TKM

We’re getting a goat!

Not me and my wife—our property isn’t zoned for hooved animals. Probably not horned animals either. Wait, are there any horned animals who don’t have hooves? Horns and paws? Or claws? I know we’re zoned for clawed animals because of the cannibalistic KFC-eating chicken from across the street.

No, we’ll be keeping our goat in Rwanda under the stewardship of my sister Valerie Mukamana, who has made real my 3½-year-old wish to effect positive change in someone’s life through the awesomely powerful gift of livestock.

Those who have read my blog for some length of time may recall posts about my first two Rwandan sisters, here and here. We were matched via Women for Women International, an organization through which I’ve been delighted to discover that, somewhere, my measly monthly contribution of $27 can still be parlayed into something more than three lunches at Baja Fresh.

To recap, on my drive to work one morning in March 2006, I heard an NPR story about a neighborhood association near Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, that functioned as a kind of emotional support and financial aid clinic for women who survived the 1994 genocide. The listener’s window into the story was Nehrama Jambare Alphonsein, who was raped by a machete-wielding Hutu supremacist and contracted HIV as a result. At the time of the NPR story, Nehrama, then 20—she was 9 at the time of the genocide, during which raping prepubescent girls was less a matter of sexual gratification than it was just another weapon of war—was raising three children, all of whom were orphans of the mass slaughter and one of whom was born with HIV.

Compounding those circumstances, many families, including Nehrama’s, mourn openly for sons killed in the genocide yet consider the raping of their daughters a matter of great family shame and therefore a taboo topic, leaving them without healing emotional outlets.

Like many Americans, my primary lens on the genocide was Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and as with many such nonfiction accounts of chilling, seemingly impossible human violence, I felt impotent on finishing it, like I had little recourse but to shudder and move on.

But that morning I heard Nehrama speak of her daily visits to a neighborhood organization, located an hour’s walk from her home, where women with similar experiences shared amongst themselves without fear of judgment or stigma.

And then she spoke of her goats.

She had six of them, all bred from a source goat the neighborhood association had given her to help raise her family’s standard of living beyond the subsistence they were eking out cultivating beans and potatoes on a rented plot of land. Mind you, Nehrama’s family still lived in a mud hut with no electricity or running water, but I was cheered by her success with animal husbandry—in that NPR-listener way made up of equal parts idealism and guilt, leaving us with a powerful need to believe that, however sad, everything we hear about turns out fine in the end—and I was certain that Nehrama’s growing herd would soon turn her fortunes around.

Ha! Get it? Growing herd? Heh.

How much are goats? I wondered. And how could I buy one for a woman like Nehrama?

I didn’t want to ship a goat, of course—that’s just crazy talk—so when I got to work I set about trying to find an association online like the one discussed, and that’s how I found Women for Women International, an organization dedicated to helping women in war and postwar regions rebuild their lives through a scholarship program addressing basic needs, civil rights education, life and work skills, and community leadership roles. Neato! And best of all, I could sponsor a Rwandan woman directly. I would receive a picture and profile at the beginning of our relationship, as well as a report on how she felt her circumstances had improved at the end of our year together, and in the meantime we could swap letters so that I could hear all about her exciting new life raising goats!

Yeah, well, suck it, NPR idealist. Go sell your goats somewhere else. Your Rwandan sisters had crafts to do.

My first two sisters, in exit interviews at the completion of the yearlong scholarship, both said they had gained much from the program: Each were unemployed at the start but were now self-employed. Each said their general housing conditions and health had improved, and that they had gained self-confidence and knowledge of their civil rights. All of which is GREAT. But both, when asked what skills training they had undertaken, said “Knitting.”

There’s nothing wrong with knitting, of course. Some of my best friends knit (well, one of my online friends anyway, and she’s the partner of someone who might read this, and could probably kick my ass, so I want to make sure I cover it). And because I just started to feel like kind of an asshole for being disappointed in my sisters’ knitting pursuits, I Googled Rwandans and knitting and found an organization called, well, Rwanda Knits, which says of itself, “Our program enables [Rwandan women] to increase their incomes through economically sustainable knitting cooperatives, through which they produce garments for their domestic market and export markets.” Right, like I said, knitting was a very sensible and lucrative pursuit on my sisters’ part. Besides, how can you argue with the mad skills of clinic instructor Faina?

Still, faced with a choice between working with yarn and farm animals, well, I was just hoping they would go for a nice dairy goat who would provide milk and cheese and perhaps even precious hours of amusement for the children. Not that I’m trying to tell anyone what to do with their scholarship opportunities. Or maybe I am a little, but I entered the sisterhood with a mission, and a little over $1,100 later we were still goatless. I just did a quick price check at GoatFinder.com (I know!) and discovered that goat kids start at $65—and that’s for a pedigreed, “show quality” goat sold in American dollars. Here’s a nubian kid from my new favorite site ZooBorns:

Spectacular nubian kids named Polka Dot aside, I reckon random goats bought with Rwandan francs cost a lot less.

However disappointed with the intransigence of the knitters (that just reminded me of the Knitters, the country project by members of X and the Blasters, and I wondered whether their 1985 album Poor Little Critter on the Road had ever been issued on CD, and not only has it, I found, but they put out an album in 2005 that I didn’t even know about; free association rocks!), I shouldered on to be matched with a third sister, which is where Valerie Mukamana comes in.

Valerie said in her entrance interview that she had received no schooling and could neither read nor write more than her name—differing from my other sisters, who had both attended primary school. Each of them had sent me cards and letters during our time together, telling me about their children and husbands, asking me about my children and my husband, and asking, if it’s not too much trouble, could I possibly send a picture? (This latter wish has gone unmet; I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of revealing my sexual orientation to my sisters, fearing emotional rejection—it is the only part of my life in which I am closeted.)

Valerie, who has a husband and five kids and, like Nehrama, said they all live in a hut with no electricity or running water, also rated her family’s general health as poor and said they rarely can access medical treatment. Of all my sisters so far, Valerie seemed in the direst straits, so I was pleased to be matched with her. But I also consciously put aside my goat obsession for another year, thinking that even if she happened to receive livestock, I wouldn’t hear about it given her inability to correspond with me.

But then, earlier this month, I did receive a letter from Valerie. Had she dictated it to someone? Had she been a superstar in the literacy program? She wasn’t telling. Instead she told me that she had started selling bananas and tomatoes at the local market to help generate income and that she hoped her family could soon upgrade from their hut to an iron-sheeted house. She said that they had not been receiving many rains and asked whether we had been receiving any here. And, of course, she wondered about my own family and asked, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I please send a picture?

She also wrote this: “I am hoping to buy a goat and other domestic animals so that I can fight against poverty.” (!)

I would go to Rwanda right now to help Valerie pick it out, but I just checked Travelocity and it looks like flights to Kigali start at $2,500—that’s with three stops and two plane changes. As much as I’d like to meet Valerie and her new goat, it seems criminal to spend potential seed money for 38 goats to do so.

Plus, my wife just told me that if she’s going to the African continent, there are a couple, three countries, maybe 10, that would be higher on her list of must-visits than Rwanda. Go ahead, try to tell her Botswana can’t possibly be as entertaining as it seems in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (but, OMG, if you haven’t watched the HBO series, Netflix it now).

So, instead of sending myself, I’m going to have to be content with sending a letter, telling Valerie that we haven’t been receiving many rains in Southern California either. Perhaps I’ll disclose to this third sister that I have no children, but that I gained a wife last year when I married my partner of 14 years; maybe I’ll even enclose a picture of myself, and ask, if it’s not too much trouble, could she possibly send goat pics in return?

The following is a letter I wrote to my family, sent today, six days before a ballot initiative comes before California voters that has been described by the pro–marriage equality camp as “Gettysburg,” and by the anti–marriage equality folks as “Armageddon.” And the Hyperbole Award goes to…  

Dear Friends—

Well, e-mail may seem like a clumsy way to announce this, but Elizabeth and I got married. We had to act quickly to make sure we were legal ahead of the November 4 election—just in case Proposition 8 passes and closes the door on same-sex marriage—and we did so quietly because, after being together for 14 years, we already felt married.

But now I have to admit, actually being legally married does feel different.

In the absence of legal recognition, Elizabeth and I defined our relationship for years on our own terms. Then when California introduced a domestic-partnership registry in 1999, we went downtown and signed up for the handful of benefits it offered at the time. Over the years California legislators fought to expand our rights under that registry such that, by 2007, domestic partnership was practically identical to marriage—except in name. And that difference in name was a constant reminder that in the eyes of the state, our relationship fell under a category of recognition that held us separate from our relatives and so many of our friends.

Now that artificial separation is erased, and this joy I feel being married represents something far more profound than a shift in nomenclature: It’s the realization of true equality, and it’s been a long time coming!

I hope that you don’t mind my using the occasion of my marriage announcement to politick just a little bit, because these feelings could be very short-lived if Proposition 8 wins. Honestly, there’s never been an initiative on the California ballot more threatening to my ongoing rights and happiness. As a family member, you’ve always treated me as a first-class citizen, and I have every reason to think that you’re in favor of the state treating me likewise. Still, given that so many voters have reservations about same-sex marriage based on what the initiative’s supporters have been saying, I can’t let this election pass without addressing the topic directly with those who care most about me.

A few truths:

First, neither the California Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nor Prop. 8 will have any effect on what is taught in schools. The state superintendent of public schools has himself appeared in television spots to assure voters that curriculum will not be affected in any way, and the California Teachers Association explains in a press release: “Proposition 8 will not affect teaching in our schools. That’s a lie crafted to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 and stripping Californians of rights they already have. Not one word in Prop. 8 mentions education, and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to be taught anything about health and family issues at school. California law prohibits it.”

Second, the marriage ruling has nothing to do with adoption laws. In California, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and Prop. 8’s passage would have no effect on the state adoption code. The defeat of Prop. 8, however, would have a profound positive effect on the children of same-sex parents. Granting gay and lesbian couples the privileges and benefits of civil marriage, far from posing harm to families, affords the children of same-sex couples the same advantages and stable family structures that children of opposite-sex couples already enjoy. Approximately 60,000 children are currently being raised by same-sex parents in the state of California; it’s frankly impossible to reconcile sincere concern for the welfare of children and families with a concurrent rejection of this population’s needs for equivalent benefits and security.

Third, the Supreme Court ruling was not the work of “four activist judges.” Three of the four judges who voted to affirm same-sex marriage were appointed by Republican governors, and they weren’t creating “special rights” for gays and lesbians—they were recognizing the equal rights and protections already present in the California state constitution for all citizens. Prop. 8’s supporters say that such things should be decided by the people, not the courts, and in a perfect world, I would agree. Unfortunately, gays and lesbians are a tiny minority—about 6%, by latest estimates—and a historically unpopular one at that. The most sacred trust of the court is to protect the interests of minorities from an unsympathetic or unknowing majority, and this court took that tenet to heart. Sadly, Prop. 8 needs only a simple majority of 50% + 1 to reverse the court’s ruling and its protections for my community.

Fourth, marriage equality poses no threat to religious freedom in California. No church or minister of any sort can be compelled to marry anyone, gay or straight.

Lastly, a domestic partnership is not the same thing as a marriage. If it were, it wouldn’t need a different name.

If Prop. 8 passes, legal consensus says that my marriage to Elizabeth will likely stand, along with the 11,000 other same-sex marriages that have taken place since June 17 in what has been an incredible summer of love for same-sex couples, but our feeling of first-class citizenship would be diminished. Relegating gays and lesbians to a second class is what this constitutional amendment seeks to do, singling out a minority population and stripping them of civil rights that all other citizens enjoy.

Before 1998, when Alaska passed the nation’s first state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by majority ballot vote, no constitution in the United States had ever been amended to rescind rights from a law-abiding segment of the population. It should have been impossible to do such a thing in America, but since then, 25 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments—largely through campaigns employing scare tactics that targeted gays and lesbians as a threat to American families and values—and this year, amendments are on ballots in Florida, Arizona, and California. I hope you’ll join me on Election Day in telling the rest of the nation that those kinds of scare tactics just won’t work here, and that that kind of discrimination is impossible in California.

Thank you for your love and support.

And please, if you feel that I deserve the same rights that you do, forward this e-mail to your friends—or, blog visitors, send a link! I feel strongly that people of all political and religious persuasions believe foremost in honesty, and however emotionally close to this issue I am, I think all will find that I’ve presented the facts plainly and truthfully.  

I make kind of a lousy sister, which distresses me not least because I’ve always harbored fantasies about how different my life might have been had my parents produced exclusively X chromosomes. A sister wouldn’t have intimated to me, just after our 1972 move, that our house’s former occupants, a family of four just like us, had all been murdered in my new bedroom. A sister wouldn’t have confined me in a padlocked homemade coffin until she could no longer hear my panicked hollering, later blithely noting that so long as I was able to shout she knew I still had oxygen. A sister would never have seized my clip-on bear collection and demanded the king’s ransom of two weeks’ allowance for its safe return.

Those of you with sisters may disagree with any or all of the above. Still, even if a blood-relative American sister could turn out to be a sadist just as easily as my blood-relative American brother, my Rwandan sister would never be so cruel, a certainty that makes me feel so much the worse that Veneranda Nyiahabimana, my first Women for Women International sister match, received neither correspondence nor goats as a result of my sponsorship.

It’s conceivable that Veneranda, given the option, simply didn’t care for any livestock at this time. Had I bothered to write, I might have gleaned more about her attitude toward goats by offering up my own goat anecdotes. I could have told her about the time, when I was in junior high, that a goat in the petting zoo at Knott’s Berry Farm—”America’s 1st theme park!”—cost me what felt at the time like a small fortune by eating the unlimited ride pass hanging from my belt loop, forcing me to buy another or face a rideless future—the future being the succeeding six hours or so. Then maybe I would have explained the U.S. concept of theme parks and why American children would want to go somewhere and pet goats.

Corresponding with Veneranda was certainly in my plans. WFWI urges that sponsored women benefit as much from kind words as from material support. But the best intentions stretched before me until, finally, I received notice in late July informing me that Ms. Nyiahabimana had graduated from the 12-month program. (All sponsorship matches are limited to one year, at which time program participants are encouraged to put any acquired job skills and micro-enterprise financing to work, and sponsors are encouraged to make peace with the idea that while they may feel they’ve made a forever sister, their material support will henceforth be transferred to a spanky new sister.) I was delighted to see that Veneranda had provided her address for future correspondence, indicating that it’s never too late to right a wrong—provided I can locate someone versed in Kinyarwanda, because WFWI furnishes translation services only for active sponsorship relationships.

Despite my lax correspondence, I was eager to learn how Veneranda felt she had benefited from the program. And while I was disappointed that her exit interview didn’t address her lack of enthusiasm for goats, I was pleased that she noted improvements in her general housing conditions, health, self-confidence, and awareness of civil rights. And if I was at first chagrined that she listed knitting as her sole field of skills training undertaken, I quickly gathered that Rwandan women approach the craft with far less irony than do any of my stateside knitting friends.

Unemployed when our partnership began last year, Veneranda now identifies as self-employed in a nonagricultural (i.e., goat-disinterested) activity. She still struggles in raising five children, two of whom are hers by birth. The other three, she says, are nieces and nephews whose mothers, her sisters, are dead, as are her own parents. She has no husband.

Veneranda was around 15 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and her living situation practically maps its ongoing social repercussions: Around 10% of Rwanda’s citizens were killed during that three-month period in 1994, leaving hundreds of thousands of orphans in the care of a population that was, when the dust settled, 70% female, thousands of whom were pregnant as a result of rape by militia men. Compounding mass rape with Rwandan laws forbidding abortion under any circumstance, the country now counts as many as 5,000 enfants mauvais souvenir (“children of bad memory”).

Despite such souvenirs, Rwanda’s women have been pressed to put their bad memories behind them. Veneranda, in her brief letters to me, wrote only of the importance of family, her faith in Jesus and prayer, and her gratitude for my sponsorship. “God bless you,” she wrote, or at least that’s how her translator interpreted her handwritten Kinyarwanda. She wondered about my family and living situation; and she requested pictures, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And that’s where I ran aground in my commitment as Veneranda’s sister.

The money’s easy enough, autodebited monthly from my account such that I hardly even miss it. But interpersonal matters are more complicated. Though I’m anything but closeted in my daily life—and could seriously give a flip how I’m perceived by folks who disapprove of “my lifestyle”—I’ve been at loose ends over just how honestly to describe my family to Veneranda.

“I have a female life partner and we’ve been together for nearly 13 years,” I might write, “which reminds me, how do you feel about President Kagame’s desire to update Rwanda’s penal code by criminalizing consensual same-sex relations?”

Or how about, “I’m pleased to hear that you take solace in your spiritual beliefs, though I don’t myself believe in God.”

Veneranda certainly isn’t in the minority in Rwanda, where 90% of citizens identify as Christian—and only 2% claim no religious affiliation. Roman Catholics account for roughly two thirds of the Christian majority, with the lion’s share of the rest falling to the Anglican Communion, the 77 million–member worldwide religious body currently engaged in a war of wills with the U.S. Episcopal Church, (presently) a province within the Communion that Anglican archbishop and primate (seriously, that’s the term for Anglican grand poobah types) Peter Akinola, who leads the African council of provinces, threatens to excommunicate en masse if the American body won’t stop treating the goddam gays as legitimate folk, a “plunge into unrighteousness” epitomized by the 2003 consecration of openly gay—and noncelibate—V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Go, ’piscies!

Do not underestimate the vexation felt by Archbishop Akinola over the homo problem: “As we are rightly concerned by the depletion of the ozone layer, so should we be concerned by the practice of homosexuality.”

I’ve been called many things in my life, but this is almost certainly the first time I’ve been likened to a greenhouse gas.

As for Team Roman Catholic, Pope Benedict XVI’s views on homosexuality differ from Archbishop Akinola’s only in tone, and are more influential, articulated as they are from the throne of the head bully of the largest bully pulpit in the world: “[Homosexuality] is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder…”

Now, I know that our affiliations don’t define us. Nor can we each be held accountable for the views and statements of our leaders, religious or otherwise. I would hope, after all, that Veneranda doesn’t collapse my worldview with that of the current U.S. administration. But the words and attitudes of perceived authorities bear influence that doesn’t always confine itself to the philosophical sphere. For instance, according to FBI statistics, hate crime incidents against sexual minorities—gays, lesbians, transgender individuals—spiked by double-digit percentage points during President Bush the Younger’s first term, throughout which he campaigned feverishly for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Lest that spike be confused with some kind of overall trend, violent crime on the whole saw steady decline during those same years.

Rhetoric kills. Rwandan propagandists’ violent exhortations to kill all Tutsis were broadcast on a popular radio station that blended music programming with hysterically pitched political talk shows. The shows’ hosts sowed hatred and disgust for Tutsis while convincing rural Hutus that they would face genocide themselves if they failed to eradicate the other—along with any fellow Hutus who refused to join in the slaughter. Such motivations and actions seem far beneath the murkiest depths of human reason, especially as delivered through an entertainment medium, but I don’t have to strain very hard to hear Bill O’Reilly’s or Rush Limbaugh’s voice urging listeners to wreak violence and destruction on all who are not like them.

So, what has all this to do with Verneranda? Well, I suppose I wonder if she might be predisposed to hate me. I wonder if Veneranda has been taught to love antigay Rwandan president Paul Kagame, and what he stands for, because his political party’s rise to power ended the genocide—even if it’s widely believed that his party was also responsible for the assassinations and ethnic tensions that led to the genocide in the first place.

Hey, here’s President Kagame with President Bush!

Perhaps my reluctance to write Veneranda hinges on the fact that I know how easy it is to judge someone in the abstract. For instance, I know that there are complicated, thoughtful, open-minded Christians who view Scripture in relative terms and unreservedly accept me, until proven otherwise, as a worthy human being, and one whose sexuality is not pathology. But if all I know about a person is that he or she is a devout Christian, because of my own anecdotal and statistical knowledge, I may not anticipate such generosity of spirit.

Then again, if I fail to casually mention my female life partner and my spiritual disbelief, just as a heterosexual Christian would unreservedly speak of her husband and faith, how is anyone lacking such prior acquaintance to know that gay atheists can actually be pretty OK people?

So, Veneranda, how awesome is it that WFWI brought together two such disparate souls? You, with your unshakable faith in God, despite about a thousand reasons to doubt his presence in your life. Me, with my wary skepticism of the world’s dominant mythologies, despite any number of advantages for which I might offer thanks to some entity larger than myself. You, with your five children, those you’ve borne and those for whom you care because someone must. Me, with my constant nagging, however psychic, about goats—like you need any more “kids.” But even as you reject the goat husbandry lifestyle, I trust that you accept it as a valid way of life, maybe even one that’s “in the blood” for certain folks. Despite our own differences, I hope that we can still be forever sisters, because we actually do have quite a lot in common. We both live in a world where the human appetite for violence is unfathomable, where sexuality is too often weaponized, and where women are often charged with rebuilding what men have destroyed.

I’ll keep your address on hand in hopes of one day finding a translator, but it may be a while; while Kinyarwanda is the dominant language in your country, fluency in same is rare here. I do know someone who can translate my letter into flawless French, and it may be far easier for you to locate a French-Kinyarwanda translator than for either of us to find someone fluent in each of our own languages. That idea, I know, veers perilously close to an actual I Love Lucy plot. Has Lucy ever been translated into Kinyarwanda?

While we sort out our language barrier, I hope it won’t make you feel too much like a test-sister if I go ahead and write to my new sister, Halima Uwimana. I think you would like her. She, too, is a single mother of five, one of whom she bore herself, and she writes that she enjoys praying with her family. She asks after my husband and children and requests a picture—if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’m sensing a trend here. At any rate, I think I’m ready to address Halima’s questions, and I’ve received a mysterious sign that she’s ready to hear the answers: It may simply be a mistake in translation, but I prefer to think my sister Halima is speaking directly to me when she begins her letter “Dear brother…”

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time. I actually felt well rested and pleasant enough upon awakening, knowing as I did that for the next few days I would be free of my labors: the nudging around of commas and such. Let misplaced punctuation flourish throughout the land this Labor Day, for I care not. What I do care about, among several other things, are reference books, and no one can make me give them up, not even on a weekend during which I’m encouraged to eschew the tools of my trade.

Ever seen the Hepburn-Tracy film Desk Set? Kate is the head of the reference department at a television network and Spence is an efficiency expert hired to assess where his newly developed supercomputer can replace employees and save the company a few bucks in payroll. I’ve watched the movie at least a dozen times, never giving a flying fig about the inevitable romantic sparks between go-getter working gal Hepburn and her perceived archenemy Tracy. I’m in it for the scenes during which Kate and her team field inquiries ranging from the total weight of the earth to the names of Santa’s eight reindeer, sometimes answering off the tops of their heads but more often searching out answers in their glorious stacks, an upstairs loft with thousands of books collectively containing all the information any of the various employees of a TV network could ever need to know.

A teenager when I first saw the film, I suddenly knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Hepburn’s fast-talking, whip-smart human encyclopedia, without the messy romantic entanglements. Why did she have to moon after Gig Young or fall for Spence when she had the greatest life ever—a single woman with a head full of steam and a roomful of knowledge?

Years later I would at last locate my sexuality and understand the complications therein, though I still found no appeal in Gig or Spence. How great it would be if Kate instead fell for her coworker Joan Blondell and they forged a life together, two books unbound, swapping fascinating bits of information amid winks and smiles—it is a 1957 film, after all; adult relations are merely hinted at through the symbology of bathrobes.

I did eventually grow up to assume a career in which facts and figures figure prominently, though most of the data I need can be gleaned more quickly via Spence’s cursed computer than through the thousands of books that make up our research department. Still, there’s great appeal in physical volumes, their relative weight often indicative of their information wealth, their indices irresistibly inviting the reader in multiple directions at once. God help me when I have to look something up in a real book, because on my path to whatever I was looking for I’m liable to engage with some other entry and forget what I was supposed to be doing. If you ever happen to lose me in a bookstore, before having me paged like an errant child, check the reference section for my glassy-eyed self, hypnotized by the visage of so many compendiums of information, sorted and ordered for my tidy, systematic gratification.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a home without an encyclopedia. I know, I know. But there’s nothing we can do about that now; we can only shoulder on when faced with such retrospective adversity. It’s not that my parents couldn’t afford such—we always had shoes in the wintertime—they just didn’t particularly see the point in spending all that money on a stack of books they figured would ultimately serve only to collect dust. Besides, we had a branch library well within biking distance; I could go pet their encyclopedias whenever the mood struck.

So this morning I was flipping through my Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, ’cause that’s the way I roll. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just, you know, flipping. This is the second copy I’ve purchased of Robert Hendrickson’s 800-page tome, having bought the first during the 2004 holidays as a gift for my therapist, who had only weeks before asked if I could recommend a good book about the etymology of idioms. My therapist had not only asked me for information, she had asked me for information regarding a volume of information—somebody pinch me! I did my research and settled on the Hendrickson volume, then I wrapped it in holiday-nonspecific paper—she’s coy when I try to discover her belief system—slid it into a manila envelope, just in case my HMO forbade gifts between doctors and clients, and left it with her secretary.

When I came for my appointment the following week she told me the book was precisely what she had in mind and that she adored it, so much so that she bought a second copy for her father and a third for the office staff: When she showed them her copy they were reportedly loathe to give it back. For weeks afterward, upon arrival for my appointment, her receptionist would regale me with reportage: “According to the book ‘happy as a clam’ comes from ‘happy as a clam at high tide,’ because clams were dug at low tide, so, you know, they would be happier at high tide. I never thought about it, but ‘happy as a clam’ doesn’t really make sense, not without the tide part.” Truly it doesn’t. (This is why copy editors often excise hackneyed expressions from the work of writers who have slipped into autopilot mode—commonly heard idioms become furniture in the American lexicon, to such a degree that our brains no longer bother to process the words or their [potential lack of] meaning.)

I later bought a copy for myself, because how could I have lived this long without one? And as I glanced through it this morning I noticed the entry for “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” In keeping with the age-old superstition that the left is sinister and unlucky, Romans, particularly Augustus Caesar, always got out of bed on the right side to ensure good health and humor.

Good to know: The left is the wrong side of the bed. This explains so much. You see, my partner and I, we have our sides, and mine is the left—always has been—which means that for close to 12 years I’ve been getting up on the wrong goddamn side of the bed!

Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Has my partner known all along? After all, she’s my Hepburn, retaining every shred of information she’s ever gathered, ready to spit it out on demand. Me? I often can’t remember my phone number; I’m Joan Blondell, always having to climb up into the stacks to ferret out my answers.

Le domestique has left me to languish in the ill health and humor of the wrong side of the bed for over a decade—and she is now officially busted. Starting tomorrow morning I’ll be getting out of the right side of the bed, thank you very much—and don’t think I won’t be rolling over your ass to get there.

I have a lyric loop bouncing around in my head, the refrain from an air freshener commercial that proclaims, “Spring is in the air!” sung to the tune of “Love Is in the Air,” and I wonder whether my mad itch to revive the backyard is motivated by the song, or maybe the song loop has been triggered by my efforts at renewal—I can’t remember which came first. I prefer to think the latter, because I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s spurred to action by a commercial jingle—that gives Madison Avenue conjurers way too much power, even if I didn’t buy, and can’t even specify, the brand of air freshener in question.

I don’t want to be that neighbor: the one who lets her yard go native and never cleans her house’s exterior and whose property eventually comes to resemble an extremely unintriguing around-the-clock rummage sale. I want to be part of the “improving” neighborhood we moved into, not the albatross that makes fellow homeowners shake their heads as they pass, lamenting, “If it weren’t for those lesbians, our Zip code would be unstoppable.”

Happily, ours isn’t the least-kempt house in the neighborhood; it’s not even in the top 10. Hell, the corner house at the opposite end of our block looks like the set of Sanford and Son, so we have a long way to slide before we’re property value–enemy number 1 in this quarter. Still, don’t encourage us.

To be fair, and I think I can extend that courtesy to myself in my blog, our backyard was dead when we bought the house, so no harm, no foul there. And while the front yard at first appeared ripe with brilliant green promise, it was merely a lawn gesture, a costume the yard had donned for “curb appeal”—the sellers had installed full-sun sod, a groundcover that didn’t stand a chance of thriving in a yard 80% shaded by four mature trees. (The sellers’ bad decisions didn’t stop there: They also installed white wall-to-wall carpet, which would be practical only if we enforced a strict no-shoes policy and carried our pets at all times.)

I was initially determined to make the backyard hospitable for outdoor grilling and dining; maybe we would even have a house-warming party (though we’ve never hosted a get-together of more than six people, ourselves included). And as it happened my mom and dad were simultaneously preparing for a move themselves, so Mother’s extensive inventory of plants came up for grabs. (The county farm bureau once called her to pitch membership in their organization; based upon the amounts of fertilizer and gardening supplies she bought, she had been flagged as a commercial farmer.)

I couldn’t take on any of her hundreds of varieties of fuschias—her “farming” specialty—since they couldn’t withstand the heat of the valley, but we loaded up on begonias, brugmansia, clivia, sego palms, and the like. She even entrusted to me her mother’s amaryllis, which had been confined to pots since the day my mother dug them up in 1980, when Grandma was moving to a seniors’ village and was determined to take them with her. The flowers did poorly at Grandma’s new place and Mom took them home to her own yard to coax them back to health, an endeavor that took on added significance after Grandma died. I’m still not sure why my mother decided to hand them over to me, as by that point they had taken on the significance of heirloom, but they seemed happy to at last shake off their confining pots and spread their bulbous roots in limitless soil.

The next chapter in the life of our yard wasn’t so bright. After tending the plants assiduously for about a year I slid into an emotional fissure that enveloped all in a pall of meaninglessness, my efforts most of all. To say that I stood idly by and watched our yard die would indicate a presence of mind I didn’t possess. I sleepwalked through the next couple of years while our property, despite my partner’s desperate efforts to the contrary, went native.

Flashing forward to the present, I feel that I have my depression more under control than ever before, and I’m emerging from an 18-month-long energy slump concurrent with an until-recently undiagnosed condition that’s also feeling more under control these days. In short, spring is in the fucking air!

If I’ve learned anything in therapy, it’s that we can’t coax much new growth without clearing out all the dead branches and detritus begat by neglect, the kind of stuff that, if we squint, can fool us into thinking that it is life. It gives a woman pause, cutting all that crap out, because the process really is an acknowledgement of death—the end of that life cycle—and an expression of readiness to exit the static fallow phase and move on to the next cycle, with all the thoughtful and anxious attention that fragile new growth requires.

Nevertheless, I’ve been darting about the yard from one project to the next, grooming and pruning and clearing whatever and wherever necessary. I understand that my efforts are off-season, but what the hell, Southern California doesn’t much observe seasons anyhow, and something tells me that anything managing to live thus far in this backyard—birds of paradise, I think, could survive the nuclear option—is hardy enough to recalibrate to the demands of my psyche.

Some plants are so stricken they have to be cut back flush with the ground to be, with any luck, wholly reincarnated. Others are leggy and overgrown and are cut back to resemble mere sticks emerging at jaunty angles from the earth. Spent branches are laid to rest in our big green recycling container to be hauled away by the city and rendered as mulch, achieving relevance at last in another life cycle.

I visit with the most vulnerable plants daily, testing for hydration as my mother taught me, by inserting one knuckle into the soil, so as to avoid over-watering my charges. With the largest plants and trees I’ve left the hose to drip overnight, moving it to a new host each morning, reassuring each in turn that it’s safe to grow, that any tendrils ventured will be met with all due nourishment. I’m not talking to them exactly—at least not by speaking aloud—but there has been communion. I feel like I’m performing a kind of penance for my past neglect, and I like to think the plants understand that I need them to come back as badly as they need me to feed them.

I remembered noticing some time ago that Starbucks promotes the use of spent coffee grounds as compost and fertilizer for acid-loving plants, an idea confirmed by enough organic gardening sites that I’ve begun sprinkling my daily grind around the camellias. I brew for one, so the grounds barely season the soil. Still, it’s cool to find new ways to repurpose, and any acid-loving, coffee-drinking plant is surely a friend of mine.

My partner has been, understandably, a little anxious about my ministry. She acknowledges that the yard desperately needs help but fears that I’ve been a pinch overzealous in what she calls my “scorched-earth policy.” And I admit that I’m prone to extremes: I tackle projects full-bore or not at all. I also admit that the “yard” I’m paying such precious attention to really does resemble nothing more than dirt and sticks in the big picture.

But when I squint I see the little shoots poking out of the ground, the tiny sprouts along the sticks, and I know that we’ve begun a new chapter together.

I come to you today from Latte Litchfield in South Carolina, where the partner and I vacation with her parents annually. We’re not actually vacationing at the coffee house but at a beach house about a half mile from here, a house that, as it turns out, has Internet access–sadly, that feature wasn’t advertised in the brochure, so we didn’t bring our laptop. Question: Had you a beach house to rent, which features would you highlight in addition to the obvious, i.e. oceanfront beach access, A/C, and the like? For instance, if it had an elevator and wireless Internet, would you gloss those amenities and instead use your precious brochure space to talk up the plantation shutters?

That being said, Internet access is only 10 cents per minute here at Latte Litchfield, and I get to sip a delicious java chip blended mocha as I blog, so all is well. Besides, last year the rental computers were located smack underneath two giant Ten Commandments tablets mounted on the wall. The tablets are still here, but the computers have been moved across the room. Still, I’ll do my best to post morally. What would Jesus write?

While Jesus, with a hard e, is certainly at home here in S.C., Hay-suse is not. Yesterday at the Piggly Wiggly I asked the deli ladies where I could find tortillas. “You mean chips?” asked one of them. “No, tortillas, like for burritos and stuff.” The ladies furrowed their brows and shook their heads at each other, like I had asked for something as rare and unappetizing as cow spit.

We did eventually find a small Mexi-Asian section, the cuisines being very similar, you know, and against our better judgement bought a package of pillowy Old El Paso flour tortillas (the only option available), the kind that are so processed they never really expire, like Twinkies. So anathema to a girl born and raised in Southern California.

On the drive out (we generally fly into the in-laws’ home city then drive to the coast) we once again interacted with the lawmen of Springfield, about 100 miles from the coast, where I was pulled over for speeding last year. This time it was a routine driver’s license checkpoint, which nevertheless resulted in a fair amount of knee-slapping over the fact that we had come all this way to go to the beach. “You took yourselves a wrong turn somewhere!” said one of the officers.

My California license saved me a ticket last year. “California!” the officer who pulled me over exclaimed when I handed it over, then asked, “If I give you a ticket, will you promise to pay it?” That “if I give you a ticket” part made it seem optional to me, so I answered, “Well, officer, I would prefer not to get the ticket.” He slapped my registration and license against his wrist and, to my everlasting surprise, handed it back to me with an admonition to “Take it easy from here on out.” I thought I was all cute, having charmed my way out of a ticket, until my partner told me that the officer was weighing whether to arrest me to ensure payment.

So, no trouble with the law, and the swimsuit is performing like a champ: The mastectomy suit is the single greatest invention since seamless undiepants. Ooh, and we swam with dolphins yesterday! Or rather dolphins passed by roughly 25 feet from where we were swimming. And even I’m not too jaded to squeal with delight when dolphins leap through the ocean within my spitting distance–you know, if I were a whale, with a blow hole in my skull.

Three days passed. Four to go. Hope to check in again soon.

So, my partner and I are on vacation in the South. Actually, right now we’re staying with her parents in the little s south, where the legendary manners and cute accents are at the ready but there are still a few Democrats sprinkled about. Tomorrow morning we head for The South, where there’s at least an outside chance we’ll be burned in effigy. This could be my last blog entry, y’all.

We arrived early for the annual South Carolina family beach trip to attend a banquet last night honoring my partner’s mother, who was named her home state’s 2006 Woman of the Year, or “2006 WOY,” as said the placard at our table. Any outstanding fantasies I had about shuffling nonchalantly around the banquet hall, unnoticed by all but those bearing canapés, were dashed soon after we arrived. Upon our entrance the vigorous shaking of hands commenced, accompanied by enthusiastic affirmations about how very great her mother is and how very proud we all are and how very pleased we were to be there. And not just any hands. Gubernatorial candidates’ hands. State supreme court justices’ hands. Power hands!

It’s notable that measures have never been taken to obscure my relationship with the daughter of the 2006 WOY. I was seated front-and-center at the WOY family table, introduced to all comers as “my daughter’s partner, Teresa.”

Hell, most people didn’t even need an introduction: Dozens of strangers approached me, clasping my hand in their own as they gleefully declared, “You must be Teresa!” Not that playing “Find the Lesbian” was a tough call in last night’s environment, but the very fact that folks in her life know that there is a lesbian and that her name is Teresa indicates an openness I never expected.

Just goes to show you that expectations are only as valuable as the stereotypes that form them. Who would ever suspect it? The churchgoing Southern family with the perilously high community profile welcomes the unbaptized West Coast dyke into their inner sanctum, saying, “Hey, this is the person our daughter loves, everybody, and it’s really OK.”

Oh, sure, my mother-in-law would really, really like to baptize me, but that’s to be expected. Twelve years into our relationship, I think she understands that it probably won’t happen, and that we can even joke about the issue indicates that my stubborn aversion to salvation isn’t a deal-breaker.

So I’d like to take this moment to say that my partner was right when she suggested, in the face of my powerful impulse just weeks ago to shave my head, that maybe I could keep a thatch of hair until after the banquet. ‘Cause when I think sincerely about the strives her mother has made to wrap her head around me and fit me in to her family picture, private and public–not to even mention the vehicle and hotel room upgrades we scammed by casually mentioning our relationship to the WOY–not arriving bald to her crowning seems the very least I can do.

Sometimes you get a haircut, and sometimes the haircut gets you.

Last week I was just itching to shave my head, not because I had head lice but because I was in San Francisco, and being there reminded me of a time when I shaved my head but not my legs—an attitude that horrified most hets and a few homos too. Ah, glorious baby dykedom.

About 10 years ago I ran into a college classmate at the West Hollywood Gauntlet. I didn’t recognize her at first. Now a professional piercer covered in tats, she had been an unassuming sports dyke—a shot putter on full scholarship—when we had an autobiography seminar in common. When she recognized me I remembered her immediately. She and her track buddy used to sit across the room from me, and we never spoke even though it was clear that we were all sisters. I told her I had always wanted to break the ice with them but that they seemed unapproachable.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “You were fucking scary.”

It tickled me to think this mammoth alpha butch was once intimidated by me, though I wasn’t actually cultivating “scary” back in the day. While I first buzzed my head in a dark mood, I maintained it more out of utility than anything: I rode a motorcycle to school and I hate helmet hair.

Shaving my head served another important utility: My mother never again complained about the length of my hair, as long as I had some.

My partner reminded me last week that our South Carolina beach week is coming up and that now might not be the best time to revisit my lost youth, what with gay-bashing on the rise and all. So I split the difference and asked my hairdresser for a “soft” crew cut. God love a West Hollywood hairdresser: My boy’s not afraid to get out the clippers when I say “summer cut.”

I don’t spend much time on the motorcycle these days, but I do bicycle—a pursuit for which I gladly shave my legs—and I still hate helmet hair. With this cut, when a shower isn’t readily available, the sweat generated on a ride is generally enough to revamp and restyle.

While visiting my parents at the ranchito this past weekend—and performing routine maintenance of my mother’s e-mail box: trashing megaton attachments that had clogged her dial-up pipeline, fixing preferences that had mysteriously been altered, and, when she wasn’t looking, deleting bigoted jokes and “patriotic” propaganda her brothers had sent her—my mother asked if I could help her with a letter she was writing.

Let me repeat that: My mother asked for my help.

My brother’s services are constantly being called upon. He can mend a fence or a roof, re-plaster a ceiling, tile a bathroom, anything really. “That brother of yours is a handy one,” my father likes to tell me.

Yes, but can he give Mother a perm?

Copyediting, while marketable in the workplace, isn’t as much in demand around the homestead as, say, your basic carpentry skills. Besides which, my copyediting zeal has incurred some familial wrath in the past.

My maiden copyediting job was my mother’s 1981 Christmas letter, and I was decommissioned immediately after turning in my finished copy. You see, I wasn’t so much enlisted to copyedit the letter; I was meant to type it. Arrogant teenager that I was, I couldn’t help but see her longhand pages, torn from a drugstore writing tablet, as the roughest of rough drafts—jotted notes, even. Surely she’d want me to smooth her clunky sentences, give current to her narrative, root out passive language, and replace repetitive words and phrases with more arresting verbiage. This would be her best Christmas letter ever!

“This isn’t my letter,” she said when I gave it to her, her expression one of pure consternation. I don’t remember how I responded to her too true accusation—I was busy being stunned by the idea that she didn’t completely love what I had written for her.

But of course she was right to take back her original letter and instead ask my father to type it up for her at work—verbatim. Authorial voice, even if that’s not what she would have called it, is paramount. How dare I assume just because her writing doesn’t “flow” that it’s not the best language with which to communicate her experiences and thoughts. My mother’s friends and relatives would no more have recognized her in the letter I had written than a literary academic would recognize a William Blake poem written entirely in legalese.

Still, her rejection stung, and I never forgot it. And she had never asked for my help with a piece of writing again—until now.

It’s a pretty unsexy assignment, this particular writing project: She wants me to lend force and cohesion to a letter she and my father are writing to a Mr. Matthew W. Slowick, a name you’ll want to remember should you ever need to address the Advance Planning Division of the San Bernardino County, Calif., Land Use Services Department. While personal reasons for wishing to contact such a department may be as many and varied as the directions unfettered community development might take were it not for county bureaucrats, my mother’s reason is more singular: horses.

My mother has made two significant moves in her life. Her first, from her birthplace in Iowa to California at age 20, took her away from her horse, Davey—the best horse who ever lived™. So it was only natural that her second move, at age 63, was to decamp from the suburban tract home she shared with my father in Orange County to a horse property in Yucaipa, an agricultural region with a population of around 50,000. Within a year of moving my parents had acquired two paints, and six months later they took on a third, all under 2 years old.

You may be thinking that three toddler-aged horses seem like too many for retirees in their mid 60s, one of whom has always been a little scared of horses, the other of whom hasn’t cared for one in over four decades. As I’m lately given to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone breaks a hip.” But let’s put these worries aside for the sake of the letter to Mr. Slowick.

Mr. Slowick is the man you want to contact when an unscrupulous mustache-twirling developer is planning a 500-home-and-golf-course development just across the way from your quiet ranchito, especially if said project includes a proposal to turn your privately maintained dead-end rural road into a thoroughfare connecting your 1,000+ new neighbors to the interstate.

“It won’t do any goddam good,” my father declared. “But we might as well give ’em an earful.”

Reading over my finished letter, I’m not sure I gave anyone an earful. In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t, because I was trying to write something that wouldn’t be dismissed as the work of a retiree who’s given over to raising hell as a hobby.

The drafts I worked from, one written by my mother and one by my father, were more emotional than county correspondence should ideally be, by turns fatalistic—we can’t have nice things—and angry—your greed is ruining our lives! “How close do you want the letter to be to what you’ve written?” I asked when I accepted the assignment, dancing around the implied question: Will we be enjoying a rerun of the 1981 Christmas letter aftermath?

“Do whatever you think is best,” my mother said.

I just had lunch with a journalist colleague and we discussed the delicate matter of editing friends and family members. “I won’t do it anymore,” he said flatly. “Because they don’t really want to be edited; they want you to reassure them that what they’ve written is great.”

“So what do you do when someone asks you to edit something?” I asked.

“I take it and give it back to them a couple days later telling them not to change a thing—that it’s just perfect. That’s all they want to hear.”

Hmm. That would be great advice if I hadn’t already sent the finished product to my parents, and also if I didn’t want so desperately to be valuable to them in some tangible way. But I had, and I do. I want them to think of me as they do my brother, as someone who’s talented and useful and generally good to have around, not as the alien lesbian daughter they love despite who she is. I want them to appreciate me for a skill or trait that’s unmistakably mine.

I spent the better part of this morning on the letter, starting from scratch but reading and rereading their letters both before and after writing mine, making sure I hit all their talking points and adding some of their phrases to the final version to make it a truly collaborative effort. Then I e-mailed the file to them with the reassurance that they shouldn’t hesitate to ask me for any changes they might need—i.e., should they want me to throw out my version and type their letters as they’d given them to me.

I returned from lunch to the following e-mail:

“Wow, we would not want to change a thing. This is great! When I give Sharon [neighbor] a copy of it, I think I will just let her think we did this all by ourselves. She will think we are pretty smart then, huh? No, I will tell her that we gave you some of the things to write about, and you did the finishing touches. Thanks so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love Ya,
Mom

While I’m ordinarily irritated by any overindulgence in exclamabangs, in this instance I don’t mind them at all. Finally, I can put that damned 25-year-old Christmas letter to rest.

Ever start writing something about your stupid life and then get so bored with yourself that you can’t imagine why you’re worth writing about or how on earth anyone else could possibly be interested in what you have to say? Yeah, me too.

But since my mother, whenever I call, reliably greets me with, “Oh, we were wondering if you’d died or something!” I thought it would be best to head off that kind of thinking at the pass here. Because I know it’s only natural to think, Golly, she hasn’t written a blog entry in over a week. I wonder if she died.

I haven’t died. My partner and I were in Georgia—the state, not the country—Wednesday through Sunday to visit her parents and catch some of the northern stages of the Tour de Georgia. Road cycling being not such a big deal in the States, folks can get almost close enough to the pro riders at the TdG to lovingly stroke their sculpted calves. My favorite moment—easily besting my first glimpse of a motley contingent of Confederate reenactors standing cheek to jowl in Chickamauga with the cyclists, the soldiers’ dirty gray uniforms revealing almost as much pot belly as the bikers’ colorful Lycra jerseys revealed muscle—happened when we were wandering among the team vehicles after the finish of the Dahlonega stage and a Belgian rider from the Quick Step team stripped out of his cycling kit and stood in the middle of the parking lot just as naked as an eel chatting with his teammates while an assistant massaged his still-twitching muscles.

I wish I had been born in country with a less inhibited culture. I’ll bet Belgian bloggers hardly ever harbor anxiety over the worth of what they have to say—and they never have panic dreams in which they find themselves naked in the middle of a crowd.