear "you're leading!" "Yes, but it's working so go with it!" I laughed back. We'd meant to choreograph and we'd meant to rehearse, but tango, like talking with a good friend or walking with a lover, has to be a conversation and since we hadn't prepared this talk, we had to make it up as we went.

That's been our marriage in so many ways, making it up as we go, mixing the traditional and startling together to make something new and fantastic. There's definitely been tension. We started as political opposites. He drank coffee and I drank tea till later when I got hooked on cheap New York street coffee and he drank organic green tea from China town. We could never walk together well down the streets of New York – there were too many people and I'd feel too impeded by oncoming foot traffic or controlled by Dan's hold on my hand. We walk together better now, time and experience letting us read each other's body language better, and learning who to let lead when. And we still Tango, late at night in the Hummingbird when Jeff or Vic puts Cordero on the Ipod like we still burn the midnight down talking like methed-up kids or old women with good gossip. Only now we have a third voice in the conversation. Connor is a child of few words, but emphatic delivery. He's changed our tango into a salsa, a three-count form, with one for Dan, one for me, and one for baby who makes three. It's still hot, its still lively, but busier. It doesn't take itself so seriously and relaxes more, is okay with being caught up in the messier joys of life and less about stretching. It has less to prove and doesn't care as much about who's looking, just that dancing is good for the living and good for the soul and understands that the three-beat is an excellent way to stay on the floor late into the night.

Pump up the Volume

I’ll bet you thought this was going to be about that perverse excrescence, the breast pump.

Nope. This is about shoes. You see, last night I inadvertently insulted a friend of mine, the lovely Ms. T who, with a fresh hair cut and a white polka-dotted Jean Harlow dress, arrived on my porch last night in a moonlit glow in an aura of retro 50’s glamour. As the hour turned from late to early, she left us in a swirl of white organdy and floated backwards down the stairs. In a motherly fit of cautionary advice, I told her to be careful and not fall off her shoes. Envisioning four-inch stiletto black patent-leather pumps, I thought I was being kind. In fact, Ms.T was wearing modest 2-inch heels and the comment came out as catty as a Sigfried and Roy show.

The only explanation or excuse I have for my misspoken vision of stiletto heels is that Macy’s has a great shoe sale. I know this because I was watching TV the other night and these feet started crossing the screen in the loveliest yet most unlikely shoes: Red hemp wedges, green strappy sandals, blue Persian patterns and my favorite – the black satin pumps. They were gorgeous all of them, like a collection of jewels set on the end of impossibly long legs and elegant feet. I thought as I watched these precious leathers stroll by, “yes, but those are four-inch heels. I’ll never wear them.” This is my mantra while I’m shoe shopping. It keeps me out of the impossible and in the realm of the improbable. I generally say nothing, though, mixing my fetishism with a kind of voyeurism that loves to look at shoes but doesn’t like to wear them.

I do have a good pair of black high-heeled pumps. They are gorgeous and make me feel like Karen Walker of the show Will and Grace. I’ve worn them exactly twice, each at the opening day of the semester. I feel tall, I feel elegant and I feel like both my feet are broken. More likely to be worn are the two-inch heeled Steve Madden’s in a half size too large. I have two pair, one brown and one black, like a pair of reliable carriage horses. They are the crux of my working stable of shoes. The real oxen of the collection, though, are my Mudd boots (sold at JC Penny), crunchy, romper-stomper things that lace up the front and zip up the size. Excellent shoes for pregnancy, I could loosen the laces for my swelling feet and then just zip in and out of them. More recently, I’ve been living in a pair of Nine West black two-inch wedges from last year and two pair of flip-flops, one blue and mushy with age sporting boating stripes and the other lime green and covered in depictions of martini olives.

If Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) said that the clothes make the man, do the shoes make the woman? I hope not, cause if so, I’m approaching trailer trash.

The problem is that summer is here and I need new shoes but don’t know what I want or what I’ll tolerate. Fall is easy – a pair of pumps, a pair of loafers, a pair of boots. Summer is never easy as I go from strappy sandals that flay ribbons off of my pezzanovante duck feet and flat slides that look like I bought them in the men’s section. I’m old, I’ve been standing on the tiny bones of these flippers for nearly 40 years and I’m sure that my illusion of Ms. T’s 4-inch stiletto black patent leather pumps was a combination of wish fulfillment and envy. I want the stiletto heels, but mostly I want to be the kind of woman who would wear them in the moonlight like Jean Harlow.