Thursday, August 31, 2006

An Idea I Can Get Behind

So, I was over visiting Livingston I Presume where I was directed to Garrison Keillor's Modest Proposal in which he suggests that since the GOP has created this situation wherein our country's young are being sent to die in a war we don't believe in, are leaving college incredibly in debt, and face being the generation to pay off the national debt we are building up by fighting an unnecessary war at the same time we enact tax cuts for the very rich, we pay that debt off by allowing no more medical care for card carrying Republicans, and allow them faith based care only.

I would like to expand this idea. The GOP has decided that they don't trust science. They don't want my grandchild to learn about evolution or have accurate sex education, they don't believe that man contributes to global warming, they don't want us to know what poisons are in our food and air or any of a number of other things. They only trust "sound science" which is their code for pseudo-science that they agree with.

So, let them live without any of the benefits of the reality based world that they have such contempt for. Turn off their health care. Turn off their lights. Turn off their television and phone. Let them walk or go horse back where ever they need to go. Let them make all their clothes by hand -- starting with tending the sheep and picking the cotton. Let them swim across the Atlantic and then walk to Iraq and replace our troops with their own bodies, using the sticks and rocks that were the only armaments available before someone experimented with reality based science. Let them plant their crops by poking a stick in the ground and dropping in a seed or two. Let them go hungry if they can't figure it out.

They want a theocracy? Let them go live in one. Iran comes to mind. Or, we could set up a preserve somewhere and allow them to go face a witch hunt.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Patriot Guard Riders

You have heard of the Westboro Baptist Church's cruel demonstrations at military funerals, carrying signs about how the American tolerance of homosexuality is causing God to turn his back on us and the deaths of American soldiers is divine retribution. These people are jackals. They have no problem intruding their hate filled agenda on the grief of families and dishonoring our nation's dead.

It turns out that, although the Bush administration has chosen to ignore this, there is a group which has turned out to defend the families. This group is the Patriot Guard Riders, a growing coalition of veterans' motorcycle clubs, American Legion and other veterans' groups, and now, apparently, members of the peace movement. One of the incredible things about the Patriot Guard is that it has no political agenda. It is composed of liberals and conservatives. It exists for one purpose -- to defend the fallen during their last time of need.

Read more about them in Supporting the Troops by William Rivers Pitt

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address spoke pointedly of caring "for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan," of the solemn responsibility held by this nation to those who served and died in her service. A plaque outside the Veterans Administration building in Washington, DC, bears these exact words. It is a motto, a mantra, and today, an utterly unfulfilled promise.
Consider the following.
The Bush administration's most recent budget framework includes $910 million in cuts to the Veterans Administration. 2,615 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and yet efforts to double the death benefit for soldiers killed in active duty have been forcefully resisted by the White House. Pay raises for soldiers have been capped. The tax-cut mantra of the White House has not trickled down far enough to assist the troops on the line; soldiers fighting overseas and soldiers deployed for extended periods have not been deemed worthy of even minimal tax relief, while billions of dollars in tax cuts are gifted to the wealthiest among us.
Nearly 20,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq, but must wait nearly six months before being seen by a VA hospital. The prescription co-pay costs for veterans were doubled in Bush's proposed 2005 budget. His 2004 proposed budget would have eviscerated funding for the education of military children. The White House formally opposed allowing National Guard and Reserve members access to the Pentagon's health care program. Perhaps worst of all, the White House quietly attempted to cut combat pay for all soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this measure was quickly scrapped after it became public.
This from the man whose staged photo-ops with serving soldiers have become the stuff of lore. This from the man whose defenders denounce critics with the line, "Why don't you support the troops?" This from an administration filled with officials who, almost to a man, had other priorities when they were called to serve.

***

"Caring for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan," said Lincoln. The government isn't doing it; this administration, in particular, seems all too willing to create new veterans while dispensing with the systems of care that tend to them after their service is concluded. Men like Hannah, and the riders of the Patriot Guard, have taken matters into their own hands. They stand for the families of the fallen, they raise funds for disabled veterans and their families, and they do so for one simple reason.
They support the troops.


Follow the link and read the entire article. It begins by acknowledging that this administration has pretty well turned its back on the fallen, living and dead, moves to the behavior of the Westboro Baptist Church, and then delivers us to the hope that is the Patriot Guard Riders. Although I am angry at Bush and the WBC, I find that the story of the Guard is such that it inspires both admiration and hope in my heart. I was unable to read it with dry eyes.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

August 29 in History

Here is a mild coincidence of things that have interested me in my life. At one time I intended to be an archeologist, and South America was the area which interested me most. I was fascinated by the story of Atahualpa when I was in high school. I am also a fan of the Beatles. On this date in history:
1533
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The last Incan king, Atahualpa, was murdered on orders of Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro used the Spanish law to justify declaring war on the Inca, steal their gold and silver, and bring their lands into the Spanish Empire: Atahualpa had refused to convert to Christianity. And here we are again, with a leader who is determined on empire, using an excuse to attack another country, take control of its oil, and remove the leader, who just happens not to be Christian. Once again, a more technological nation defeats one with inferior armaments.


1966
Some things you wish wouldn't have changed.

The Beatles performed at Candle Stick Park in San Francisco, their last public concert. I won tickets by calling in to a radio station and identifying Elinor Rigby the day after it was released. Went with friends who brought green brownies. (Luckily the driver didn't eat any, since on the way back it seemed to me that the Golden Gate Bridge was dancing like a python and turning all sorts of colors. Not frightening, but it might have made driving difficult.) The audience was shouting so loud that we couldn't hear any of the music -- and it later turned out that the Beatles had learned not to waste effort on American concert audiences, and were not actually bothering to sing.

Poo

The father was sitting and reading his paper when his five year old daughter asked him, "Daddy, where does poo come from?"

Startled that she should ask such a question so young, he still thought about it so he could frame an answer that would explain it to her. Finally, he said, "Honey, you remember we had breakfast this morning? Well, after we eat food, our bodies take all of the good things, the vitamins, the energy, the calcium, the protein, all the things our bodies need. Then, what's left, the part we can't use and even that might hurt us, well our bodies send that out of our bums and it is poo."

The little girl looked stunned for a moment, and then asked in a trembling voice, "And Tigger?"

Monday, August 28, 2006

The Three of Us

You've seen this picture before, Julie is about a week old and Richard is two. She was 5 pounds, 3 ounces when she was born, but she lost weight initially (I've been told most babies do) and here she is back up to an even 5 pounds. I had been to court for my divorce on the morning of December 30, 1965. In the afternoon I was being readmitted to UC Berkeley, and that night I checked in to the hospital and Julie was born the next morning. Three weeks later, I was back on campus. Life was certainly busy.



This was the same Christmas that Julie got the box from Richard; we are visiting my parents. You can see some of the toys they received -- there were lots more. Just as I had been the ultimate oney-oney, my kids were the first of their generation. They had the grandparents and great-grandparents and aunt and uncle all to themselves for the first few years. Actually, Forrest's daughter Carey came along not long after this, but for this time, they were it and they got all the gifts. (I remember that when I was little -- almost all the gifts under the tree were for me, and to this day a fully loaded Christmas tree makes me feel like it's all mine. Even a tree in someone else's house with nothing under it for me can make me feel special and good.) I was still going to Berkeley at this point.


Here we are in front of the Fairbanks Public Library. Notice that it is a log building. We lived half a block away, also in a log building. I was working as a Montessori teacher at the time. This is the library that a group of Montessori moms was coming out of one Saturday and heard Julie call across the street to her best friend, "You don't either have to be a virgin to get married, Amy Desrocher! My mom said she wasn't." Alaska being Alaska, that made my reputation. The moms thought it was wonderful to know that I was human. There were a couple of things about living in that house. One, it had once belonged to a very famous lady of the night. It was on the corner and all of the corner houses were on the same party line. Three times in two weeks we had accidents at that corner and all three times all four houses tried to call 911 at the same time.

Here we are in California, in San Francisco on the beach. In the background you can see The Cliff House and Sutros Baths. Richard was 23 and Julie 21 here and this picture was taken by Julie's father the weekend he came to California and Julie met him for the first time since she was a few months old. For the first time that he had known she was his. Not that I didn't tell him, once Kate had figured it out, but I did it indirectly and it took him 18 years to figure it out. Doesn't speak hint, not Michael. At this time, Richard had moved back in and Julie had moved to San Francisco to finish college and Missy was a kitten.
And this was taken in Juneau about seven years ago when Julie and Maya came up to visit. This is pretty much how we all still look, except I've got more white in my hair than I did then -- although in this picture it looks whiter than it was. Richard still has a beard. He started wearing one when he was in his early 20s and still looked 15 and we have all grown used to him in it. I don't have any idea what he looks like without it now; I might not recognize him if he shaved it off. This is the last time the three of us were together. That doesn't seem possible, all those years when the three of us were always together, and now we never are. Plane fare from California to Alaska is a bit steep and vacations have just never worked out for Richard and Kathy and me to all go down at the same time. And for Julie, Ted, and Maya it is equally expensive. I wish they would move up, but I don't hope for it, since Julie and Ted are big city folk and like a warmer climate.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Sunday Meme

So, Julie tagged me. Haven't done a meme before, but this certainly gives me something for Sunday, leaving a couple at least started "in the can" which is a good thing this week, as school started here last week and I will be over at the high school recruiting for Teens In Action, and probably fairly tired in the evenings. And not at my desk over lunch, either.

1. Things that scare me:
George W. Bush
Religious fanatics
People who actually believe that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11

2. People who make me laugh:
Julie
Richard
Stephen Colbert
Jon Stewart
Lewis Black
Mark Twain

3. Things I hate the most:
George W. Bush
Politics and the way they work
People who harm children

4. Things I don't understand:
People who don't reflect on their experience
Bigotry of any kind
Hubris

5. Things I'm doing right now:
Drinking grapefruit juice
Blogging
Rubbing Pippin's belly with my toes while he wraps himself around my left foot and purrs

6. Things I want to do before I die:
Write a lot more
Publish
Travel a lot more

7. Things I can do:
Teach anything I can learn
Learn a very wide range of things
Write so that people laugh and cry when I want them to

8. Things I can't do:
Sing well
Draw at all
Dive

10. Things I think you should listen to:
Children when they tell you there is a bear in the yard or a black widow spider on the stairs*
Your conscience
Bird song
Waterfalls
The surf
Whatever makes you laugh really hard

11. Things you should never listen to:
Discouraging words
Hate filled talk
People who don't know you're there

12. Things I'd like to learn:
To draw
To sing
To whistle

13. Favorite foods:
Thanh Long crab
Bing cherries
Watermelon
Jamaican jerk pork
Ripe peaches
Grilled salmon
Mongolian barbecue
Pomegranates
Persimmons

14. Beverages I drink regularly:
Coffee
Pepsi
Grapefruit and pomegranate juice
Hot and Spicy V-8

15. Shows I watched as a kid:
I Love Lucy
Captain Video and his Video Rangers
Hopalong Cassidy
The Lone Ranger
The Cisco Kid (Listened to)

16. People I'm tagging (to do this meme):
Kate
Ted
Pseu

* My sister, Loretta, once told our nephew Elzie to go out and play when he reported a bear in the yard, and then when she went out to hang the wash discovered that there was one, along with her five children and our brother Chuck's four and she had to chase it away with a transitor radio because she didn't know how to shoot the rifle; I once said "Yes, Dear" to Richard when he told me there was a black widow on the stairs and sent him down those stairs to go outside and play and then went down them myself and saw that was one.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Sexualizing Children

Nature has given us definite cues as to sexual maturity. This child is obviously not there yet. She has a flat little girl chest, short limbs, a look of innocence and asexuality. The signals she sends out are for protection.




This woman obviously is mature. Her body signals that she is fertile, she is desirable, she is ripe. She has breasts, pubic hair, and the lines of her body are longer. Her body sends signals to attract a man so that she can start a family.




This woman is obviously built to pillow grandchildren on her breast. Her fertility is unquestioned, but it is in the past. She is no longer sending out signals to young men. Indeed, the signals she is sending may include the prosperity of her husband or the group.



So what happens when you dress the little girl as a sexual being and the grown woman as a child? You confuse the messages they are sending to the world


This is supremely dangerous. We no longer live in small familiar groups, but in large anonymous populations. Many anthropologists believe that this is the reason for wearing clothes in tropical climates, to reduce the sexual signals that occur when strangers meet. (Nudists do not find the bodies of their family members enticing, only of strangers.) So, adults dress to reduce the signals, and there are cultures where adults dress and children run around naked. No one gets confused about who is sexually mature and who isn't. When children start wearing clothes, usually because of the climate; sometimes because of the size of the society, there is nothing provocative about their clothing. When a girl reaches maturity, the society has ways for her to dress to signal that. It may be a flower behind her ear or pierced ears or low cut dresses or floor length dresses. Whatever it is, it is different than little girls wear. The society is careful to guard little girls against inappropriate sexual interest.

But, what we do is a double whammy. Not only do we sexualize children's clothing, but we then dress sexually mature women in children's clothing, which begins to sexualize the non-sexual clothing of children. We are setting ourselves up for trouble, as this article on CommonDreams.org No Escaping Sexualization of Young Girls by Rosa Brooks makes clear.
In our hyper-commercialized consumerist society, there's virtually no escaping the relentless sexualization of younger and younger children. My 26-month-old daughter didn't emerge from the womb clamoring for a seashell bikini like Princess Ariel's but now that she's savvy enough to notice who's prancing around on her pull-ups, she wants in on the bikini thing. And my 4-year-old wasn't born demanding lip gloss and nail polish, but when a little girl at nursery school showed up with her Hello Kitty makeup kit, she was hooked.

In a culture in which the sexualization of childhood is big business and — mainstream mega-corporations such as Disney earn billions by marketing sexy products to children too young to understand their significance, is it any wonder that pedophiles feel emboldened to claim that they shouldn't be ostracized for wanting sex with children? On an Internet bulletin board, one self-avowed "girl lover" offered a critique of this week's New York Times series on pedophilia: "They fail, of course, to mention the hypocrisy of Hollywood selling little girls to millions of people in a highly sexualized way." I hate to say it, but the pedophiles have a point here.

There are plenty of good reasons to worry about children and sex. But if we want to get to the heart of the problem, we should obsess a little less about whether the neighbor down the block is a dangerous pedophile — and we should worry a whole lot more about good old-fashioned American capitalism, which is busy serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter.
Yes, they will sell anything. Your health. Your future. Your child.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Friday Cat Blogging

Missy & Abe

Missy was my cat for 18 1/2 years. She was a small creature, five pounds at her largest, four and a half towards the end of her life. Abe was her best animal friend in her later years. An Irish wolfhound, Abe's head was as big as Missy. (In the background you can see parts of Abe's mistress, my friend Zinna.) As you can see, Missy and Abe got on very well, for all the size differential. This was partly because Missy had been raised around Julie's dog Samantha, who was the most gentle and accepting dog in the world, and partly because Abe was, like so many larger breeds of animals, a gentle creature himself. He was big, what did he need to prove to anyone? And Missy was a cat, what did she need to prove to anyone?

Missy and Abe both liked porcupines and tried to make friends with them. The difference was that when Abe would approach one, the porcupine would turn his tail toward Abe, Abe would do the dog greeting and try to sniff under the tail, and he would invariably get quills in his nose; he may have been one of those dogs who get addicted to something in the quills or maybe he just never learned. Abe never saw a porcupine he didn't try to sniff. Going for a walk with Zinna and Abe was a never ending adventure, with Zinna and me being vigilant and pulling him back before he could, once again, get quilled. Missy, on the other hand, never got quilled because as she would approach, they would turn their backs on her and she would circle to touch noses and so she never touched them and never needed to learn that they were sharp.

As Missy aged, she slowed down and slept a lot. When she first woke up she moved slowly, carefully, allowing her joints to warm up before she put much stress on them. Except the time six weeks before she died, when she was sleeping on my breast as I sat in my recliner. Suddenly, she was up and gone and by the time I could turn around to see what was happening, all that was left of the mouse was its tail. Such a good little predator, she was.

These days both Missy and Abe have been gone for a few years. But I still miss them. Having the Hooligans is lovely, and they make me laugh with their young antics, but sometimes I want my little, quiet, comfortable Missy.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Scare Tactics, Yet Again

So, we got up on Wednesday morning and what, other than election results in Alaska, greeted us as we read our morning paper? The latest study claiming that, as SFGate.com phrased it, "Early Death Only a Belt Hole Away". How does that feel, for all of us who are fat and all of us who love somebody who is fat?

I've been reading these studies for decades, at first with a sucker's personal interest and eventually with a critical mind. Let's think about this. The conventional wisdom is that obesity leads to an early death. We have more obese people today than ever before in the history of the human race -- not only are there more fat people, but individuals are fatter than ever before. And we can see, from the falling life expectancy that fat kills. Except that, life expectancy isn't falling. While obesity has overtaken up to 60 percent of the population, life expectancy has gone from 49 to 77 years. An increase of 57 percent.

As I read the article, I noticed a couple of things. And, shall we be surprised by what I noticed? First off, the study is being touted by the Obesity Society. Heard of them? Well, they aren't a society of the obese. No, they are a group of professionals in the field of obesity management. In other words, folk who pocket part of the $33 billion per annum paid out by people like me in the hope that they will get thin. Secondly, it is being challenged by a number of professionals who don't profit from this population, including Dr. Glenn Gaesser, the obesity expert who wrote "Big Fat Lies", a debunking of many of the myths around weight; Dr. Gaesser says that the study is "just adding to the obesity hysteria".

So, I looked a little further and found this Campos: Weight Study's Data Tortured by Paul Campos

Paul Campos is the author of The Obesity Myth, and in writing his article went to the New England Journal of Medicine and actually read the study. Here is part of what he has to say about it.

This, at last, produced a (modest) increase in mortality risk associated with "overweight," thus allowing the authors to draw their conclusion that "overweight is associated with an increased risk of death."

But notice how this result was produced. Since the "overweight" people in the study still had the lowest death risk, even after the authors tossed out 70 percent of their subject pool by limiting their analysis to never-smokers, the study found "overweight" associated with an increased risk of death only among a particular subgroup: people who had been "overweight" at age 50, but were at a "normal weight" when they later entered the study.

In other words, what the study really found is that, for middle-aged "overweight" people, weight loss increases the risk of death significantly! (This, by the way, is a very common finding in studies of this sort).

The authors, needless to say, fail to note this awkward fact, which does not merely contradict, but actually inverts, the public health message their study is intended to bolster. Will journalists covering the study manage to figure this out on their own? Fat chance.

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? That, if people who are currently 50 or over and are overweight believe this "study" and lose weight, they will actually increase their risk of death significantly. And that the authors of the study obviously know that (in order to explain away the fact that their own results showed fat people living longer than thin ones, they had to decide that the thin ones were dying of smoking related causes and so eliminated 70 percent of their original subjects whether their deaths were smoking related or not) and still publicize their results in a way that endangers fat people. And although our society is significantly biased against fat people and doesn't hesitate to heap scorn upon us, this is not being done because of that. No, it is being done for the same reason that the tobacco companies hid their research that tobacco was both deadly and addictive for 50 years and marketed to children. The same reason the diet industry ignores the research that shows that one of the major causes of weight gain is dieting and continues to sell diet products and services, knowing the result will be an increase in weight in 98 percent of their customers. Where there is a profit to be made, it is really not important that you might make people worse or kill them. And if you have to convince children to smoke or constantly redefine overweight downward to replace your lost customer base, well that's what you do. Nothing personal, you understand, just business.

Sometimes They Sing

Tuesday was the Alaska primary elections. I'm amazed -- it may be for the first time in my life, but everything turned out the way I wanted it to! I can't remember a time when hardly anything did that, talk about all of it!

The best thing was with the Republican primary: our current governor, Frank Murkowski, LOST! Unless you live in Alaska, you can't imagine how great that is. The man was a US Senator for 22 years and is a Republican governor in a red state where there is exactly one (count them, 1) liberal district in the entire state! He was trounced! He can't run in November unless he decides to pull a Lieberman, so he can't win. Tuesday morning a friend told me she hadn't decided yet how to vote, since she was registered undeclared she could vote for any party she wanted, and was thinking of going Republican to vote against him so he couldn't run, or maybe to vote for him so he would be the competition for the Democrat we want to win (Tony Knowles), since Murkowski's popularity is so low right now, or to go Dem and vote for Tony. Murkowski is soooo bad! He appointed his daughter to fill his US Senate seat when he was elected Governor. He wanted to buy a jet with Homeland Security funds, the Legislature (GOP majority) said no, so he bought it on a line of credit, on a technicality allowed in the state constitution! Then, he used it in questionable ways, like to pick him up from vacation trips. He canceled the Longevity Bonus, a Social Security supplement the state had provided for it's seniors because the cost of living is so high in Alaska that many people, even people who were born here, even Alaska Natives, have had to move outside when they retire. When he cut off the funds for this, he said it would cause no hardship because elders who needed it could qualify for food stamps and rent assistance! As though people of that generation would apply for such a thing after having supported themselves for their entire lives! As though there was no difference between receiving money that everyone over 65 received and having to prove that you are poor! (Am I growing indignant? Can you tell by the exclamation marks?) He cut off revenue sharing to communities, causing untold hardship to small bush villages which suddenly could not afford to pay any full time staff or insure themselves. He was negotiating a deal for a gas pipeline with BP-Exxon that would have frozen taxes on them at a level below the standard oil producing state/country level for 40 years! He has appointed a man who wants to close down the state ferry system (we have many communities in Southeastern Alaska that are not on the road system, some islands, some with any possible road way in avalanche country) as the head of it, his appointee has messed with the schedules so badly that it is losing money and people dependent on it can't get where they need to be without taking extra time for travel, and he is pushing to build a road out of Juneau that will end, not at a town that is connected to the roads, but at a ferry terminal in the middle of nowhere! If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that the road will connect a number of private mine and logging sites to Juneau and make it much more profitable for them to operate. So, good bye Frank Murkowski. You will not be missed by anyone but the crony capitalists you really worked for.

The Democratic candidate will be Tony Knowles, who was governor for two terms (we have term limits, and after two you have to take one off) and did a good job of it. Enough so that he was re-elected in this red state. The Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor is a man I've eaten breakfast with, Ethan Berkowitz, who is one of the good guys. (This is a small state as far as population goes; many of us know folks who might be considered important and out of our league in other places.)

And we defeated the big money cruise lines and passed Proposition 2, which, among other things of benefit to the state, will enforce stronger controls on the sewage they can dump in Alaskan waters. Despite the fact that they pumped over a million dollars into their campaign to defeat it, and we only spent $7,000!

We passed Proposition 1, which limits campaign contributions.

So, don't know what will happen in November, but today is a good day and I will bask in it.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Happy Home
My Solid Foundation on Wheels

Here is a picture of my father holding me in front of my first home. The car is as big as the trailer. You can see that there are two sections -- one end was the living room. The couch let down into a bed and that's where my parents slept. The other section was the kitchen and the cushions on the benches and the table let down to make a second bed. That was my bed, and when Forrest was born, he slept with me. There wasn't enough room to open a door inside, so there was a curtain between the two rooms, which meant I fell asleep at night to the sound of my parents talking. When they had taken a book out of the library or received a Book of the Month Club selection that they both wanted to read, they would take turns reading aloud. Many a night I fell asleep to the sounds of them reading to each other. If the book was funny, they would both laugh which I just loved.

The other thing about this trailer is that it was bigger on the inside than on the outside. It had to have been, because it was so full of love and laughter and warmth and cheer that nothing as small as that trailer looks to be from the outside could have possibly contained it. My parents had this incredible romance. The first time they met, my father went home and woke up his mother and told her he had met the woman he was going to marry. My father had been divorced, and my mother was worried that her father wouldn't let them get married once he knew, so during the last month of my mother's senior year of high school, my father hired a pilot to fly them to Carson City, Nevada where they were married.

The day after Pearl Harbor my father tried to enlist. Because he had flat feet and was deaf in one ear, no branch of the service would take him and he tried them all. Since he couldn't serve in the military, he and my mother moved to Oakland and he worked in the shipyards building war ships. Between the hulls. The noise there was so bad that he lost the hearing in his other ear, but he never complained about it. It was simply what he did during the war. After that, he wore hearing aids, and in those days they were huge. The speaker sat in his shirt pocket, there were very visible ear pieces in both ears, and wires ran under his shirt to the speaker and to the two large batteries that filled his back pants' pockets. They weren't very good, either. He couldn't talk to more than two people at a time and really hear what they were saying. Background noise could drown out voices. It made it awkward for him to make friends at work and my mother says he was often lonely because of it. He had always been a very gregarious person, and to be unable to communicate easily had to have been very hard.

I was born not quite five months after Pearl Harbor, and my parents were living in an apartment at the time. As soon as the war was over, we moved into the trailer and traveled from one end of California to the other. My father, who had started out as a musician, was now in construction and whenever the mood struck him, we would move so he could work on some other project. If they were building it in California in the late 40s, my father may well have worked on it.

Years later, I would meet people who had known my father and they would tell me that when he entered a room it was like the sun came out from behind a cloud. Suddenly, the room was full of warmth and light. That he made them feel important when he listened to them. That he made them laugh. I remember him climbing into the very highest branches of the conifer in my grandmother's front yard and calling down that it would be perfect if only there was a pool table. And he loved to put a bobby pin inside a cigarette and when he smoked it the ash would cling to the bobby pin and he would ignore it and people would be hovering around with an ashtray waiting for the ash to fall, which it never did. He sang me songs like Mairze Doatz and Three Liddle Fiddies (about three fish who swam and swam all over the dam) and Hot Sot Ralston on a Rilara (I haven't a clue what this was about, but it involved deep voices and shoulder motions) and all of those silly word play songs of the 30s and 40s.

One thing about having a very small home, my mother could clean it in a very short time, and then she had hours while my father was at work alone with me. She taught me all the nursery rhymes and took me to the park and played with me. I was the center of the universe, and I knew it. Except for when I was getting my clothes torn or dirty, it was almost impossible for me to displease my mother. She would put me on the handle bars of her bike and we would go all over.

We had lived in 26 towns by the time I was six; my parents intended to settle down and get a house when I started school. But before that happened, my father stepped on a rusty nail and got tetanus and died. I have lived in all sorts of places since. Had a real bed in my own bedroom with a real door. I was never as rich as when we lived in that trailer and I slept on the kitchen table. I learned very early that things don't matter, but people do. The most important thing you can give your child is love, both for the child and for the other parent.

When people see the picture of our home, they think we were poor. And when they hear that my father died, they feel sorry for me. But, there was never a child who got a better start in life than I did. And if I had to choose between six years with my father and a lifetime with any other, I would choose those six years.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Julie Victorious

This happened one Christmas and the toys they had opened were spread all over the house. Just like the cliche! Ignored the toys and fought over the box!

This is one of my favorite recorded memories. Richard was four and Julie two. You can see that he has size and strength on her. He's barely trying to keep that box away from her. She, on the other hand, has determination. Notice how calm his face is, notice how strained what you can see of her face is. He's holding on with one hand, she's pulling with both. She wants it more than he does, there is no question about that. And so, it is not in the least surprising that she gets it.

And do we see content on her face now that she has it? Perhaps, but also the determination to keep it. She fought for it, it's hers! She is getting it away as fast as she can. Later, my sister gave her a ride in it, but I don't know what Julie thought she was going to do with it when she went after it.

And one thing that hasn't changed from that day to this -- Julie goes after the things she wants with all of her heart and all of her strength and the odds just don't matter. She hangs in there and she achieves.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Dressing Down the Decades
1969 - Present
The Pantsuit

And then, life changed forever and much, much, much for the better. I moved to Fairbanks to teach in the local Montessori school, and stopped having to wear skirts. Alaska, because of the weather, was ahead of the Lower 48 in allowing women to wear pants to work. It was wonderful. I had skirts, I sometimes wore them, but rarely. Mostly it was pantsuits. The one pictured here was one of my favorites, gray that could be worn with any dark, intense color. Notice the three sets of chains that I bought to go with my gray mini and vest. I'm posing in the living room of the log house we lived in, which we called Antler Manor because there was a set of moose antlers above the front door, and it seemed nicer than calling it Horney Hall. Richard, Julie, and I shared the house with various roommates at various times, often another woman with a child.

Another good thing that happened with clothes, and happened very rapidly, was wash and wear. When we moved to Alaska we brought most of our clothes in suitcases, but the ironing came up by mover. The mover lost my belongings for six months, and when I finally got them, the only clothes my children owned that needed ironing were the ones in the shipment -- in six months, mothers had been freed of the iron unless they wanted to deal with it.


Pantsuits come in all sorts of styles and fabrics, good for summer as well as winter, or as in this case, for California as well as Alaska. By the time I had returned to California, in 1975, pants were being worn for work by many women there as well. Things had really changed in the five years we lived in Fairbanks. I was walking uphill on the UoP campus, the same UoP that had threatened to expel my aunt for wearing a pair of dress slacks to the grocery store just six years earlier, and there on the grass was laying a young woman with a short skirt and her feet pointing down hill and you could see she had on no underwear. Students and teachers were walking by and no one turned a hair.

1981-1993
Business Suits

For a while in California I owned my own training and consulting firm, and for that I had to wear skirted suits. I did it. It was a uniform, like the middy and pleated skirts I'd worn at boarding school. Of course, I used my own style on it as much as I could and had one turquoise suit and learned all sorts of things to make them more individual. But, when I was standing up in front of business people and expecting them to accept my authority, I had to know how to dress for that. Dark suits, high heels, dark glasses frames, all the tricks that make a woman who is just 5'2" tall seem imposing.

Now that I'm back in Alaska and I'm working in social service agencies, I'm back in my slacks. I'm back to free movement and easy care in my clothes. I can still play with color and enjoy clothes, but I no longer need to be constrained by them. I haven't worn a skirt that wasn't ankle length since a job interview in 1993; I have some long skirts, but no short ones. I haven't worn high heels since that day, either. Or pantyhose.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Dressing Down the Decades
1960 - 1968

I Never Wore Tie Dye

I was a hippy. Started with my custom made sandals. And then, I let my hair grow for seven years and wore dark clothes. One outfit was a burlap skirt with a satin blouse. You should have seen my step-father's reaction to that one. Even better when I smoked my cherry wood pipe! He didn't want me to smoke it in the house, but if I went out on the porch the neighbors could see me. I would go back to Berkeley with my throat and mouth sore, and not touch the thing until I visited my parents again.

Lots of black and gray, charcoal and navy. Actually, I sort of came in on the end of the beatniks and the beginning of the hippies. See the madras bedspread used for a curtain and the wine skin hanging from the light pole. Smoked grass and some hash, ate peyote buttons, dropped out of college to live in an attic and write the great American novel (didn't do either), read my poetry at coffee houses, drank lattes before anyone else had heard of them, hung out with other young people who had artistic leanings, enjoyed myself completely. Stopped wearing the girdles all girls and women wore in those days. Considered moving to a commune. Lived in San Francisco near the Haight Ashbury.

Did sound effects for a friend who did radio plays. Went to museums and plays and concerts and book stores. Took part in some early protest marches. Attended three IWW spaghetti feeds, but that got too sad when there were 12 people there talking about how things were going to be after the revolution. When they didn't serve food, they pulled in the five faithful -- two of whom were rumored to be FBI agents.

One day Ken Kesey walked in as I was cooking for a group and ate what was supposed to be my breakfast. (By which I mean he not only ate the food I'd cooked for myself, but also the last food in the house.) His girlfriend read tarot. Another time I chased Neil Cassidy out of my house with a broom because he was putting the moves on my roommate, who was living with me while her husband was in jail.

1965 - 1968
Back to College

Julie was three weeks old and Richard two years and my divorce was still fresh when I returned to UC Berkeley. When I was registering, they tried to tell me that although I was 25, I needed my parents' permission to live off campus. I wasn't going for permission to do a damned thing, so I smiled and agreed that I would be glad to bring my baby and my toddler and live in campus housing. Amazing how suddenly I didn't need anyone's permission.

My Aunt Florence was newly widowed and returned to University of the Pacific at the same time. She had to get the dean's permission to live off campus although she was 43 and she only got it, as a single woman, because she owned a house within a mile of the campus. One day she was in the grocery store, wearing grey wool slacks and a white cotton blouse, and the dean of women came up to her and explained that if she was seen in town again in slacks she would be expelled. Mini-skirts would not have been allowed at UoP!

Mini Skirts

It's hard to believe that institutions had that much control of grown women, but they did. The mini-skirt felt like a rebellion against that, and although they were really sexy, many of us wore them as a badge of autonomy.

My favorite outfit was gray suede mini and vest and boots and hat (with a black feather) worn with black tights and turtle neck and three sets of silver chains. (Still have the chains. Still wear them with gray and/or black.) I looked like nothing so much as a mod Maid Marion, and would have done so even more if I had ever been able to afford the cape that completed the outfit. I think I identified very much with Mrs. Emma Peel when wearing a mini, and that was a good place to be while working free of the patriarchy.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Dressing Down the Decades
1956 - 1962

Pleated Skirts & Sweater Sets

High school and the first two years of college found me in pleated skirts and sweater sets. The sweaters were the same color, a cardigan worn over a shell. You could also wear the cardigan with a blouse and the shell alone or with a jacket. Having a plaid skirt with four colors in it and then a sweater set in each of those colors was the goal. I did the first two years of high school at Hillsdale High in San Mateo, California and the last two at Thomas Downey High in Modesto. College was the University of California at Berkeley. My mother thought, when I went away to college, that I would come home with polish. Maybe wearing a circle pin.

The only problem with this plan was that I arrived at Berkeley during the beginning of the student movement. I may have dressed like I was on my way to stereotypic adult womanhood, but it wasn't to be. The combination of who I was and where and when I was quickly derailed that plan. Anyway, this is what I mostly wore when I was majoring in anthropology and my mother still had hopes.


1960
Sandals & Shirtmakers

The fact that within two months of hitting Berkeley I went to Sandals Unlimited and had a pair of these custom made did give her pause. Well, to truly understand my mother's concern you have to know that these are really the ones I had.
Wide leather and tied just above the knee. Most comfortable pair of shoes I ever owned in my life and I wore them almost exclusively for at least 15 years. To this day I am one of the few women my age without bunions or other misshapen conditions of the foot, because while I was being a hippy and wearing sandals that had been cut to the pattern of my feet and then soaked and worn until they dried to an exact conformation, most women were wearing high heels with needle points. Had I been more pliable, more accepting of my fate as a woman, I too could have been half crippled by my shoes.

The other thing I wore in high school and college was shirtmaker dresses. I loved them. They had such freedom -- as easy to wear as a man's shirt, looked good. My favorite I got my junior year of high school and wore at least weekly through my sophomore year of college. My roommate wore it to a Halloween party and everyone knew she had come as me. By college, I had begun to find some sense of a different style and these I usually wore with the gladiator sandals and a four inch wide black leather belt. The buckle was a gate hinge. Smashing!


My freshman year at Berkeley I joined the staff of the Independent Californian, an underground newspaper formed when the Regents started censoring the Daily Californian for its coverage of the HUAC riots in San Francisco and the staff resigned and started their own paper. Here we see me getting radicalized even though I was still partially dressed like a proper young lady.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Dressing Down the Decades

1948
School Uniform

This is a middy blouse. Mine was worn with a navy blue tie and a navy blue pleated skirt. It was my uniform at St. Mary of The Palms School for Girls, in Mission San Jose, California. It was a boarding school. I attended St. Mary's after my father died, although we were not Catholic. Some day I'll have to tell you how hearing that all non-Catholics go to hell makes a little girl with a dead father feel.

When we lived in Puerto Rico, because they didn't speak English in the public schools in 1952, I attended a Catholic day school and wore a uniform much like this. I think the skirt was green. I think that middy blouses and pleated skirts were fairly standard for Catholic school uniforms in those days.

1956
Squaw Dress


This is an example of the sort of thing I wore to school when I lived in El Paso, Texas and in Roswell, New Mexico. Lots of ric-rac. Our mothers had silver concho belts to wear with theirs, and sometimes there was turquoise inset into the belt.

Squaw dresses came in solid colors, like this one, or with alternating colors, so that the top and second gore were one color and the first and third gores were another. We tended towards combinations like turquoise or pink and grey or green and brown. We could choose the colors we wanted, because our mothers made all of our clothes. Black and white was a particularly dramatic contrast and I made myself one eventually. The only reason I could wear it without washing out was that I was so young -- I'm not the right coloring for black and white. I loved it.

1956
Full Petticoats & Circle Skirts


In Roswell, in addition to squaw dresses, we also wore full petticoats and circle skirts. You may have seen pictures of poodle skirts, and there were some with poodles, but most were poodle free. I had one with my name embroidered on it. And one in light gray with a dark gray patch pocket and one in purple with lilac flowers at the hem. Again, my mother made them all.

Under the skirt, we wore anywhere from two to six petticoats. We soaked them in starch and/or sugar, so that they stood out quite far. Since we could never decide which made them stand out farther, we often soaked them in both. Two girls were about the limit to walk side by side in the halls at school or on a sidewalk. We would have been in real trouble had there been a fire.

These things took a lot of care, from soaking of petticoats to walking abreast to sitting with modesty. The fashion didn't last long, which was just as well. It was really training for being the kind of woman that society wanted in those days -- willing to do whatever was necessary to look good.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Dressing Down the Decades

I haven't told you yet, but I love clothes. They tell others who we are and remind us of who we used to be. We look at pictures of the past and are reminded of how the world used to be for us and other foremothers and forefathers.

The world used to be more restricted for females. Women and little girls both wore dresses that buttoned up the back. Not only were they hard to climb and tumble in while maintaining modesty, but we needed help getting dressed. It meant we were more dependent than boys. (Of course, things had come a long way from the days when rich women were sewn into their clothing each morning and your maid could tell by the stitches if you'd been out of them that day. And the maid was paid by the husband, not the wife.)

When my father was a little boy, shoes had to be buttoned up by putting a buttonhook through the button hole in the stiff leather and pulling the button through. This was not an easy thing for a child to do, and young children couldn't do it at all. If my father took off his shoes, his mother had to button them back on him. Do that a number of times a day and a busy mother runs out of patience. So, even today there are children who get in trouble for taking off the shoes that now fasten with velcro.

Elastic waists and velcro and zippers have freed children and their mothers. Wash and wear has eased the tension between mothers and children immensely. Universal wearing of jeans has given girls freedom we never had before.

Since clothes make such a difference, I have decided to do a series on clothes I have worn. I will take one example at a time -- otherwise the post would be too long. So, for today we will take this introduction and my first item of memory, the little white dress I wore at the age of three.

1945
I Always Wore White

When I was a little girl, there were no modern fabrics, certainly not wash and wear. It was during and just after WWII and factory production was all for the war effort, so although my father was making good money working in the ship yards, no washing machines were to be had and my mother had to do the wash on a scrub board. She always dressed me in white. Many of my dresses had eyelet or lace on them. Just the sort of thing to get dirty or torn easily. And I was not a clean child. I was up trees and down holes and through pipes and into everything. Torn lace and dirty bodices were my standard expression. (The reason my hair is done in Shirley Temple ringlets is that I was born on her birthday. Shirley, Shakespeare, and me. So, now you understand.)


And the worst of it was when we went to visit my Grandmother Hunt in the fall and the pomegranates were ripe. I think Grandma had around ten pomegranate trees. To this day, I can't resist pomegranates. Picture me, three years old, in my little white dress, hiding under the tree and eating pomegranates. Even with modern washing products, there is no getting that juice out of white cotton. Now picture my mother trying to scrub those stains out of my dresses on the board. Now picture me being scolded. And now, knowing me, first picture me with newspaper tucked into my collar trying to protect my dress that way. Do you see the newsprint on my dress along with the purple juice? Then picture me, naked as the day I was born, eating the fruit, getting juice all over my body, and then picking up my clothes with my hands still wet and leaving purple handprints all over them.

Finally, picture me, purple stained from stem to stern, trying to figure out how my mother knew that I had been sneaking pomegranates.

1948
School Uniform

This is a middy blouse. Mine was worn with a navy blue tie and a navy blue pleated skirt. It was my uniform at St. Mary of The Palms School for Girls, in Mission San Jose, California. It was a boarding school. I attended St. Mary's after my father died, although we were not Catholic. Some day I'll have to tell you how hearing that all non-Catholics go to hell makes a little girl with a dead father feel.

When we lived in Puerto Rico, because they didn't speak English in the public schools in 1952, I attended a Catholic day school and wore a uniform much like this. I think the skirt was green. I think that middy blouses and pleated skirts were fairly standard for Catholic school uniforms in those days.
1956
Squaw Dress

This is an example of the sort of thing I wore to school when I lived in El Paso, Texas and in Roswell, New Mexico. Lots of ric-rac. Our mothers had silver concho belts to wear with theirs, and sometimes there was turquoise inset into the belt.

Squaw dresses came in solid colors, like this one, or with alternating colors, so that the top and second gore were one color and the first and third gores were another. We tended towards combinations like turquoise or pink and grey or green and brown. We could choose the colors we wanted, because our mothers made all of our clothes. Black and white was a particularly dramatic contrast and I made myself one eventually. The only reason I could wear it without washing out was that I was so young -- I'm not the right coloring for black and white. I loved it.

1956
Full Petticoats & Circle Skirts


In Roswell, in addition to squaw dresses, we also wore full petticoats and circle skirts. You may have seen pictures of poodle skirts, and there were some with poodles, but most were poodle free. I had one with my name embroidered on it. And one in light gray with a dark gray patch pocket and one in purple with lilac flowers at the hem. Again, my mother made them all.

Under the skirt, we wore anywhere from two to six petticoats. We soaked them in starch and/or sugar, so that they stood out quite far. Since we could never decide which made them stand out farther, we often soaked them in both. Two girls were about the limit to walk side by side in the halls at school or on a sidewalk. We would have been in real trouble had there been a fire.

These things took a lot of care, from soaking of petticoats to walking abreast to sitting with modesty. The fashion didn't last long, which was just as well. It was really training for being the kind of woman that society wanted in those days -- willing to do whatever was necessary to look good.

1956 - 1962
Pleated Skirts & Sweater Sets

High school and the first two years of college found me in pleated skirts and sweater sets. The sweaters were the same color, a cardigan worn over a shell. You could also wear the cardigan with a blouse and the shell alone or with a jacket. Having a plaid skirt with four colors in it and then a sweater set in each of those colors was the goal. I did the first two years of high school at Hillsdale High in San Mateo, California and the last two at Thomas Downey High in Modesto. College was the University of California at Berkeley. My mother thought, when I went away to college, that I would come home with polish. Maybe wearing a circle pin.

The only problem with this plan was that I arrived at Berkeley during the beginning of the student movement. I may have dressed like I was on my way to stereotypic adult womanhood, but it wasn't to be. The combination of who I was and where and when I was quickly derailed that plan. Anyway, this is what I mostly wore when I was majoring in anthropology and my mother still had hopes.


1960
Sandals & Shirtmakers

The fact that within two months of hitting Berkeley I went to Sandals Unlimited and had a pair of these custom made did give her pause. Well, to truly understand my mother's concern you have to know that these are really the ones I had.
Wide leather and tied just above the knee. Most comfortable pair of shoes I ever owned in my life and I wore them almost exclusively for at least 15 years. To this day I am one of the few women my age without bunions or other misshapen conditions of the foot, because while I was being a hippy and wearing sandals that had been cut to the pattern of my feet and then soaked and worn until they dried to an exact conformation, most women were wearing high heels with needle points. Had I been more pliable, more accepting of my fate as a woman, I too could have been half crippled by my shoes.

The other thing I wore in high school and college was shirtmaker dresses. I loved them. They had such freedom -- as easy to wear as a man's shirt, looked good. My favorite I got my junior year of high school and wore at least weekly through my sophomore year of college. My roommate wore it to a Halloween party and everyone knew she had come as me. By college, I had begun to find some sense of a different style and these I usually wore with the gladiator sandals and a four inch wide black leather belt. The buckle was a gate hinge. Smashing!


My freshman year at Berkeley I joined the staff of the Independent Californian, an underground newspaper formed when the Regents started censoring the Daily Californian for its coverage of the HUAC riots in San Francisco and the staff resigned and started their own paper. Here we see me getting radicalized even though I was still partially dressed like a proper young lady.

1960 - 1968
I Never Wore Tie Dye

I was a hippy. Started with my custom made sandals. And then, I let my hair grow for seven years and wore dark clothes. One outfit was a burlap skirt with a satin blouse. You should have seen my step-father's reaction to that one. Even better when I smoked my cherry wood pipe! He didn't want me to smoke it in the house, but if I went out on the porch the neighbors could see me. I would go back to Berkeley with my throat and mouth sore, and not touch the thing until I visited my parents again.

Lots of black and gray, charcoal and navy. Actually, I sort of came in on the end of the beatniks and the beginning of the hippies. See the madras bedspread used for a curtain and the wine skin hanging from the light pole. Smoked grass and some hash, ate peyote buttons, dropped out of college to live in an attic and write the great American novel (didn't do either), read my poetry at coffee houses, drank lattes before anyone else had heard of them, hung out with other young people who had artistic leanings, enjoyed myself completely. Stopped wearing the girdles all girls and women wore in those days. Considered moving to a commune. Lived in San Francisco near the Haight Ashbury.

Did sound effects for a friend who did radio plays. Went to museums and plays and concerts and book stores. Took part in some early protest marches. Attended three IWW spaghetti feeds, but that got too sad when there were 12 people there talking about how things were going to be after the revolution. When they didn't serve food, they pulled in the five faithful -- two of whom were rumored to be FBI agents.

One day Ken Kesey walked in as I was cooking for a group and ate what was supposed to be my breakfast. (By which I mean he not only ate the food I'd cooked for myself, but also the last food in the house.) His girlfriend read tarot. Another time I chased Neil Cassidy out of my house with a broom because he was putting the moves on my roommate, who was living with me while her husband was in jail.

1965 - 1968
Back to College

Julie was three weeks old and Richard two years and my divorce was still fresh when I returned to UC Berkeley. When I was registering, they tried to tell me that although I was 25, I needed my parents' permission to live off campus. I wasn't going for permission to do a damned thing, so I smiled and agreed that I would be glad to bring my baby and my toddler and live in campus housing. Amazing how suddenly I didn't need anyone's permission.

My Aunt Florence was newly widowed and returned to University of the Pacific at the same time. She had to get the dean's permission to live off campus although she was 43 and she only got it, as a single woman, because she owned a house within a mile of the campus. One day she was in the grocery store, wearing grey wool slacks and a white cotton blouse, and the dean of women came up to her and explained that if she was seen in town again in slacks she would be expelled. Mini-skirts would not have been allowed at UoP!

Mini Skirts

It's hard to believe that institutions had that much control of grown women, but they did. The mini-skirt felt like a rebellion against that, and although they were really sexy, many of us wore them as a badge of autonomy.

My favorite outfit was gray suede mini and vest and boots and hat (with a black feather) worn with black tights and turtle neck and three sets of silver chains. (Still have the chains. Still wear them with gray and/or black.) I looked like nothing so much as a mod Maid Marion, and would have done so even more if I had ever been able to afford the cape that completed the outfit. I think I identified very much with Mrs. Emma Peel when wearing a mini, and that was a good place to be while working free of the patriarchy.

1969 - Present
Pantsuits

And then, life changed forever and much, much, much for the better. I moved to Fairbanks to teach in the local Montessori school, and stopped having to wear skirts. Alaska, because of the weather, was ahead of the Lower 48 in allowing women to wear pants to work. It was wonderful. I had skirts, I sometimes wore them, but rarely. Mostly it was pantsuits. The one pictured here was one of my favorites, gray that could be worn with any dark, intense color. Notice the three sets of chains that I bought to go with my gray mini and vest. I'm posing in the living room of the log house we lived in, which we called Antler Manor because there was a set of moose antlers above the front door, and it seemed nicer than calling it Horney Hall. Richard, Julie, and I shared the house with various roommates at various times, often another woman with a child.

Another good thing that happened with clothes, and happened very rapidly, was wash and wear. When we moved to Alaska we brought most of our clothes in suitcases, but the ironing came up by mover. The mover lost my belongings for six months, and when I finally got them, the only clothes my children owned that needed ironing were the ones in the shipment -- in six months, mothers had been freed of the iron unless they wanted to deal with it.


Pantsuits come in all sorts of styles and fabrics, good for summer as well as winter, or as in this case, for California as well as Alaska. By the time I had returned to California, in 1975, pants were being worn for work by many women there as well. Things had really changed in the five years we lived in Fairbanks. I was walking uphill on the UoP campus, the same UoP that had threatened to expel my aunt for wearing a pair of dress slacks to the grocery store just six years earlier, and there on the grass was laying a young woman with a short skirt and her feet pointing down hill and you could see she had on no underwear. Students and teachers were walking by and no one turned a hair.

For a while in California I owned my own training and consulting firm, and for that I had to wear skirted suits. I did it. It was a uniform, like the middy and pleated skirts I'd worn at boarding school. Of course, I used my own style on it as much as I could and had one turquoise suit and learned all sorts of things to make them more individual. But, when I was standing up in front of business people and expecting them to accept my authority, I had to know how to dress for that. Dark suits, high heels, dark glasses frames, all the tricks that make a woman who is just 5'2" tall seem imposing.

Now that I'm back in Alaska and I'm working in social service agencies, I'm back in my slacks. I'm back to free movement and easy care in my clothes. I can still play with color and enjoy clothes, but I no longer need to be constrained by them. I haven't worn a skirt that wasn't ankle length since a job interview in 1993; I have some long skirts, but no short ones. I haven't worn high heels since that day, either. Or pantyhose.