Really, Bill?

In all of the turmoil and grief over the Aurora shootings, surely our hearts go out most of all to the parents of the child victim, 6 year old Veronica Moser-Sullivan. At least, this is true for those of us who have hearts.

Bill O’Reilly has a bit of a different take on it:

I don’t want this to sound harsh to anybody, but the reason that these children were in the theater at midnight to see Batman was because their parents didn’t want to pay for babysitters because babysitters are expensive. So they take the children, the children fall asleep in the movie and the parent watches the movie. And the (six) year-old girl who’s dead – the mother of the girl was shot in the chest – you just heard her father. She survived.…The story about this is that the mother, the father – and you heard the father – took the six year-old to the midnight movie. And they did that, as I explained, ‘cause they didn’t want to pay a babysitter, because babysitters are 15 bucks an hour, OK? OK? And there you go. 

I have found that if you feel the need to say “I don’t want to sound harsh to anybody”, you probably should rethink what you are about to say. If what you really want to sound is loving and sympathetic, then you don’t tell somebody it’s their fault a loved one is dead. That’s not the way not to sound harsh. You say something like, “Oh, this is horrible; this is dreadful. Your poor baby! I’m so sorry this terrible thing happened. It should never be.” That might still not be comforting, but it isn’t likely to get you accused of being harsh.

You know why parents don’t leave their children home with a baby sitter? It isn’t just the money. Some parents prefer to be with their children. They don’t want to turn their children’s care over to other people. That doesn’t mean they need to hole up with the kid in a cave. They go places and do things and take their children along, because they like being with their children.

Some people are afraid to leave their children with a babysitter. We hear stories of abusive babysitters. Even babysitters who are kind can have poor judgement. Your teenage babysitter may mean well but be tempted to take the opportunity to make out with her boyfriend on the living room sofa while the kids set fire to the house trying to toast marshmallows. Worries like that make parents  just feel safer keeping their children with them.

Do you think that kind of worry is a little extreme? Your chances of experiencing a reported house fire in your life are 1 in 4. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a home fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 10. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a reported fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 89.

Your child is probably safer with a babysitter than you think, but “[c]hildren under age 6, the group most likely to be cared for by babysitters, are also those most likely to be victimized by them (figure 2). Children in this age group made up 60 percent of the victims of babysitter crimes in the NIBRS jurisdictions.”

Remind me again - what were the chances of being shot by an assailant in a movie theater prior to the Aurora shootings? For that matter, what are they now?

And if little Veronica had been left at home with a babysitter who turned out to be abusive or who panicked and couldn’t get her out of the house in a fire, would Bill O’Reilly be saying, “At least her parents didn’t take her with them to the movies where she could be shot by an armored gunman”? Yeah, right.

Why in the world would someone even think it is okay to talk about parents like this? They didn’t take their daughter hang-gliding or rock climbing; they took her to a movie. Yes, it was a midnight showing, but the worst they could reasonably have been expected to anticipate is that she would be crabby the next day. This goes beyond just the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; this is just plain cruel.

Really, Bill. You don’t want to sound harsh? Then keep your mouth shut.

Now and Always

Every month the Foundation for Historical Louisiana meets at the Old Governor’s Mansion and hosts a speaker. Last night’s speaker was Christian Garcia, who has just edited and published a book of letters written between his maternal grandparents between 1901 and 1916. His grandfather had been a state legislator and attorney and thus was often away from home working.

His family saved all the letters and Garcia was given them twenty years ago by a family member who hoped he would do something with them. The something he did is a book called Now and Always: A Louisiana Love Story. Garcia’s talk consisted of a short movie followed by readings of some of the letters, and then a summary of things he learned while researching the history of that period and compiling the letters. 

I went home wondering how it would be to have access to extensive correspondence between family members. My grandfather wrote to my grandmother once while he was visiting other family in South America. I know this because I sat next to my grandmother while my aunt translated the letter from Italian for me and my brothers. My grandmother greeted each term of endearment from my grandfather with some Italian words of her own which I didn’t exactly know, but the tenor of which were obvious from her facial expressions and gestures. I’m not sure what she was mad at him about, but it did make a nice change from the times I sat between the two of them while they competed for my attention. I would love to have that letter today.

My dad did save some of the letters my mother wrote to him while he was overseas during WWII. I remember they began with “my dearest darling”, which I thought was funny because who thinks of their parents being in love when they are little. I don’t know what happened to those letters.

I do, however, have a letter my mother wrote to my paternal grandparents in 1943. The letter was written from here in Louisiana, because my father was stationed at Camp Beauregard near Pineville, Louisiana (a few hours north of here) and my mother had rented a room in town to be near him. They had just been married the previous month and her coming to Louisiana to be with him was the only honeymoon they got before he shipped out. My dad had sent me the letter for me to read with the idea I was supposed to send it back but I sort of forgot, for that version of “sort of forgot” that means “didn’t want to”.

The letter begins with my mother explaining why my dad did not write himself.

 . . . [H]e is kept so busy that he can’t even write. Last week they sent him out on the firing range at another camp. He was there for six days. He was supposed to get Wednesday night off and also Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. But he was out on the range and had no time off. When he came back he had a six day beard. He couldn’t even write to anyone.They gave him yesterday off and we went out. We came back too late last night. He wanted to write, but he asked me to. He will write the next time he gets off. You see, the reason he has very little time is because he has to go to school for an hour or sometimes two each night.

My dad was actually a good correspondent for most of his life. He was the one who wrote to me once I left home, and sent all the news of my brothers, sister, and eventually nieces and nephews. He kept up a long correspondence with a boyhood friend in California. I have only one letter from my mom (my stepmother) announcing my sister’s third pregnancy. So I imagine he actually did feel bad about not being able to write to his parents himself.

I went out to camp on Monday. I was watching him work. He’s good! [that was actually double underlined.] He’s the best officer there. I was allowed to go in his hut. Mrs. Adler (her husband shares a hut with Frank) was with me, so we went in and sewed the patches on their jackets and overcoats. That’s the first work I’ve done for Frank since we were married.

That’s my favorite part of the letter. My poor mama, a new bride living in a rented room while her husband lives in a hut, not even able to cook or clean for him. She must have felt as if her life had been interupted. And I don’t know whether my dad was the best officer there or not, but I had my own experience of her fierce loyalty to anyone she loved a few months before she died. My cousin and I had come home from the candy store with a box each of some kind of taffy. Terry could not find a chocolate in her box and I had two. She accused me of stealing hers, I denied it. My Aunt Nellie ordered me to give Terry one of the chocolate candies and my mother roared, “If my daughter says she didn’t take it, then she didn’t take it.” (Picture double underlines here.)

I moved into another room here. It’s nice and roomy. I have a three piece bedroom set, a nice easy chair, and a small vanity bench that I use as a table. I also have a sink in my room and space for my wardrobe trunk. It’s very pretty. It’s bigger than the other room I had and right off the living room. We can use the living room as often as we want. The people are all very friendly, so I don’t feel lonesome on the five nights Frank isn’t off.

She goes on to ask about other family members, then adds

Tell them we wish they could see the beautiful countryside down here. Oh, yes, down here you don’t need a license to drive and you can get enough gas to go pleasure driving if you know the right folks. Too bad we don’t have a car.

Same old Louisiana (although now you do need a license to drive).

She signs it “Love and kisses, Julia”. I’m pretty sure the name on her birth certificate was “Giulia” because that is how it was spelled on her wedding invitations, but naturally she would have Americanized it as soon as she could spell. 

Ten years later she was dead, of a rare blood disease that turned into blood cancer. My maternal relatives would frequently say, “I guess you don’t remember your mother”, but I do. I remember the time she defended me to my aunt (although looking back , I suspect I did take my cousin’s candy, not out of larceny but out of sheer inattention.) I remember one afternoon I sat with her in the living room while she read a book. Every time she looked up, I smiled at her and she would smile back. I began to worry that she would get tired of smiling back, but she didn’t. She smiled back every time. I remember the time I had an abscessed tooth and Dad let me sleep in their bed the night before my dentist appointment. I couldn’t sleep and kept pinching her back so she would know I was there. The next morning I asked if she knew I had slept in her bed and she said, “Sweetheart, I knew you were there.”

So I kept the letter, because it is her, just the way I remember her, now and always.

My mother and I when I was 3 or 4.

It's a Miracle!

I don’t know if the news has spread to your neck of the woods, but we have a miraculous bleeding statue here in River City. The statue is of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as we Methodists are most likely to call her, known to Catholics of course as the Virgin Mary or the Most Blessed Mother. In the neighborhood around St. Thomas More co-cathedral, life-sized and near life-sized statues of Mary abound, and the owners of one of them noticed what they consider to be blood on the statue’s head about a week or so back. 

Skeptical souls consider the substance to be droppings from a bird who had either been eating berries or had blood in its stool due to illness*. Cynics suspect the homeowners of perpetrating a hoax. Selecting the most parsimonious explanation first is actually what the Catholic church recommends in such cases, as expressed in the saying, “God does not multiply miracles.” It is a human failing to reach for the most exotic explanation over the most prosaic. I remember riding on a bus one night next to a woman who insisted that a bright light visible in the sky must be a UFO. I could not convince her that it was actually the planet Jupiter, a very well known object and one that is not flying.

I suggested John come with me to see the statue, out of idle curiosity. The homeowners have put up a tent and chairs for people who wish to come and pray. The statue itself is covered with a large umbrella and surrounded by pots of flowers and some candles. There were two women sitting and praying when we arrived, and three more on foot who walked around, read the posters on the garage wall and left apparently unconvinced.

I could see from comparing a picture of the statue taken when the “blood” was first discovered to the statue as I was looking at it that the “blood” is wearing off, not surprising given that we have had two weeks of afternoon showers. Apparently whatever caused the deposit to appear is not an ongoing event, more indication that this event has a prosaic explanation.

I have my own hypothesis. It is, after all, summer. Kids are out of school, curfews are later, and they have no homework.

“No religion, either”, my husband chimes in. I’m not so sure about that. If this is a prank, I suspect it would be most likely to occur to a Catholic. Be that as it may, today’s internet savvy youth can easily Google “how to make fake blood”. It’s more logical than “Mary has a head wound”.

On the other hand, as I said, there are a lot of these statues in that neighborhood. Would someone young enough to think that this is a cool prank also recognize that stopping at just one makes it more convincing? Or would that person want to decorate every statue in the neighborhood? I don’t know.

Here is the picture I took. See what you think.

Maybe the baby hit her with a rattle?
Click to see full size.

*If you follow that link, be warned. Gendered and ablist insults, NSFW pictures and off-color language are the norm on that board.

Red Hot

John and I have been given a free trial membership to a retirees group sponsored by a local hospital. In addition to getting discounts from local merchants, we also have the opportunity to go on trips with the group. Yesterday we went to Avery Island and New Iberia, to tour the Tabasco factory and Shadows on the Teche.

Avery Island is not an island. It is one of a group of salt domes in southeast Louisiana which look like hills in the wetlands surrounding them. Jefferson Island is another such salt dome nearby, as is Weeks Island, once the plantation of the Weeks family that built Shadows on the Teche. 

Avery Island is home to the beautiful Jungle Gardens and Bird City, but we didn’t get to tour them yesterday. We only got to tour the Tabasco Sauce factory and country store before heading off for lunch and our tour of the antebellum home.

Since this was not our first trip to Avery Island, not seeing the gardens was only a minor disappointment. I have pictures from prior trips.

When you go to visit the factory, you get a history of the invention of Tabasco sauce, its early manufacture, and how its produced today, from both a tour guide and a video. Then you get to walk through the bottling plant and a one room museum, before walking over to the country store.

The so-called country store is really a gift shop, selling Tabasco brand products. You can taste a lot of the products, including their pepper jellies, chili made with Tabasco brand chili sauce, and their ice creams. Yesterday they were giving out samples of their new Raspberry Chipotle ice cream. 

When I first visited Avery Island, over thirty years ago, they didn’t have the video, and there was a real country store, further down the road that leads to the Jungle Gardens. I bought cold drinks for Neal and me out of one of those old time coolers. That road is now closed to visitors and presumably so is the old store. The first time I visited the Tabasco sauce factory, the tour guide pointed out in the display scrip that used to be paid to the workers to use in that country store. It hasn’t been mentioned on subsequent visits. I suspect they don’t want you associating the abuses of the old “company store” economy with their product, although considering how isolated Avery Island must have been from its surroundings in the early 1900’s, a store on the island was a necessity, and I have no reason to believe that their prices were exploitive. I wish they had kept the old store.

The McIlhenny family that makes Tabasco brand products apparently have been running a green business before anyone ever heard of the term. When the first Mr. McIlhenny made his pepper sauce, he bottled it in old perfume bottles to give his friends. Tabasco sauce is brewed in oak barrels that are obtained from distillers like Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. By law, the distillers can only use the the barrels one time, but the Tabasco factory can use them until they fall apart. When they do, they are chipped up and the chips sold to use in smokers.

The barrels are used for fermenting a mix of crushed Tabasco peppers and salt for three years. The barrels are topped by another layer of salt and holes drilled through to let out gasses. The salt comes from the salt mine on the island. Our guide told us that the used salt is used as salt licks for the animals that live on the island.

Once the pepper mash is finished fermenting, it’s mixed with vinegar and salt for 30 days. Then the pulp and seeds are strained out and the sauce is bottled.

The remaining pulp and seeds still have work to do. That byproduct is sold to other companies and is used to give the heat to many cinnamon flavored products, including Red Hots, Trident and Dentine gum, cinnamon gummy bears, and Close-Up toothpaste. Waste not, want not.

I used to flavor my cinnamon apples with melted Red Hots, but now that I am using cinnamon extract instead, I think maybe I should add a drop or two of Tabasco sauce. John bought some of their newest flavor, Raspberry Chipotle. I bought some Kosher salt from the Avery Island salt mines. I’m sure I could have found Kosher salt cheaper in the local grocery, but I keep forgetting to buy it. I also bought myself a chocolate-Tabasco bite. It tasted like ordinary chocolate at first, but has quite a kick at the end.

If you are ever in Louisiana, think about visiting our salt dome islands. The gardens, both on Avery Island and on Jefferson Island, are gorgeous, and where else are you ever going to taste Raspberry Chipotle ice cream?

Tabasco pepper plant

Barrel used to ferment the sauce

Buddha statue in the Jungle Gardens

Even More Fame

Ah, fame and fortune. Okay, scratch the fortune part. The book that I wrote about last August is finally out, and I have my copy. The book is called Lost in Translation: The English Language Taken Hostage at Home and Abroad, edited by Chris Stone. It’s a picture book showing humorous mistranslations, misspellings, and abuses of grammar in English signs, menus, and other documents seen around the world, and two of the pictures are mine.

I had almost forgotten giving the author permission to use the pictures in his work. Yesterday we were checking the mailbox and John found a large envelope addressed to me. “Are you expecting something?” I am, actually, a T-shirt from LL Bean to replace one that wore out in a few months time, but not this soon.

“It looks like a book. Are you expecting a book?” As I said, I had forgotten all about it, so until I opened it, I had no idea what it was.

My pictures are numbers 16 and 89.  You have to count them to figure out which is which because there are no page numbers, just a picture on each page and captions. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet, but my husband has, and I heard laughter. 

Anyway, here are my two contributions:

Taken in Hungary, April 2010

Taken at Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

To see the rest, buy the book.

Color Code

Well every person you can know, And every place that you can go, And anything that you can show, You know they're nouns. If you ask me to explain who I am, I will use nouns. I am a woman; I am a citizen of the United States of America; I am an Italian-American; I am a speech pathologist, even though I am also a retiree; I am a feminist; I am a blogger; I am a Baby Boomer; I am a senior citizen, even though I prefer the term old broad. Each of those terms describes something related to my identity. Most of those terms relate to something permanent about me, except perhaps the ones regarding my age, but even then, my birth year is something permanent. It doesn’t fluctuate wildly. Some of them relate to choices I have made and values I espouse; others relate to choices made on my behalf or sheer chance, but they all are part of who I am. This morning, I went to the drugstore to drop off a prescription from a doctor whose patient I am. I took my car, so on the way there I was a driver. Years ago there was a drugstore closer to my house that I could walk to, making me a pedestrian. Later, I treated my husband to lunch and he drove, so I was his passenger.  At the restaurant, I of course was a diner and customer. We conversed at the restaurant, so sometimes I was the speaker and mostly I was the listener.  The nouns in blue are different from the ones in red. They don’t tell you anything intrinsic to my identity. If you asked me to tell you something about myself, you’d probably be confused if I said, well, sometimes I’m a pedestrian and sometimes I’m a passenger, and also I’m a diner. There are some senses in which being a speaker can be a job description, but not in the sense I used it here. Of course, one can be a bus driver or a race car driver, but there again, that’s a specialized sense of the word. The words I highlighted in blue are words that label my role in a specific, usually temporary interaction. They aren’t my hobbies, my occupation, my identity. So why am I babbling on about this (in color, no less) you ask.  I am thinking of an incident that occurred when Jerry Sandusky was convicted of sex crimes. A reporter on location made reference to “victim number 7” and was interrupted by someone back at the station saying, “I don’t think we should call these young men victims. I think we should call them survivors.” For a moment, picture a red box filled with nouns like the ones I have highlighted in red, the ones that label people's occupations, hobbies, religion, political identities, values, ethnicity and anything else they might choose to use in constructing their identity. Then picture a blue box filled with nouns like the ones that I have highlighted in blue, filled with nouns that label a transient role you might play in a specific interaction before moving on to something else. In which box do you place the word “victim”? To me, “victim” belongs in the blue box. It’s a label for a role in a specific, usually temporary transaction (if sadly not always temporary enough). It’s not a hobby, an occupation, a political affiliation. It’s not a choice I made about how to live my life. Unfortunately, the word “victim” seems to have crept out of the blue box into the red box. Too many people act as if being a victim is a choice the victim made or a core part of a person's character. A sense of shame has become attached to the status of victim like the sense of shame that should attach to being a bigot or a thief or a murderer (a few other red box words). It has become a name to call someone. After all, there are no passengers, only people who flunked driver’s ed. To get away from this shame, we have replaced the word “victim” with “survivor”. I am not going to argue that we shouldn’t do that. If you have had an unfortunate experience at the hands of a predator or even at the hands of impersonal fate (say in the form of a weather event or a fire) and if calling yourself a survivor is part of what helps you cope, I will respectfully use your calling customs. It’s the least I can do for you. I just think that whether we use the word “victim” or the word “survivor” or something else, we need to grab that word “victim” out of the red box and return it to the blue box where it belongs, with its little blue friends. It’s a perfectly respectable label for a transient role in a specific, usually temporary interaction, not a name to use to stigmatize someone. (Edited to remove references to identity since Nick brings up a good point. I hope this makes my point clearer.)

Sweet or Unsweet

If you order iced tea in a restaurant in the south, you are likely to be asked, “Sweet or unsweet?”.  I am fairly certain that “unsweet”, in the sense of “not having sugar added”, is not really a word. I say that because my word processing program has it underlined in red, and when I look it up in my inline dictionary I get the answer “No entries found. Do you mean ‘unseat’?” Looking the word up on dictionary.com, I do get a definition:

unsweet adjective
1. (of champagne) moderately dry [syn: sec]
2. distasteful; "he found life unsweet"

I’m not sure either of these definitions fit iced tea, especially the second one, but you won’t convince anyone down south that the word they are looking for is “unsweetened”. Nonetheless, whenever I order iced tea in a restaurant, I specify “unsweetened” and add, “with no lemon” because I really don’t like lemon in my iced tea. Half the time it arrives with a lemon slice on the rim anyway, and then we have to do it all again. I suspect that in the restaurants we frequent, I am known as Her Again. Her Again is actually a good tipper, but it doesn’t matter, because most of the time my husband is paying for dinner. So I also suspect I get the same glass back minus the lemon slice. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone spit in it either, but I figure that’s why I have such a sturdy immune system.

I tell people that I live south of the tea line. In the north, at least when I was growing up in New York, if you asked for tea in a restaurant you would get a cup of hot tea, unless you specified iced tea. Down here, if you ask for tea in a restaurant, you get iced tea, unless you specify hot tea (which they might not even have). 

I ran into a similar distinction when I went to college in Buffalo, NY. Where I grew up, “soda” meant a carbonated beverage. In Buffalo, a carbonated beverage was “pop” and “soda” meant an ice cream soda. Down here, of course, a carbonated beverage is a Coke, or sometimes a cold drink.

I suspect in time “unsweet” for “unsweetened” will make its way into dictionaries. After all, it does fit a grammatical rule. I’m still going to take it with no lemon.