While doing my dwindling list of Christmas cards down to mostly family, I was still muddling over whether to wander off on some side streets from my Main Street gridlock and went into a kind of panic, though the goat-footed Greek god Pan of woods and pastures wasn't exactly noisily frightening me. Before I explain, I must thank my cousin, Ryan K., for giving me this privileged challenge, creating the website for me, for it is a challenge to my restlessly impatient mind, which is like one of those rock tumblers used by rock hounds to smooth agates, e.g. Well, no, my mind is more like an attic full of crazed little gnomes running around opening drawers and slamming doors all over the place. I have the best curse I could suffer: relentless curiosity. Which is why I have always considered my brain the essential part of my body. The rest is pretty much the cheap dreck now estimated to be worth $4.50 in materials, probably because most of it is water: 70% of the muscles, 50% each of the fat and bones. Undoubtedly more in my case now that I have to take what Dad called pee pills. (How do I know those numbers? Courtesy of the most fabulous library in human history: the Internet. Reason enough for even the biggest scaredy-cat to buy a computer.)
My high esteem for the grey matter which turns into a very yukky lime jello when it's steamed, as a CSI episode graphically illustrated, also explains why I'm pretty much the teetotaler my parents always were and raised me to be, with the story of how some men tried to hold Dad down and make him drink beer and failed. As a result of merely two colossal college hangovers when my brain's chemical plant simply shut down and I had to roleplay the Headless Horseman, carrying my head around very, very gingerly, wincing at anything more than a whisper, I have only contempt for drunks, especially those macho sort who consider being hazards to the rest of us--as when they drive, brawl, or go home and beat up their wives and children--some weird signification of the size of their testicles, when it's the opposite. It takes bigger, better balls to stay sober and deal with the world. And, hey, I know what I'm talking about. Grandma L. took the children and hid them in the barn when my gambling, alcoholic grandfather came home in drunken rages from one of his toots in town; she likewise hid money in buried fruit jars so that Dad always wanted to take a metal detector out to the old home place, sure that he could find some of them. (Her attempt reminds me of the Air Force wives in Minot, ND, where I first taught college, who had to buy all the groceries at payday, 13 or 14 loaves of bread at a time, because their husbands drank and gambled away so much.) Dad's oldest brother had three or four wives--we're not sure because he apparently didn't marry one of them--and wrecked his career with booze, and I hated his and his third wife's visits when they not only usurped my bed but insisted on kissing me awake with their beery breaths. When I grew up, at those popular dances I mentioned, we had a major contingent from the Lindy area, two large families really, whom we identified as representing the standard stereotypical drunks: one grew progressively happier and sillier, the Good Drunks, but the other grew broodingly surly and dangerous, the Bad Drunks. At a wedding dance in our new h.s. gymn my junior or senior year, the latter beat up, among others, their brother-in-law, dragging him out from under a car to break his jaw. We had circled the car earlier, the much-decorated groom's car secretly put up on cottonwood blocks so they wouldn't be able to drive off, probably why the brother-in-law rolled under there after escaping from the gymn attack. I saw the whole sequence. (I can't remember what other damage his doctor treated, but I found his shoe knocked off in the gymn.)
I briefly had a cafe job as a very broke graduate assistant, the only cafe in Wayne after the bars closed, so I can describe very accurately what slobs drunks can be. No one else managed to get egg yolk, which is so gluey artists use it as paint binder, on everything on the table, napkin dispenser, salt and pepper, sugar. The waitresses made me serve the worst of the lot, who behaved better for me, of course. No butt pinching, suggestive come-ons for me.
The court system has a large business in alcoholic parents, murderous drunk drivers who leave other people maimed or dead, stupid bar brawlers who "accidentally" kill the guys they're fighting with, wife and child abusers, the guys who lost their jobs and can't pay child support because they drank up their paychecks, on and on and, I do mean, on. Also, I worked for alcoholic judges. They could probably have a local AA chapter of nothing but judges, several of nothing but lawyers. My first judge, by the time I worked for him in his last nine months before retiring, was a popular, courtly--gosh, I didn't mean to pun--raconteur (Dad was one of those too, a really good storyteller), kind of a legal stereotype, Democratic, Irish [Roman] Catholic, tall, hawk-nosed, with wonderfully wavy white hair beauticians must have envied. He flirtingly flattered women and tended toward Victorian flourishes in speech and letters, which I learned to duplicate so well that he quit dictating the many little letters and cards that earned him PR points and just told me who and why to get me going. I will not catalog all his faults, but I knew the much-abused bailiff, who had to fetch that judge and take him home daily, had had to deal in earlier times with the judge's wife calling him and begging him to go fetch the very drunk judge out of some bar night after night.
The judge I loved, the one I worked 24 years for, had a sad period of alcoholism that was one of the most bizarre, embarrassing, humiliating episodes in my working life. He would leave home and disappear with his drinking cronies before he got to the Hall of Justice (a/k/a the old courthouse), and his wife would call us, the bailiff and me, to find out where he was. Or else she would call and say he was "sick today," code for hangover smashed. When we used our spies to find out what bar he was frequenting so we could try calling him there, he'd take his buddies and move elsewhere. Despite signs to the contrary, the omnipresent "hurry-up-and-wait" syndrome attorneys and especially judges create, the long times between court appearances, the court system is dependent upon relatively tight scheduling, given the overload of litigation. The bailiff kept her appointment book meticulously. When the judge went off on a binge, she would actually weep in frustrated despair from having to call up both sides in every scheduled case and having to fictionalize yet another delay. Because I helped her, I not only dealt with that but actually didn't want him there when he was in a drinking frenzy, when he slurred his speech, threw a temper tantrum, constantly lost his place even--the worst possible times--in solemn sentencings, or was soap-opera maudlin, to the extent of turning weepy. Actually more prominent in the Democratic R.C. politicolegal world here in Omaha than his predecessor and just as good a raconteur, he had many people interested in discreetly covering up his lapses--the Good Ol' Boy system power structures use--while I wanted to hide under my Stenograph and actually blushed in shame for him, though a few attorneys and one perpetual litigant (one of our Crazy Ladies, a very special difficult-no-impossible-to-deal-with group) did file complaints that we somehow slid past. Luckily, thanks finally to some quiet ultimatums and his courage in entering AA and sticking with it, because of his tolerance and humaneness, he became one of the most respected judges in the the history of the local judiciary and in the state. (He's also the one who taught me terseness, though you'd never believe it at the moment.)
That's one of the ways the system works that the Public is probably better off not knowing, given the final happy result definitively in its favor. I have to footnote that he was all for the Public's knowing, ordinarily, a staunch believer in freedom of the press who told me that my notes amounted to public records to which anyone should have the right (provided I was paid for the work, of course), the same applying to exhibits. Except--There are always exceptions, as with prominent attorneys' divorces when the evidence of their wealth as it comes from their corporate legal relationships and terms of divorce were sealed, which also happened with some mental health records of an attorney who had a nervous breakdown, that sort of reason. "Sealed" means just that: by court order I taped shut the evidence envelopes with written warnings and kept them separately; if they were filed, they required a court order to open--not likely.
So how did I arrive on this detour away from the farm? I had already been stonewalling from what I call surfeit paralysis. My chemically overstimulated brain--you know, with all those maddened little gnomes running around--has so many people, places, and things I could play word games with that I end up in Inertia Land, stuck, struck dumb, which is why my ex-students have never seen any of the writing they expected me to do. At least before this blogging site. Decisions, decisions. Should I mention how fascinated I am with the drawing shorthand of comic strips, the weird Egyptian-Picasso way Drabble puts both eyes on one side of Ralph's face or the staggering minimalist accomplishment of my favorite, Zits (since Calvin and Hobbes are consigned to memory books), about our wireless technology as it comically affects teenagers and parents. Perhaps I should mention Grandpa K.'s 103-year-old cousin who uses the original spelling of the name. I was playing my digital piano to mull it all over and calm down--Mom considered what and how I played a barometer of my moods, as arthritis later became our trio's barometer of weather--when the local newspaper enraged me.
Which leads to the horoscope and my third and last judge's DUI plea. Unlike John Updike, who insists every good writer should put in six hours a day on his craftsmanship, I follow my jazz inclinations and improvise right here right now at the keyboard just as I play the piano by my B+ sight-reading ability. I'm also aware that attention spans nowadays do not differ among 3-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 60-year-olds: a minute at tops. Besides which I have actually calmed down to merely simmering and have all the rest of my life left. (It is significant that one of my major Changes retiring from court reporting was removing my wristwatch. I'm dependent now on my cell phone, when I remember to take it with me, or the pickup's clock or my appliance clocks, no stress in them.) So my tilted-out pinball machine a/k/a brain has a break.
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