Mother, mother

There's too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There's far too many of you dying

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

  Marvin Gaye "What's Going On?"

I hate labels.  As you read this blog, don't you dare label me as a "this" hater or a "that" lover.  Just. Don't.  I am Rene.  That's all you need to know.  That says it all.  One word.  Rene.

I spent my childhood in the 50s.  So, if stuff was going on, which I'm sure it was, I didn't know anything about it.  I had my own stuff going on at home and at school and at church. I was learning how to tie my shoes and how to navigate the cracks in the sidewalk when I was roller skating and with Randy, the kid next door who threw worms in my face and fostered a life-long fear of the gross things.

I hit my stride as a pre-teen and teen in the 60s.  Nobody used the term "preteen" back then. You were a kid until you reached the age of accountability (around 12 in evangelistic churches).  After that, no free passes.  Right was right; wrong was wrong.  And you KNEW it.

A river runs down the center of my hometown and divides it into the East side and the West side.  I lived on the East side.  In my high school, almost everyone's parents had "blue collar" jobs.  There were no rich kids and poor kids.  We were just kids.  Then my senior year happened.

I walked into the cafeteria one day and headed for "our" table.  The first person "reserved" it for the rest of us.  We usually sat on the same side in about the same place.  I saw him clear on the other side of the cafeteria.  I walked over, plunked down my tray,

 "What are you doing clear over here?"
"You can't sit here," he mumbled without looking up.
"What do you mean I can't sit here.  What's going on?"
"Just leave, okay.  Just leave."

He was my friend; I was his friend.  He was black; I was white. All hell broke loose after that.  I went on day by day determined to remain friends and we did.  We had no ax to grind, but somebody did and grind it they did.  He was no longer "colored," he became black.  As in Black Power Movement. As in "Say it loud/ I'm Black and I'm Proud." ("Say It Loud" James Brown)

                                                      I am no better and neither are you

We are the same, whatever we do

You love me, you hate me, you know me and then

You can't figure out the bag I'm in

I am everyday people, yeah yeah

Sly and the Family Stone "Everyday People"

I graduated from college in the early 70s and began working on my career as a teacher in a predominantly WASP community.  Race was an issue because diversity was nearly non-existent.  And, frankly, I was glad to get away from all the turmoil of my college years.

If you hear the song I sing

You will understand (listen!)

You hold the key to love and fear

All in your trembling hand

Just one key unlocks them both

It's there at your command

Come on people now

Smile on your brother

Everybody get together

Try to love one another

Right now

The Youngbloods "Get Together"

Fast forward to the present.   So, here's what I think:  we do not have a race problem in our country right now. The problem goes much deeper than genetic predisposition.  We have a WORTH  problem.  People no longer acknowledge their worth because if they did, the hate and the killing and the fear would decrease.  The solution hinges on The Golden Rule.  Yeah, yeah.  I know what you're thinking.  She's gonna start preaching and I am done with this blog.  But wait!  Hear me out, please?  Are you aware that every major world religion has its own version of the rule?  Look it up.  It's true. I do not have to explain the correlation to you.  A high school student  that I was tutoring asked me one day why I said that I cared about him.  I simply answered because I wanted him to care about me.
That is all.

Dream a little dream with me...

I am one of those people who dreams in technicolor.  And, based on the content of my dreams, I am more than a little emotionally unsettled, I think.  I dream in vignettes which are most often totally disconnected.  Snapshots of a scrambled egg mind.  This was last night's version.
**The following are in no particular order and are not grammatically correct.
I dreamed of...

My childhood friend, Cathy, who morphed into a movie star carrying a Prada purse and wearing large designer sunglasses and had a jet to catch but could not board it until she went to the local immigration office which I envisioned in my mind as being a rather stark room lit with a fluorescent light and suddenly her sister was by her side to endure the entire episode and give her moral support since they were at the immigration office until 2 in the morning with my father who took them there and then they came back and I was asleep and they woke me up and we got up and ate chocolate and then I went back to bed and when I awoke they were gone and I was very depressed.

And then my mother and grandmother were very worried about me since I was depressed and were very happy when I decided to walk down a long skinny sidewalk to get the mail from a mailbox that was on a pole only a foot high and while I was going down the walk, I decided to pull weeds that my dad had missed  and some of them required  using both hands and one of them had a large green slimy ball attached to the end of it and I kept trying to throw it but I couldn't so I finally held it like a baseball and threw it and it landed a few inches away from me  and I pulled up ground ivy that had a root that ran all the way up a hill I ascended that I had not descended.

And then I decided to get a shower and went to the bag I had packed and finally found the clothes I needed but then changed my mind and had to go back and get another top the challenge being not to disturb the neatly packed clothes and I was being very quiet because I did not want to wake my host who happened to be the lady which previously lived in my house but I chose to shower in the guest bathroom only after I had taken a tour of a beautiful home in which every floor and wall was snow white except someone who I suspected was me had turned over a bottle of cleaner the color of egg yolks and it spilled on the white floor but in the hallway there was a white mop and a bucket of water which led me to believe that this was a normal occurrence and so I began to mop it up and realized the more I mopped the more it spread and stopped because I wasn't going to mop the whole place. And then my host awoke and told me the house we were in wasn't in New York at all but in Oxford and I said that all the pictures she posted on Facebook were from New York and she said she went to see her son there and that was why but she lived in Oxford and would I please be her friend because she got treatments every Friday and was very lonely over the weekend and I thought it over without giving her an answer and my mother and grandmother confirmed the fact that she said treatments while we were eating and the coffee that I drank was the best coffee that I had ever tasted. And I thought if she died I wouldn't mind buying that house.

And then it was Election Day and I was standing in line to vote in a Rumpke port-o-let and my uncle called from the steps of a mobile home to ask if the polls were open and I realized that I was one of the first in line to vote and when it came my turn I realized that I wasn't wearing my glasses and thought that this was going to be a joke but then sight came to me and I was able to see the ballot which was 73 pages long and I got all my pages mixed up and was trying to sort them and another lady came in to vote which I thought was rather rude but went with it and she said she had just moved to Fairfield.

And then my uncle called to say that he and my aunt were staying in for dinner because they had taken down their decorations and they wanted to sort them which when my mother heard that she laughed and said it really meant that they didn't want to eat turkey and dressing again and she turned around to go and I saw the bright yellow roses on the back of her dusty rose chenille robe that had yellow ovals which contained pink flamingos standing on one leg.

And I asked my dad if he would go with me to my apartment which I had not been living in for several months because I feared I had been evicted for not paying my rent and what set off the whole thing was that I thought about my mailbox overflowing with mail and remember I hadn't been there and the apartment was in a not so nice part of town and he said he would go but he would drive separately because he was going to meet his uncle and I asked which one and he squinted and looked like he was trying to remember and finally said he thought his name was George or something.

And that is all...

And furthermore...

Last post on Meniere's, I promise.  Having Meniere's separates you not only physically but also emotionally from the hearing population.  I first began noticing changes in my hearing at bedtime when I listened to the radio as I fell asleep.  When I lay on my right side, I could hear it; when I lay on my left side, it became considerably softer.  Then in my classroom which, at the time, was located in the bowels of Lakota High School, I kept telling my kids to quiet down.  Finally, one of my bolder students approached me and informed me that no one was making any noise.  Oh.  In older classrooms, the concept of quiet blowers/vents in the room was not in vogue yet.  So every time the thing kicked on, my hearing kicked off.  I arranged the student desks so that I had an aisle right down the middle so that I could get "amongst them" so I could hear.

It was time to get my hearing tested.  When I got the results of the tests, I cried.  Besides being a teacher, I am a musician.  I play piano and sing like a heavenly angel.  I really got into a shouting match with God.  "Why?  Why me?  I am using the talents you gave me to serve you.  I teach.  I love my kids.  I'm a nerd-I love English!  And my music?? I'm singing in Your house!!!"  I didn't get it at all. 

I received my first pair of hearing aids.  Hated them.  Couldn't wait to jerk them out of my ears at the end of the day.  On the way home from school, I put them in the car ashtray.  When I got home, first I removed my shoes, then my aids.  They distorted my hearing.  What I had previously been able to do involuntarily I had to do voluntarily.  I had to decide what to listen to and what not to listen to.  I had to constantly adjust the volume.  I put them in.  I took them out.  It was exhausting.  And, despite what Miracle Ear claims, you hear everything at the same level.  Just the normal movement of my students drove me crazy.  Papers shuffling, feet moving, pencils writing, people breathing.  If someone coughed, I nearly jumped out of my skin.  Those were analog aids.  Now, the ones I wear are digital.  We have come a long way, but I still read lips even with thousands of dollars of technology in my ears.

Back to the music thing.  I became very bitter.  I decided if I couldn't sound the way I used to, then I'd just give it up.  I did.  No piano.  No singing.  No radio.  Nothing.  I quit cold turkey.  By the time I could afford a really great sound system in my car, I no longer could hear the nuances in the music.  Poor me.

The upside of all this is that I became a secret weapon on cafeteria duty.  Since I could read lips, I could tell when one kid was trying to hustle another for money.  I could tell when a fight was about to break out.  I learned enough profanity to last me a lifetime.  When I student taught, my co-operating teacher could not hear.  So, when kids asked if they could sharpen their pencils, she would give them permission to use the restroom.  It was funny then, but not when I started doing the same thing.

Another time, a friend and I were riding in a car listening to an oldies station.  The Rascals came on singing "Groovin""  I looked at her and asked who Leslie was.  "You know-"you and me and Leslie groovin""  She cracked up.  The line was "you and me endlessly groovin'"

Before I conclude this riveting series on Meniere's, I would like to leave you with some "dos" and "don'ts."

When someone tells you he or she is hearing impaired, don't say, "Huh?"  After the ten thousandth time, it ceases to be funny.

When someone is wearing hearing aids, don't shout at them.  You will cause their eyeballs to liquefy.

When someone wearing aids, asks you to repeat something, don't roll your eyes, sigh, and talk to them as if they are a toddler.

When you notice someone is wearing hearing aids, don't try to avoid looking at them.  Makes us feel like we have a large booger on the end of our noses too horrible to look at.

Do be kind to them.

Do be patient with them.

Do enunciate clearly and for heaven's sake don't cover your mouth when you speak.

Now, I think my hearing aids are beautiful.  More valuable than gold or jewels.  Because of them, I sing, I hear babies laugh and coo, I hear my precious Pepper snore when she sleeps at my feet, I hear my resident Canadian geese honking, and I hear the wind blow.  Because of them, I hear life.

O Sleep, where art thou?