Feeling Unsafe

The Temperature of the Country

We are in the dog days of summer, continual heat and humidity shortening tempers, even threatening lives with heat stroke or dehydration, and the emotional temperature of the country has expanded from low simmer to boil. That it is a presidential election year is no coincidence, though I suspect the high emotions are not only because of voter dissatisfaction. Shooting massacres are on the rise, everyone has a story to share about their experiences with road rage, and sound bites on the internet compete to see which one can be the most vicious.

Despite the fact that most have recouped their retirement-fund losses since 2008 and unemployment is down, pessimism about the country’s overall financial well-being remains. We cannot help but be affected by the world’s unrest—political assassinations and coups, financial upheavals, and unending deaths by terrorist attacks. Some recommend pulling in and concentrating on our own country. The world no longer runs that way. What affects one major country generally affects the rest. It is not possible to be an island unto ourselves.

Safety—a Basic Need

Safety is one of our basic human needs along with food, water, and shelter. The simplified version of all our unrest is that we do not feel safe. We have more and more recalls of fresh and packaged foods for possible life-threatening contaminants. How can so many slip by the watch dogs of our food supply. Is anyone watching?

Go anywhere in the country and study overpasses and bridges. Will it take a death, several deaths, before repair becomes a priority rather than one more expense the town/city/state budget cannot absorb? Raging fires and drought further destabilize our food resources and our very survival. First oxygen and then water are the top two necessities for supporting life. Simply put, our planet cannot sustain the number of people likely to inhabit it in the near future.

Hopelessness

So, in a word, we do not feel safe and have reached a point of compassion fatigue—too many disasters, too many hurts we cannot make right. A callous develops on the skin when it is too often abraded, as it also develops on the spirit. We begin to choose what we will bleed over lest we hemorrhage, and hopelessness creeps in, the weary belief that nothing will ever be set right. Hopelessness engenders fear for our safety, for our survival. And fear engenders anger. The split nature of our current politics offers us no hope of finding solutions and encourages us instead to lash out at each other.

I will not pretend to any expertise that qualifies me to offer solutions. I do know, however, that targeting a group of people or a particular cause on whom to vent our frustrations accomplishes nothing. I have never cared much for the idea of our country being a melting pot. When you melt things together, each part loses its distinctive character and becomes part of a muddy sludge. I like the idea of a colorful salad, each ingredient distinct and with a flavor all its own that becomes enhanced rather than lessened when joined together by the dressing—perhaps in this analogy, the laws by which we agree to be governed.

Now, we have to agree on these laws or at least, since it is impossible for everyone to get what they want every time, be reasonable and agree to disagree from time to time.

Following Parents' Footsteps

Following in Your Footsteps

Those who study family dynamics say that children tend to take after the parent of the same sex. Who they take after in single-parent homes is a different subject. I’m fascinated by genetics and how they manifest through the generations. My three-times-great grandfather on my father’s side was a newspaper publisher. My mother’s father self-published a novel, and her oldest sister has written a historical children’s book about a Native American woman’s life.

 Is my love for reading and writing hardwired by my genes? My mother says she read to me a lot when I was little. I don’t remember it, and I know my love affair with books—I wanted to spend all my free time with them—frustrated my mom, who wanted me to go out and play with friends. She rarely reads for pleasure. My dad didn’t either until after he retired. Then he read all the time. Neither had any inclination to write.

Parental Influence

I would say that my sons do have much of their dad in them—his gross, male sense of humor (my female opinion only of course), his slowpokey way of doing things (they are all turtles), the procrastination that accompanies that, and maybe the totally typical male way of not being able to find anything not directly in their line of vision. I say this because all my female friends complain of the same thing. I know of only one relative of my husband’s who writes.

I also see many of my traits in our sons—shyness, sensitivity, especially to unkindness and hypocrisy, and vivid imaginations. When they were children, even younger teens, I read to them all the time. It is not true that doing so will turn your children into readers. Neither of my sons enjoys reading books though both like stories, more in the form of comedy skits, songs, video games, and for my youngest, poetry. My older son writes lyrics to songs, in which he tells stories. My younger writes poetry that is showing more and more skill, not that I’m an expert. I haven’t studied poetry.

I see a mishmash of my husband and me in how our sons interact with others. Our kids’ social conscience is more similar to mine, their etiquette more like their dad’s. Our oldest looks at responsibilities more like his dad—if it’s okay, it’s good enough—our youngest, more like me—we feel the need to give a project or a job our all. This naturally does not translate to chores at home. Both kids are hoarders and downright pigs in their personal spaces, just like their dad. I worry about fire hazards. I do collect stuff, too, but generally it is organized in specific places and doesn’t wander all over the house. Yes, I feel outnumbered, but damn, can’t men mop up when they miss that great big hole in the toilet? Okay, over it.

Genetics

Physically, my sons don’t look alike or an awful lot like any one family member. The oldest has my father’s curls, my mother’s bump on the bridge of his nose and his father’s pointed tip, and my maternal grandfather’s long, lean build. The younger’s feet and toes, though much bigger, have my shape. His body type is like his father’s, his eye shape like his paternal grandmother’s. His hair waves and has cowlicks like mine. I have no idea where his nose came from.

I suspect our personalities also have much more to do with heredity than we generally admit—preferences, sensitivities, and proclivities to certain fears, behaviors, and talents. Too bad no one in our family had an interest in becoming a biologist.

Author Sandra Brown

Author Sandra Brown

I’m on the fence about her books. Most of the stories I’ve read from her come under the thriller genre. I’ve read some that I didn’t care for, even found the writing sloppy, and some that I enjoyed. Mean Streak did well in sales. About a woman attacked on a running trail and unsure whether to trust the man who finds her or her husband when it becomes clear someone wants her dead, I thought the first so-called twist was an insult to the intelligence and the second very clichéd.

The Silken Web, an earlier work, was a romance with the typical plot—boy meets girl, conflicts threaten the relationship, happy ending—but well written despite silly conflicts and choices the characters faced to create the conflicts. Best Kept Secrets is an older work, perhaps one of the first and before she honed her craft. The characters were caricatures, the plot disappointing.

Breath of Scandal kept my attention throughout and had engaging characters. The main villain was somewhat stereotypical, but his henchmen were interesting. The only peeve I had was that the female protagonist returned as a successful businesswoman to the town where she grew up and was raped by several high-school boys. The idea that she could come back unnoticed to set up her revenge was silly. Too many people knew about the incident for it to be a mere breath of scandal. The misfortunes that fate handed out to the rapists were too many to be believable. The first death was a complete surprise to me but made the second a foregone conclusion, though the method of that death surprised me. All in all, one of the better books of hers I’ve read.

Hello, Darkness gives an interesting glimpse into the running of a radio station. Full of suspense, someone stalks the nighttime radio personality, a woman emotionally hiding from her past. A lot of red herrings—some manipulated, I thought, by having characters go against the type portrayed in a way the reader couldn’t possibly guess. In the thriller genre, there should be hints of possible conflicts in a character that allow the reader to speculate on his or her involvement as the antagonist.

A prolific writer, I want to read a few more of Sandra Brown’s most recent novels to see the growth of her skills. If anyone has read any they want to recommend, I’d appreciate the titles.  

Scenes of a Mom

Scenes of a Mom

A start of surprise ran down my mother’s rigid body as I flung my five-year-old arms around her waist. My loyal playmate Blackie, a black and white cat who let me dress him in a baby bonnet and parade him around the yard in a baby carriage, had been run down on the long, straight road many used as a speedway and that abutted our long driveway.

We were not a hugging family. Stepping back, my mother offered neither words of comfort nor disapproval of my tears. She bundled me into the family car and took me out to dinner, just the two of us, my first experience of loss marked with the proper weight of solemn importance.

My mother shooed us outside and this day forgot to lock the door against constant childish demands. She stood in the middle of the living room, yardstick in hand, and conducted to a classical record playing on our record player that looked like a suitcase. She noticed me, standing in the doorway, mouth open, and the yardstick drifted down to her side. Face red, she asked what I wanted. I felt bad interrupting her pretend time but was delighted that, even though a grownup, she still found time to play. It’s one of my favorite lessons.

In all but the most extreme weather, my mother stood weekend after weekend under an awning, behind a rented table filled with her shelves of cats, dogs, and clowns made from fuzzy yarns, which she sold at New Jersey’s Englishtown Flea Market, the largest market on the east coast. Mom had gone back to work, after we three kids entered school, as a third-shift aide at a rest home where she finally found a few hours of peace and quiet to dream and create. She took orders and produced people’s beloved pets from photographs or matched the color of crocheted tissue covers topped by her unique animal or clown heads to their décor. My mother saved enough from this second job to send two kids to college and to buy my parents’ retirement home.

Mom recently moved to a lovely house renovated into an assisted-living facility where attendants wheel her to musical programs, word games, church services, and meals. I had for a time cared for her, doing her laundry, supervising her medicines, taking her shopping. I no longer have to do any of those things and I miss it, miss the daily contact. Yet I know this is the last scene of my mother’s life and she is living it as suits her stubbornly independent spirit while giving her children one more life lesson.