This Ain't Amtrak

It starts slowly some days and then builds to a screeching crescendo - the deafening howl of a locomotive whizzing through my head, chest, and limbs. I call it the Anxiety Train. All aaaa-booooaaaarrrrrddd! And today is a textbook Anxiety Train day – we’ll be stopping at every outpost, every abandoned platform in my life. Right on schedule.

6:00 am It starts with a connect and then a disconnect. I am a connector. Jack is a disconnector. People pair up that way. It’s a fact of nature.

Don’t worry, I tell myself. Take a bath.

In the bath, I realize that I have difficulty modulating. I am cut off in mid-sentence. I cannot finish a thought or complete a mental transaction with the guy I love.

7:00 – My kids don’t want the muffins I got especially for them. Bran, apple cinnamon, carrot raisin, blueberry. Instead, we make whole wheat toast with pink frosting. They don’t like the toast part so much and just eat the frosting. I am a bad mother. When they are finished eating, they look like two drunk hookers with pink lipstick smeared all over their faces. I eat the bran muffin. Phyllis asks, “Are you going to eat all those?” She takes the carrot raisin.

7:20 – Still at home, I call Jack. No answer.

7:25 – Jack calls back. I have to get the kids to daycare and I have to get to work. He offers to call back. I say never mind.

8:00 - Why do I have such lack of insight? I move to my desk, where life is boring and stressful. I begin to doubt myself. Why did I say never mind? I wanted to talk to him. But I don’t want to be a pest.

But I am.

Get to work, I tell myself.

I can’t.

9:00 - I stop and look around. Where is everyone going? For coffee. Everyone is so productive. Why am I not productive? I am a fake. Whenever I look around, my heart flutters. Why is it like this? What did I do to make it like this? How can I make it stop being like this?

9:05 Ping Jack.

9:13 Call Jack.

9:22 Email Jack.

Note to self: Jack used to soothe me, but the fact is that trying to contact him only aggravates the anxiety. No answer. I feel vulnerable.

Everything is worse now.

After 10 but before 12:00 - I am now canceling several credit cards. I have been meaning to do this for months. I have good credit – like $10,000 on every blasted card, plus cash advances. If anyone wanted to steal my identity, what a field day they would have.

Note to self: If I ever become ill, I vow to apply for several credit cards again. I think when you die, your credit card debt dies with you. Or maybe not. I’ll look into it.

12:21 - I call Jack. He sounds annoyed. I need to leave him alone.

12:35 - I am canceling more credit cards. The credit counselors sound annoyed. "You have no balance," they tell me. "Why cancel?"

My response: Because I want to. So there. Stop asking so many questions.

12:52 - I take a Clonazepam. Wait 20 minutes. It’s not working.

2:00 – Maybe M&Ms will help.

2:15 – I wonder if anyone will notice me going to the vending machine several times within a one-hour span? Well, too bad. They’ll have to get used to it. I’m an anxiety eater. Maybe some of them will find it endearing.

2:44 - There is a medium-sized gorilla behind my rib cage. He is pounding on the inner walls of my chest cavity. He wants to pull the whistle cord on the screeching locomotive. Take the other half of the Clonazepam, dammit. Just take it.

3:30 – This is a little better now. Man, people sure do send me a lot of emails.

3:45 – I am able to focus on work now. I check in with a colleague about material that needs to be included in the draft of a guide I am writing. He is a nice guy. I wonder if I make sense. He doesn’t seem annoyed with me at all.

4:15 – This is much better now. In fact, it is going well. I am zooming right along in my work, pounding out the Frequently Asked Questions. Question #1 – What is the sound of one hand clapping? Question #2 - If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it fall, does it still make a sound? Question #3 - If God and Superman got into a battle, who would win? In a few hours, I will be home under the lavender comforter.

5:10 – There is a young girl pushing a baby carriage across the parking lot in back of my work building. She is heading for the field that abuts the highway. I can tell she is having trouble maneuvering the stroller, but the baby is fast asleep, his head bobbing back and forth as she makes her way across the pockmarked pavement.

I don't like the looks of it.

They are far ahead of me as I turn, so I am not able to get a good peek at them. For a split second, I fear for them, fear for the baby. Is the mother frustrated? Why is she alone in an abandoned parking lot?

I am well past them now, but I brake. Check the rear view mirror. Back up. Back back back back back. Yeah, she needs a ride.

As we fold up the stroller and put her son into my baby’s booster seat, I can see that she is pregnant. She looks to be a teenager, no more than 20 for sure. She is a baby, she has a baby, she’s having a baby. She is visiting the baby’s father. It’s a good three mile walk in 90-degree heat.

Our conversation is superficial, but I am glad I stopped. My problems don’t seem so bad.

6:30 – I swing by Goodwill to look for ice cube trays. My kids like ice cubes. I wander back to the book section and browse the cookbooks. Then the biographies. A nice lady talks to me about home schooling her children. She shows me a list – do I know any of these books? Heinrich Ibsen, Garcia Marquez, Virginia Wolfe. I tell her what I know.

We are women, so we talk. We tell each other everything. Her son takes drugs and she is ashamed. She gave him everything she knew how to give him. I tell her about my kid, the one who steals. She gets goosebumps. We exchange phone numbers. This is good, because I need friends. Can you tell?

8:30 – Goodwill is closing. The haul: two pairs of shorts for my big girl, a Kidz Bop CD for my little girl, a bunch of books and a Democracy for China t-shirt for mom. No ice cube trays.

9:00 - Seems like the anxiety train is pulling into the station for the night, but just in time, Phyllis comes home. She curls up on the couch. Even though I am typing away at the computer, she gives me the weekly recap of couples counseling with her husband.

Sometimes I hide when Phyllis comes home. I can't bear to hear the stories about her husband, what a slug he is, how he sucks the life out her. She doesn't have to tell me - I was married to practically the same guy. Twin sons of different mothers, our husbands are. Oh God, please make her stop talking.

In the distance, I can hear the roar of that train.

Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me

“When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.” M.F.K. Fisher in the foreword to The Gastronomical Me.

I've been getting a few questions about the food pantry. Seriously, I didn't know poor people could read.

Here are a few tips:

For grocery shopping, try ALDI www.aldi.com or Super Walmart. ALDI is much cheaper, but you might not have it in your area. You can get no-name kid snacks and milk and produce for reasonable prices. If your kids can't read, they won't know they're not eating real Doritos.

For protein - beef, pork, chicken - try www.angelfoodministries.org. There are no income requirements and you can pay with food stamps. I think it’s food from the government, passed out by churches. Maybe an infamous faith-based initiative? It makes sense – the government pays for the food, the church organizes the volunteers. The food is NOT seconds, there is nothing wrong with it. The meat is frozen and of good quality. Here is the menu: http://www.angelfoodministries.org/menu.asp

Find a food bank in your area. Try http://www.secondharvest.org/zip_code.jsp. When you get there, ask for the names of other food pantries, because you may have to rotate. Ask for food pantries that you can go back to as much as you need to. Ask for a church that gives out bread or day old pastry or (if you are comfortable) a free dinner once or twice a week.

Glean. It goes back to Biblical times. http://www.endhunger.org/gleaning_network.htm

Finally, go to church. Ask God to help you. Start a food pantry or a clothing closet for people looking for jobs. Stay alive. When you get back on your feet, help someone else.

The Unbearable Lightness

Jack’s sister died Friday morning. He was with her, and I was glad of that. She was unconscious and had shallow breathing for a day and a half, but he held her hand and stayed with her and her husband. I am proud of him. He did well.

It was my fear that when I died, my husband would not do that for me. When I was in labor with my first child, he yelled at me. I had a long labor, and he grew frustrated and tired. Then he yelled at me. It caused a huge wound in our marriage, and we still have it, even in our divorced relationship. He couldn't be there for me when our child was being born. For years after she was born, I had this feeling that I had to get away from him, that he would let me down in a big way again, and for good. I just pictured him abandoning me when I needed him most - he'd be out talking to friends, watching a game, taking good, good care of himself at the very moment that I died. And I would die alone. Lonely. Needing.

Before my first daughter was born, I was afraid to die. It was a near-death experience, having her. I made the mistake of birthing with a midwife, and I was in labor for 50 hours. The baby and I nearly died. After that experience, I stopped being afraid to die, but I was filled with dread about dying alone. That dread is gone now. I need to think about where I lost that. I think in the divorce. In losing Jack. Right now, I am in that process.

There are a few other key moments that defined my marriage, but that one is huge. I ruminated on it for years, the hurt was so bad. That's what's different about Jack. He can take me. In all my intensity. The sex intensity, the emotional intensity, the writer intensity.

There's something about death and intimacy. One time in bed, Jack asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I just wanted him to be on top of me and to look in my face. I didn't care about coming, I just wanted to feel him inside me and see him straight on. And we just did that for a long, long time. No talking or shouting, because we had already made love a bunch of times that day, so it wasn't frantic. It was tender. I cried afterwards, because I was happy and at peace. We still talk about that sometimes. I'm crying now as I write about it.

Most people could not take that. It would weird them out. And at that time, Jack and I weren't talking about loving each other or leaving countries or anything like that. He was just my friend, and he did me this huge favor. He opened my heart.

Anyway, it's hard to let go, but it's time. I guess I am doing it in a process. Sort of like dying, or being born, maybe. I'm not sure which.

This Means War

Does anybody remember the War on Poverty? I do. Man, I’m pretty sure we surrendered at some point – maybe in the 80’s. If not, we sure are getting our asses kicked.

Now there’s a War on the Poor. And it’s not the conventional type of war, either. It’s a sneaky war, fought with all sorts of psychological dirty bombs and weapons of mass destruction. We are not equipped to fight it, because we don’t even know we are in it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what being poor means today, what it meant when I was a kid, and about the trouble we are in as individuals and as a nation. When I was a small kid, being poor meant that you didn’t have enough to eat. Maybe you didn’t have lunch at school, or your clothes were shabby. Usually, your family was huge.

As I got older, being poor meant that you got subsidized lunch or free milk at school. You got to see the guidance counselor on a regular basis. It meant you wore hand-me-downs and drank powdered milk at home. Maybe you didn’t have a winter jacket, or you shared one with your sister. Your mother paid for groceries with food stamps, which, ironically, didn’t look like stamps at all.

Nowadays, being poor looks and feels different. There’s a blind rage associated with it that I don’t think anybody anticipated; we don’t know whom to yell at, whom to blame for our condition. A lot of poor people have cable TV. Cell phones. Ipods. We eat at McDonald’s. Sometimes we are fat (because we can’t afford a gym!) and some of us do drugs. We don’t go to church, we don’t watch or watch out for each other’s kids, and we don’t call on our parents and grandparents, either.

The government doesn’t help us anymore, but if we work some, the credit card companies are willing to let us dangle in the wind a bit. The mortgage and car loan people are right there behind them. No money down! No payments for 6 months! I call this nouveau pauvre – you get a chance to make a jackass of yourself with credit cards and car loans until you get put in the Database of Nitwits. Once you’re in there, forget it. You can’t even get a checking account.

And for those of use in denial, those of us with a 401K or pension, even Wall Street has gotten in on the action – everyone is invested, everyone trades. We are all waiting for money to fall from the sky. Pennies from heaven, maybe. Like we deserve it.

I don’t know anymore. When I am feeling really insightful about it all, I get the impression that our poverty is a question of spirit. I was talking recently with my room mate, the one who doesn’t flush the toilet. She grew up on a farm in the Midwest, out in the middle of nowhere. Her family was poor – they ate what they grew, slaughtered animals, pretty much lived hand to mouth. They canned, froze, smoked, and stored everything. They wasted nothing and threw nothing away. It was important to make good use of everything, over and over. You never knew when you’d have to go hungry.

Her dad mistreated her mom, and he would sometimes beat her. As her two brothers grew older, they began to hit the mom. They hit my room mate, too. The dad became paranoid about the mom running away. He started taking some wires out of the pickup truck when he was not around so that no one could leave the farm. Over the course of a few months, the mom figured out which wires were missing and replaced them with spare parts from the junkyard. One day, the mom and my room mate took off with just the clothes they were wearing and their kitty cat - the dad had always threatened to hurt the cat if they ever tried to leave.

My room mate concluded the story with a comment about how, after she and her mother ran, her brothers broke open her piggy bank and stole all the coins. I could tell this was the hardest part of the story for her to share; she got pretty choked up. Her eyes were wide, her face open and vulnerable. She wanted me to understand that betrayal.

Today, she’s a successful engineer in her late 40’s. She has two small children, just like me, but they live 300 miles away with their father who doesn’t like to hold down a job. My room mate and her husband have a bad marriage, but she is willing to bear the financial burden for the family and the emotional burden of being separated from her children.

When she told me all this, I understood better something that had been baffling me for a while; my room mate eats old food. For real. She buys marked down items in the supermarket that are about to turn, or that have expired. Dented cans, old egg salad, taped up boxes. It kind of gave me the willies, but I figured she was just thrifty. A couple of times, she’s gotten really sick from it, too. Food poisoning. But she still does it. She seems to panic when food has been in the refrigerator for too long; she’ll ask, “Are you going to eat that?” And more often than not, I am just about to toss it out.

That’s poverty.

Yesterday, I went to the food pantry. I’ve noticed the line there has been getting longer, and the past few times I have not gotten much food. Still, it’s more than I had before. This time, the director came out and spoke with everyone about donations being down. She said that most of the food is coming from Cisco, and it’s basically odds and ends that we have to make do with. She said that the volunteers had made up bags, and that it was important for people to just take what was given to them without complaining because it would be impossible to give everyone the same things.

Yes, people had been complaining.

It kind of pricked my heart, the bit about complaining. As far as I know, this is the only food pantry that doesn’t hassle people for names, addresses, social security numbers, and all that. They have been so kind to me. But complaining?

That’s poverty.

I have cable TV, and I’ve seen those commercials with the kids eating from the garbage heap in India. Thank God I don’t have to live like that. That is poverty. That is true indigence, and most of the world has to live in those conditions so that we can have cable TV, cell phones, and McDonald’s.

Here in America, the War on Poverty and the War on the Poor continues. But I have seen the enemy. Our poverty is within. We are making ourselves poor.