PeaceBang

Baton Rouge, Lousiana, Saturday, October 8

Last night I dreamed that I was standing, arms outflung, in front of the ocean. It was dark and waters were rising foul and warm all around me. I was with my community and I reached on each side of me for hands and said, “Take my hand so that none of us need die alone.”
The waters rose very fast and I drowned, and as I died, I thought, “That was all I could do. And I am not dying alone.”

I awoke gasping for breath.

I meet people every day here who have lost loved ones to drowning. Joshua, one of the two chief church volunteer leaders at Allen Chapel, is grieving his cousins and their family — three children, I believe, who drowned in New Orleans.

Last night I bought some items at the Body Shop. I asked the salesgirl if she knew where a certain restaurant is but she smilingly replied that she did not, as she’s from out of town. “Oh,” I asked, “Where you from?” Without losing her smile, and with a touch of pride she replied,
“I am from New Orleans.”

The New Orleanians I have met are all resolutely high-chinned. They do not want pity; they always say that they are counting their blessings and they are so glad to be here. They smile, so I smile back with dry eyes and wish them a very good day and take care.

Let me ask the pastors out there to think about something:

If the population of your town or city suddenly doubled with evacuees from a monumental natural disaster, what do you think your church’s mission would be in that time? What is your church for?

Would you welcome people in to sleep on your pews and to camp out in your kitchen and Sunday School rooms?
Would you serve as a distribution center for donations pouring in from all over the country?
Would you clothe the naked and feed the hungry? How about displaced prisoners? Would you shelter them, too? Do they deserve a roof over their heads, or do they not?

How many committees, if any, would you need to form to discuss these decisions? How long would those meetings be before decisions could be made?

Does your church have a covenant, is it explicit, and how would it hold together if unwashed, traumatized, homeless and hopeless thousands were in need of your hospitality?

Katrina Relief Donations Ideas, October 6th

Listen up, ya’ll.
I just came back from Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church in Baton Rouge.
They are hosting 67 individuals there right now, including lots of children, in a NON Red Cross, impromptu shelter. People are geting placed from there into some kind of housing, or being re-located. They need
pots
pans
housewares: silverware, dish towels, toasters, blenders, etc.
CLEANING SUPPLIES (for those returning to New Orleans, especially)
towels, linens
for setting up new house.

There are new evacuees coming in because FEMA is going to stop paying for hotel and motel rooms, so they’re looking at another big raft of folks coming in soon.
Not only this, but they are connected as a distribution center to several other AME churches that have, all told about 350 evacuees staying in their buildings.

I noticed a nice, shiny church across the street from Allen Chapel that was empty and shiny. For shame.

Mrs. Belinda Washington is running things at Allen Chapel and coordinating with the other churches, and she is just saving lives. She is saving lives every day.
I personally think she should run FEMA, and possibly this country.

For her residents, you may assemble personal hygiene kits containing: toothpaste and brush, soap, deoderant, Tampax, razors and shaving creme, and a washrag. They would be so grateful. Some children’s packages would also be thoughtful and appreciated.
Please do not send clothes, as they have all they need at this time.

Send to:

Allen Chapel
AME Church
6175 Scenic Highway
Baton Rouge, LA 70807

Thank you.

Baton Rouge, October 6, 2005

When I got up on Tuesday morning I thought it was terrifically convenient that Expedia.com had sent me an e-mail informing me that my flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Baton Rouge was going to be a later one, and I did not need to do anything but show up at the appointed time. I hate flying anyway, so I was fine having an extra hour in the airport to decompress before climbing back on a big mechanical bird.

Except that when I got to Dallas and lined up for my flight, I was called aside by a flight attendant who mangled my name over the PA system. The equivalent would be something like, “Miss Pays-Bing?” And it wasn’t a Southern accent thing, just an “I can’t read” thing. I warily approached the desk with my luggage.

“Due to weight restrictions, Miss Pays-Bing, we’re going to have to deny your boarding pass.”

I’m not lying.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve been working out three times a week and really trying to cut down on portion sizes but I don’t think I can do anything else right now.”

She didn’t get it, or didn’t think it was funny. As it turns out, Expedia.com had generated the little demonic message all on its own and completely not in concert with American Airlines, which had expected me on the earlier flight. And because I had “changed my flight,” I was being penalized by being bumped off this later one. They were loaded up with supplies for Katrina relief and the plane was just too heavy.

I pitched a quiet, polite fit, explaining the I had NOT changed my flight, and producing the e-mail from Expedia [spit].com. They eventually allowed me to board, and I got on and settled in. After the flight had achieved that silent expectation of departure, with all passengers in their seats and all the carry-on luggage squished in the overhead bins, the same flight attendant came on board. She called out, in a piercing version of Fat Person’s Nightmare, “Miss PAYSBING?? I’m sorry, we’ve exceeded our weight restriction. Please come with me.”

As I toiled down the aisle with my bag, I called out, “Is anyone in advertising on this flight? Don’t you think this would make a great Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers commercial?” People chuckled in sympathetic solidarity.

But here’s the thing: there is an obesity epidemic in America and that’s not funny, even to me. I’m glad the media is starting to report on the race and class dimensions of the epidemic, because it’s an unmistakable factor, Hello.
I did finally get to Baton Rouge (with a $200 American Airline voucher tucked into my wallet for future travel) and what I am finding in the relief work is that much of what’s needed is super plus size clothing for folks. Yesterday we got a call from a shelter in need of size 48 pants for a man. The church just did a successful drive for plus-size bras for evacuee women. Also yesterday, three palletts of boxes containing 1200 or so cotton leggings from Junonia, a manufacturer of plus-size sports clothes for women, arrived for the church. They were distributed to shelters last night. I am going to call Junonia today to pimp for some shirts.

I’ve been out to several restaurants so far and they serve Hush Puppies at every meal (I like to call them Heart Attack Puppies). It is Fried Food Land here. A Whole Foods went in recently and a Louisianan joked that they’ll like the sushi fine as long as they can bread and fry it.

So Baton Rouge is just lovely, mostly. Aside from the fact that everywhere you go there is a sense of dread and loss, and the words on everybody’s lips are “emergency services” and “Ninth Ward” and “don’t know next” and “oh my God,” you would never know a hurricane had come through. People are charming. The guys at Enterprise upgraded my car to a swell P.T. Cruiser, and the girl at McDonald’s called me “lady ma’am.” Everyone asks where you’re from and warmly thanks you for coming. The other volunteers at the church are funny and hard-working and welcomed me right in. I am staying with a really smart, lovely evolutionary biologist in her nice apartment.

But last night, when I went into the outrageous third world country known as the River Center and passed through the armed military security detail and first saw the thousands and thousands of cots, I was finally confronted with the physical evidence of what’s really happening here, and what I had been hearing about all day. This crisis is going to change the history of America. The scope of the thing is unbelievable. Once you start hearing the stories, you realize what it means to havre a whole vibrant city displaced, in the Diaspora.

What did I do at this Red Cross shelter? I sat on cots and played with four little children who climbed all over me the moment I went over to intervene in a fight and ask how they were. The little girl, with extravagant dreds up in curlers (!) was three and asked me right away if I had any candy. The boys were five and ten years old and like any children will do, fought over the gum I gave them. Another boy slept soundly throughout the 2 hours we hung out together and I scratched Harry (they call him “Sweet Presley”) and Pete’s backs (I know the “WILL YOU SCRATCH MY BACK?” thing — we do it all the time in my family, complete with the yanking the shirt up routine). The sleeping baby inched his way over throughout my hours there until his head was in my lap. His eyes were crusted shut, and he was too warm.

There was one tiny guy– must have been a little more than two — in a kind of leopard print suit who came over to give me a wide, sunshiny grin and show me his tummy. We played “WHOSE belly button is that?” until he got tired of giggling and wandered off to find more entertainment among the rows and rows and rows of cots. He looked like a Vegas entertainer in that suit. I wanted to eat him up.
A little Latino boy rolled by on a beensy mini-Big Wheel. Couldn’t have been cuter.

I looked up at one point to see a child smack a really young, white female Red Cross volunteer square across the face, hard. Her expression of compassion and care changed not one iota as she told him he musn’t hit. My little sassy card-playing lady ma’am over on the cot needed to hear the same thing. A lot. This isn’t to say that the children don’t seem fine. They do. They miraculously do. I’m sure they’re NOT fine — for one thing, they all need a good bath and tooth brushing — but they seem amazingly resilient. They’ve been there for weeks, some of them.

A few rows over, a man slept soundly with headphones on, his prosthetic limb leaned against a pile of belongings. He lost his “nice” leg in the flood, I learned, and this one is just a long tube of metal.

And in the row next to that, Cowboy, a gorgeous black musician from New Orleans, strummed the guitar and sang the blues.

Taps

One more thing about the funeral:

I did fine in the choking up department until I walked out of the chapel behind the cadet who was holding Marvin’s ashes. I felt under control but found that my breath came in little sobs, which irritated me as the videographer was right in front of me and I thought, “Give me a break, you exploitative bastard, and point that camera somewhere else.” I know my face looked like the mask of tragedy. No matter how hard I tried, it steadfastly maintained a grimace of pain. It was like facial muscle rebellion: “Hey lady, we’ve managed the professional ‘healing-smile’ thing for an hour now. Something’s gotta give.”

Maybe I could have the professional compassionate smile permanently etched in by a plastic surgeon, or tattooed on. My Aunt Pearl and Aunt Mae, bless their glamorous little septugenarian hearts, both have eyeliner tattooed on. Can you stand it? And I am here to say that they’re both piss elegant. They slay me. I took a photo of Auntie Mae at the reception and she looks dewier and prettier than most girls look on their Sweet 16th. I know she’ll never have another Marvin but I do hope some lovely older man (or younger! hey!) keeps her good company in these coming years.

You should know that it was absolutely pouring rain when we got to the chapel and that as I was giving the final prayer, the sun came out and shone through the windows. People gasped. I had somehow expected it. Not because of some miraculous sign from God but because we were in the Hudson Valley and I thought it just might happen that weather patterns would change rapidly. That timing, though, was exquisite.

When I walked slowly out of the chapel and into the sunlight and saw all of those soldiers at attention in the cemetery, I almost crumbled. But I thought to myself, “You do the God part, they do the country part. Get up on your hind legs and don’t give those boys any reason to think of religious leaders as big wusses.”
I did the commital without shedding a tear and then stepped back as the military took over. When the 21 gun salute went off, I jumped a bit but stayed collected. I watched the flag folding ceremony with tremendous respect: that stuff is absolutely fascinating. But when they played “Taps,” I sobbed into my hankie. There was no way I could not. I was only happy that I was discreet in my sobbing, but I still heard my sister whisper to one of my cousins, “[PeaceBang’s] losing it.” I thought, “Good God, no matter how much dignity you try to have in life, there’s always a big sister around to bust you.”

And I was glad.

What I Took To Baton Rouge

It doesn’t help that the cat is being excessively adorable, extending her animatronic Toonces paw around the side of the computer and batting at me while I type, all the while purring up a storm. She has a miniscule red scab near the bald spot on her ear that has me worried since I’m leaving for Baton Rouge in the morning and can’t take her to the vet. What if it gets HUGE and takes over her whole precious striped head?

I haven’t taken her to the vet for two years. There, I admit it. It’s not that I’m a bad Cat Mom, it’s that she has such hysterical fits when she has to get in her carrier that I dread trying to stuff her in there for the 7 minute ride. Since she’s an entirely indoor feline I kid myself that she can skip her annual check-up.

I know. I know. I promise to reform my ways and get her in that blasted carrier ASAP no matter how fat and bushy her tail gets, and how menacing her growl. She also yowls as though someone is torturing her. Did I mention that?

I just don’t feel like going away right now, but that’s neither here nor there. I just hope I can be of some help, even if it’s just getting my colleague to relax for an hour over lunch. My sermon is almost done and I feel like the world’s all-time moron for preaching on the subject of RESILIENCE to a Baton Rouge congregation post- Katrina. What was I thinking? I should have preached on The Book of Job or something. Truth to tell, I just didn’t have time to write a new sermon so I tailored this one — which I wrote for my own congregation’s Homecoming Sunday — for them. I just hope they don’t knock me down and kick me in the head at coffee hour. I have this vision of me rolling around trying to shield my internal organs as the boots come flying, yelling, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I thought it would be inspirational! I thought it would be healing!”

My hostess tells me that the grocery stores are just about empty; she got the last loaf of bread in the store the other day. So I am bringing some items from Trader Joe’s: pumpkin bread mix, cornbread mix, brownie mix (that wonderful fat free stuff you make with yogurt) and some other unperishables. Everyone can get their hands on some canola oil, water and an EGG, right? I also just think that everyone should have pumpkin bread in the autumn, even if it is 90 degrees where you are.

Everyone says to bring a surgical mask for the mold. And surgical gloves. So I’m packing those but don’t really anticipate needing them.

I’ll blog from Louisiana if I can find the time and the computer. I bought this fancy laptop last summer and wouldn’t ya know, I’m too nervous to travel with it! I’m too scared someone will steal it and that without it, my brain will just shrivel up and stop, like Harriet the Spy’s did when her parents took her notebook away.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t read Harriet the Spy you’re missing one of the great literary masterworks of all time. It is a bald heinous crime that they cast Rosie O’Donnell as Ole Golly in the movie, instead of the obvious and only choice, Lily Tomlin.

But I digress. Better get back to packing.

Sorry, I Can’t Get Over It Yet

Days later, I’m still inexplicably, unreasonably happy every time I look at that angry, cranky, stormy-eyed baby picture of myself.

It just validates everything I suspected about what it was like to be a baby.

I give that kid the power salute, man. I feel you, baby.

No Experience Required

I don’t know why you’d need experience as a judge to serve on the Supreme COURT or anything:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/politics/politicsspecial1/03cnd-scotus.html?ex=1129003200&en=6648ec9839edaf1a&ei=5009&partner=MSN_NYTHOME

I guess it was okay for William Rehnquist, so it’s gonna have to be okay for Harriet Miers.

I wish I’d known about this. I would have had my close personal friends nominate me for Chief Buffalo-Wing-Eater-Margarita-Drinker-Hot-Mediterranean-Men-Companioner. Because even though I’ve never held that job in a professional capacity, I feel that I could be really, really good at it.

And it would be good for America.

PeaceBang Approaching Forty

jowls
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I just tried an experiment. I took a photo of myself just sitting there, making no effor to have a facial expression. I wondered what I really look like in repose.

The answer is, I look like a tired, slightly jowly, approaching-middle-age woman.

The Mac lipgloss helps some, but there it is.

I look like a woman who has slightly less time to suffer fools than she used to, and who has seen a thing or two.
Not bad. Accurate. Evidence of many good meals under the chin(s). Laugh lines around the eyes, and rumination lines around the mouth.

How interesting. I can certainly see why people seek the scalpel at this age, but what a pity to miss all the roadwork life does on your face.

Stepford Destiny’s Child

Ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of my friend Michael, this heinous little ditty from Destiny’s Child:

Baby, I see you workin’ hard
Wanna let you know that I’m proud
Wanna let you know I admire what you do
Don’t know if I need to reassure you
My life would be purposeless without you
If I want it (you got it)
If I ask you (you provide it)
You inspire me to be better (ooh)
You challenge me for the better (ooh, ooh)
Sit back and let me pour out my love letter
[Beyonce]Let me help you take off your shoes
Untie your shoe strings [he can’t even take off his own shoes??]
take off your cufflinks
What you wanna eat Boo, let me feed you
Let me run your bath water
Whatever you desire,
I’ll aspire
Sing you a song,
turn my game on
I’ll brush your hair, help you put your do-rag on [most unintentionally funny line in the whole thing]
Wanna foot rub, want a manicure Baby,
I’m yours I wanna cater to you [chorus]
Let me cater to you
Cause baby, this is your day
Do anything for my man
Baby, you blow me away
I got your slippers, your dinner, your dessert
And so much more, anything you want
I wanna cater to you
Inspire me from the heart
Can’t nothing tear us apart
You’re all I want in a man
I put my life in your hands
I got your slippers, your dinner, your dessert
And so much more, anything you want I wanna cater to you

[Kelly]Baby, I’m happy you’re home
Let my hold you in my arms
I just wanna take the stress away from you
Makin’ sure your that I’m doing my part
Boy, is there something you need me to do
If you want (I got it)
Just say the word I (I’ma try it) [Michael says: “Basically…she is saying that she will take it up the butt”]
And whatever I’m not fulfillin’
No other woman is willing
I’m gonna fulfill you, my body and spirit I promise ya,
I keep myself up
Remain the same chick you fell in love with
I’ll keep it tight, [awww!!c’mon!! TMI!!] keep my figure right
I’ll keep my hair fixed, rockin’ the hottest outfits
When you come home late, tap me on my shoulder
I’ll roll over Baby [I just threw up a little in my mouth]
I heard you, I’m here to serve you If it’s love you need, to give it is my joy
All I wanna do
Is cater to you, boy [chorus]

Wow. What an anthem to true partnership. Isn’t this just what you want on your teen daughter’s I-pod??

daddys and sons

daddys and sons
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

The men in my family are toughies. My dad and his brothers were. Their father and his brothers were. And my cousins are tough with their kinder.

But looking over these images from Marvin’s funeral, I can’t help but notice: wotta bunch of total mush-hearts.

I can hardly stand it.