SuperWeed

Dag… Tagged! (Thanks a lot, Julian).

Here are the rules of the game:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here goes:

1. My grandfather was a prizefighter before he became an eyeglass lens grinder. My grandmother was a keypunch operator in a factory until the factory shut down and she went to work, after a long scary layoff, as some kind of clerk at a hospital. Her mother had worked in a bakery; her father was an ice man. My mother worked at the five and dime before getting a good government job. My father the sailor went AWOL from the Navy, went to prison, and then disappeared. His mother had been a barmaid. I don’t know about his father and neither did he.

2. 30 years later, my sister found my father living under an assumed name in a trailor park in a small town in Florida, where he worked as a waiter in the local diner. He turned out to be a mild-mannered recovering alcoholic who had been saving up money to hire a private investigator to find us. Finding out that I am lesbian, he spoke like a PFLAG member, using all the right language to ask, very politely, “do you have a partner?” During his decades-long drunken oddyssey between prison and the trailer park, he often passed through Baltimore, driving down our street in hopes of catching sight of me or my sister but too shy to knock on the door, believing us better off without him.

3. My father went to prison for robbery, so I come by my scorn for private property honestly.

4. I don’t have any tattoos but, at least since 1992, my girlfriends always do. It’s not on purpose. I don’t know why.

5. My books are organized according to the Dewey Decimal System and a disproportionate number of my friends are librarians.

6. As a tenant organizer in Ann Arbor in the 1990s, I organized a rent strike in a dilapidated senior/disabled public housing high-rise in which most of the senior tenants were, due to covert steering of white seniors into a better building, African American. Incensed that these elderly black tenants trusted disreputable white me over her sanctified churchy self, the black director of the housing commission went door to door, telling all of the black seniors that I was a lesbian with whom they ought not associate. She did manage to scare off most of the women but a few of the men stuck it out for what turned out to be an 18 month strike that led to a new roof, new plumbing, and 20-odd other improvements. Over the course of the strike, the men loved to recollect the door-to-door incident except that they were too modest to say the word “lesbian.” So, they substituted the word “radical” instead. I’d be walking a picket line outside of city hall, guiding an elderly blind man dressed like the hero of a 1970s Blaxsploitation flick as he told the story yet again: “So she came to my door and told me that you were a radical. And I told her, ‘Why are you telling me her personal business? I don’t care if she is a radical. What she does in private is her own business. I just want the roof fixed!’” Then we would laugh and know that we were going to win.

7. One of the striking tenants, Mr. Morgan, did the banking for the strikers. After the strike was over, they all got to keep all of the money they’d withheld. (They elected to give the tenants union a portion of that money, which worked out to be the largest single donation the union had ever received in its 25+ year history.) One day, Mr. Morgan came to me to explain how he was doing the accounting. He talked and talked, explaining it again and again, but I just couldn’t follow him. Then I figured it out: He had never been beyond elementary school and even that was in the era of segregated schools. So, he had never learned division as those of us with book learning usually do it. Instead, he had devised his own method of achieving the same function as division by other means (basically a series of iterations of of multiplication and subtraction). It was brilliant. I tell this story to my students (many of whom are on their way to being the only people in their neighborhoods with college educations) to remind them never to confuse education with intelligence.

8. I’m mad about maths. And maps.

Now… I tag:

1. Herbivore
2. Post Punk Kitchen
3. Animal Writings
4. Invisible Voices
5. Anarchocyclist
6. Neva Vegan
7. Easy Vegan
8. Food Fight!

July 11th, 2007 | Category: Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL