Happy Pride!

I teared up a little when the flags went by today, which is strange because I don't normally feel quite so stirred by the stars and stripes. But I was at Twin Cities Pride.

If you've never been to a Pride celebration before, try to imagine "the happiest place on earth" minus the Disney stereotypes. But there is the same irrepressible joy.

When the flags came by at the beginning of the parade, I was proud. Of my country. Of my state and it's embrace of the LGBT community. It was lovely to see our senator, governor, and other elected officials waving at the crowd, not hunched in their offices, writing hate-filled legislation in the name of religion.

When I attend Pride, nobody wants to check my birth certificate. Nobody judges me for the excruciatingly boring clothes I'm wearing amid rainbows and glitter. Nobody stares at my sensible shoes. Instead I'm greeted everywhere with, "Happy Pride!"

This is the America I'm going to remember a week from now when we celebrate our independence. Not the hate in North Carolina and Orlando. But an America full of color and love. An America that welcomes me just as I am. And maybe I'll cry just a little.

Xenophobia

The sun has set in the UK, and I find myself re-evaluating the whole idea of voting. Sure, it sounds good. Give everyone a voice. Let them have their say. Be fair.

But then again we do have some limits. We don't let children vote, for instance. If we did, they would all vote for more candy, lots more TV and later bedtimes. Broccoli and spinach would be against the law, as would doing dishes, doing homework, and doing anything parents say. Above all, there would be no sharing!

Because sharing is really hard. It requires loosening your grip on something you have. Letting someone else hold on to it, too. But that is the basic lesson of childhood, a lesson preschoolers and kindergarteners have drilled into them. That "Mine! Mine! Mine!" is childish. Something you outgrow with maturity.

The Brexit vote was Britain at its most childish. Refusing to share. Grabbing toys away from others. Screaming "Mine!" at the rest of Europe. Those screams can be heard on our shores, too. People who pledge allegiance to he-who-must-not-be-named throw eerily similar tantrums.

So I'm re-thinking this whole voting thing. If we refuse to let children vote, should we also refuse to let people who act like children vote? Maybe the kids who've been to preschool and kindergarten would make better choices.

Farmer's Market

It seems like every time I'm wearing a t-shirt that announces my advocacy for gay rights (I have quite a collection), I run into my Baptist neighbors. They're wonderful people who may very well support gay rights themselves, but we don't discuss it, and I'm left to wonder what they think of me.

Last Saturday, I went to the Farmer's Market. The first of the year. My expectations for produce were low, since it's still early in the growing season, but I headed out to see what could be harvested. I was wearing one of those t-shirts—the gay ones—though I'd thought momentarily about changing, given the possibility that I would run into one of my adult ESL students, who snigger every time the subject of same-sex marriage comes up.

Sure enough, while waiting to cross the street to the market, I stood behind a woman whose t-shirt bore the names of local mega-churches and organizations that had tried so hard to make sure no gay couple would ever wed legally in Minnesota. I know, because I worked hard to help defeat them. Across the street, Jehovah's Witnesses stood on the sidewalk, over-dressed for vegetables. They would have been happy to answer any questions I may have had about my eternal damnation. Inside the market, Somali families carried bags of food that they couldn't touch until sundown because it was Ramadan.

This was one day before the carnage in Orlando. In the aftermath, people who worship guns—for having, not hunting—have claimed once again that only more guns will make us safe. But if all of us who wear our conflicting identities so publicly, backed up our differences with weapons, going to the farmer's market would be as dangerous as going to a movie theater. Or an elementary school. Or a community center. Or a Bible study. Or a nightclub.

#Orlando

"Be careful!!" I texted my son yesterday, June 12, 2016. As if he were a five-year-old about to cross the street. As if my words could somehow keep him safe in an America completely saturated with guns and hatred. I made him text me when he got home. He probably sighed and rolled his eyes.

The men at Pulse were young like my son. Their mothers would be about my age. They would know how little they could do to protect their children from another person's anger. The days of hand holding while they cross the street are long gone.

It has to be up to all of us, then, to protect them. To be sensible about guns. To be tolerant of others. To reject any religious or political justification for hatred. Because no mother should have opened her eyes this morning knowing that she has outlived her child.

Veiled

It was startling. Only the eyes.  I tried not to stare at my new student. I'd seen others like her before, who chose to cover their faces, but never in my English class. She was tall and thin and so timid that I could barely hear her voice through the veil. She was late the first day because she got lost. She seemed a little lost the whole term. 

At the beginning of the next term, a Latina woman and a woman from Ethiopia came in and sat down. I began to try to learn their names the way I always do. Large post-it notes with their first names on them went on the table in front of them, facing me. “So I can see your name. Face. Name. Face. And remember,” I said. My hands moved from the table to their faces, up and down. 

Just before class was supposed to start, a woman in a hijab walked in and sat in the back. Another new student. “And what’s your name? I need to write it on this paper,” I said. 

“Teacher, it’s me.  I’m not a new student.”

I stared at her face. It was true. The eyes were right. The voice was right. But I had never seen her face before. For the entire previous term, she had covered it with a veil. 

The fascinating thing was I had created a face for her. Her eyes were beautiful. Huge and trusting. Her long lashes used to get tangled in the top of the veil. She constantly pulled it down to see. I assumed that the veil was hiding unparalleled beauty, that those who gazed upon her face would be struck dumb by it’s radiance. 

Unveiled, the thing that struck me about her wasn’t her eyes. It was her crooked teeth. She was beautiful, to be sure, but not in the way of goddesses. She was a mere mortal, who—had she grown up in Minnesota—would have spent her adolescence dreading trips to the orthodontist to tighten her braces. 

 

Invasive Species

It's raining, and soon my suburban sidewalks will be covered with worms. They may have been carried there by rising water or crawled there to escape drowning.

When the sun comes out, they will be stranded, unable to find their way the few inches to the grass-covered soil that would save them. They will shrivel and die where they are.

I used to rescue worms after a storm. It made me feel extra-good about myself to pick up their squishy, squiggling bodies and put them back onto the nearest lawn. Then my niece, an ecologist, explained that they were an invasive species, and didn't deserve my kindness. Uninvited, they had become ubiquitous. Now I step over them.

When the sun comes out, the trees in my backyard will grow a little bit, stretch their roots and branches wider. They will consider forming seeds to reproduce themselves.

We bought this house partly because of the "woods" in the backyard that screen us from our neighbors. It took several years for me to realize that it was buckthorn, also an invasive species, that granted our privacy. I began tearing the young ones from the ground and bought a weed wrench for the bigger ones. The huge ones, resembling trees, had to be left for my husband and his chain saw. But it was a battle we couldn't win.  Now I ignore them.

I have read the news every day for decades. As Chinese earthquakes and Indonesian tsunamis swept the world, I used to comfort myself with the idea that distance equals difference. Because those people were from another place, they must be affected by tragedy differently than I would be.

Then I began to work with immigrants, and I had to face the truth. Distance is meaningless. There is no difference. They are not an invasive species. We uproot them or leave them to struggle at our peril, because they are us.