Blog #80
My daughter Jennifer lives in North Carolina, as those
of you who follow my weekly lapses into insanity have learned by now. As I begin to write to you, Hurricane
Florence is looming dangerously off the coast about 100 miles from where she
lives. Naturally, CNN has been airing a
continuous plea for residents to evacuate the shore areas. I wonder if CNN truly cares about the
people’s safety or if they have some other motive.
Go
grab all your sons and your daughters
And
hurry to find higher quarters
It’s
raining in torrents
So
run far from Florence
To
make room for all our reporters.
Ok,
you’ve gotten the obligatory limerick out of the way. You liked it; you didn’t like it. It’s over.
Let’s move on. Hi there and
welcome back. I hope you are feeling
well today. Do you have pronouns? I have a wonderful friend named Amy, a young
lawyer in California. Amy and I were
emailing the other day when I noticed the signature at the bottom of the email. Included with her name and her professional
and contact information was a line that said (Pronouns: She, her).
Well, ok, I am from a different generation and am not capable of
processing the rapid changes in gender awareness, but, I decided, if she has
pronouns, I guess I should have pronouns too.
Just to stay current, you understand.
So I wrote her back: I see
your pronouns are she and her. Mine are
it and old.
Update: Jennifer and her family (husband, three
children, one exchange student, three dogs, two cats and twelve chickens) lost
power for three days and endured a long spell of rain. But everyone is fine, even the chickens. I know you care about those chickens. Over the past week, many of you have
contacted me with concerns for the safety of my daughter and her family. You
are very nice people to be so thoughtful.
That’s why I write to you every week. Thank you very much.
I have, in my English class, several Chinese students,
and we were recently talking about the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. This year is the Year of the Dog. Why should you care? Well, there are one billion, four hundred million Chinese on your doorstep
trying to take over the world. It might
be worth your while to learn a bit about them.
The Chinese rotate their years through a menagerie of twelve animals: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat,
Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig. Hey,
Chinese folk, I love your egg rolls, but your choice of animals is a bit
bizarre. I like Tiger – fierce, strong, unchallenged. And Horse – fast, beautiful, useful. Even Rabbit – cute, soft. But Snakes and Pigs
and Rats? Who do you have choosing your
animals – General Tsao and his Chickens?
I was at Walgreens
recently and picked up a box of assorted sized flesh-colored Band Aids. When I got home, Carol noticed the bag. She notices everything. She knows what I eat, what I wear and what
the second half of each of my sentences is going to be.
What’s in the bag? She asked.
Oh, I replied, I just
needed some . . .
flesh-colored Band-Aids, she said.
How did you . . .
Know?
I just did. But they’re really
not flesh-colored Band-Aids.
Well, I said, yes they .
. .
No they’re not. Read the box.
I did and discovered two
things. First, it did not say “Flesh
Colored”. In today’s world the term
flesh-colored is unacceptable. What
color is flesh-colored anyway? Perhaps
it should be labeled “Flesh of White Americans of European Descent
Colored”. It occurs to me now that white
people are not People of Color. I feel so drained! But do not be alarmed. There is a brand called Tru-Colour Adhesive Bandages – Diversity in Healing which
are the color of – well, people of color.
And second, (there was a first
somewhere in the last paragraph, so now here’s the second) they weren’t
Band-Aids. They were Walgreen’s Adhesive
Bandages. So Carol was right. She always is. Just ask her.
But you can understand my mistake.
Band-Aids have been such a familiar commodity in our lives for so many
decades that we presume it’s just the name of the commodity itself, not a brand
name.
There are lots more like
that. The most familiar brand names that
have become synonymous for the generic product are Kleenex, Scotch Tape and
Coke. But there are lots of others. Aspirin, for instance, is a brand name as are
Jell-O, Chapstick, Bubble Wrap, Q-Tips, Crock-Pot and Frisbee. And now Google
just means to look something up on any old search engine, just like Xeroxing used to mean making a
copy. Oh, did I tell you Carol was right
about the Band-Aids? She wanted to make
sure you knew.
She never, however, cares
if I know anything. Babies are born, hurricanes strike, friends
move to smaller quarters – whatever it is, I am the last to know. It is obvious that I am on a need-to-know basis
and she never thinks I need to know anything.
Except what to pick up on the way home.
As Dopey often said to
Snow White, “I am not Happy.” Why am I not happy? Well, besides the fact that nobody ever tells
me anything and the disappointment that I am not a person of color, there is
always the fact that two hundred years from the date of my birth, your Google
page will not mention my name. It
did for Edgar Allan Poe. But for
me? Alas, nevermore.
Still, I have no time for
weeping. I’ve got work to do, people to
see, places to go, fires to put out, dreams to dream, Diet Cokes to drink, lots
of people to love and things to pick up on the way home. Do you need anything, Honey? Don’t worry, I’ll save enough time to write
to you next week. Until then, stay well
and count your blessings.
Pronouns: it and old
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