There Is No More Soup!!!

I decide to go home early.  The original flight on Friday afternoon was on Delta, the third leg of a triangular flight, and there is no possibility of doing that third leg on a different airline.  Instead, I buy a one-way ticket on AirTran (from Travelocity) on Wednesday morning for a Thursday afternoon flight.  I am willing to just pay for the new flight and not use the old one, in order to be home.

The AirTran Thursday flight is reasonably cheap, and as is often the case with low-rent airlines, there is no option to select a seat.  No problem -- they'll assign me a seat at check-in when I drop off my checked luggage.

No.  Must happen at the gate, then.

At the gate, the jetway agent makes a fairly aggressive announcement.  "If your boarding pass does not have a seat assignment printed on it, then... YOU DO NOT HAVE A SEAT ASSIGNMENT!!!  Go to customer service and get a seat assignment, or don't say I didn't warn you."  [This is not me being funny... this is as verbatim as I can get it.]

The desk agent also is on the PA. (Along with all the flight information from all the other gates, to Toledo, Kansas City, and a million other things.  I'm assuming that someone has done some research on acoustic disorientation in air terminals, but if not, it's a crucial area of study.)  "This is an oversold flight.  AirTran is offering a $200 travel voucher to anyone willing to take a later flight."  No volunteers.

I and two others are standing at the agent desk.  I ask about getting a seat assignment.  "This flight is oversold.  I just said that.  We're waiting for volunteers, and I can't give you a seat assignment until I have seats."  The young college-aged woman next to me starts to cry.  "I bought this ticket three months ago!  I HAVE to be in Boston today!!"  The agent says, "I have to wait for..." she checks her watch... "seven more minutes, and then I can give you a seat for any no-shows.

She gets on the PA.  "If you have not yet checked in to Flight 205 to Boston, you need to proceed to Gate B7 immediately.  If you have not checked in by ten minutes before the hour, your seats will be released to standby passengers."  At which point the agent over at the jetway also gets on the PA and calls across the seating area to the ticket agent, "No, we're full.  We're at 117.  There are no more seats."  They're having a personal conversation over the PA system, with 6,000 people in the terminal wondering if they need to pause their phone calls to hear what's being said.  And their computer system shows the gate agent different numbers of people having arrived than it's showing the jetway agent.  I really do hate air travel.

The ticket agent then turns to the three of us and goes through a series of reasons why this is all our fault.

• "You can't just buy a ticket the day of the flight and get a seat assignment anymore.  The flights are always oversold.  You have to buy at least 24 hours in advance."  But the young woman bought her ticket months ago, and even I bought mine more than 24 hours early -- 32 hours, to be exact.  
• "But did you select a seat assignment?"  No, there was no option to do so.  
• "You should have selected a seat.  Once you buy a seat, then you have the seat."  There was no option to do so.
• "I've worked for four airlines, and they all oversell their flights."  

This was the point at which I had to do something beyond correct her assumptions.  "That's a really dumb business model.  At least we should know if there's a risk that we might not get a seat.  If you want to buy a can of soup, and I'm out of soup, then I can't sell you a can of soup!  I'm out.  There's nothing left to sell.  Listen, I know this is not YOUR fault.  You must go through this all the time, right?"  At which moment the ticket agent herself was near tears.  "I've been with AirTran since September.  My doctor is telling me I have to quit, this stress is not good for me.  There's nobody else who does it this way."  She pulls herself together.  "We're three seats oversold.  Let me see if I can find some volunteers."

The pot has been sweetened, by the way, to a full round-trip voucher to anywhere on AirTran's network.  (Which, by this time, I'm seeing as akin to an offer of an extra month in a juvenile detention center.)   One volunteer steps forward, and the gate agent comes back to the three of us, points to me, and says, "I think you were here first."  I said, "Get this girl on the plane."

The young woman is still crying a little bit, but she says "thank you" and gets her new boarding pass.  She goes to stand at the head of the jetway.  The agent walks back to the jetway as well.  She's gone for five minutes, but finally returns with two other passengers who'd already gotten on the plane.  They'd given up their seats for some unknown incentive (probably a round-trip flight on a real, grown-up airline).  The gate agent came back and got new boarding passes for the two of us who remained, and we walked to join the young woman at the jetway.  She turned to greet us, and said to me, "Good things happen to nice people," and gave us both a high five.

So happy ending, all's well, etc.  But I can't get over the idea that a business as important to our economy as passenger air is allowed to sell 110% of its capacity without being extraordinarily clear every time that your ticket is nothing more than a ticket to a jetway lottery.  If a business is selling a CHANCE to get on the plane, then they need to be regulated by the State Gaming Commission.  But if they're selling a product, then they need to quit selling when they've run out.

My Detroit

I'm in Dearborn, preparing to do a talk to the national meeting of Campus Compact, the higher-ed organization that promotes community engagement.  To get here, I flew into the Detroit-Wayne County International Airport, but then was picked up by the conference organizer and whisked away to The Dearborn Inn, a tony resort founded by Henry Ford in the 1930s as a guest center for all of the magnates who came to seek his favor.  The buildings and grounds and associated private airport were designed by Albert Kahn, Ford's favorite architect; Kahn was responsible for a huge number of Ford's corporate and industrial buildings for twenty years.

It seems that every time I've been to "Detroit" in the past few years, I've actually been to Mitt Romney's version of Detroit — the surrounding executive suburbs, Dearborn and Bloomfield Hills.  Just as with the economy as a whole, wealth persists even in the absence of workers.  Detroit may be a hollowed shell of its former glory, but the lawns of the clubs of Dearborn and Bloomfield Hills are still groomed with cuticle scissors.

I first met Nora because of a paper she wrote on what she called "psychic homelands."  People, she said, often have a place in their minds that is at the core of their identity.  Sometimes it's a real place — a hometown, a childhood home, a place they visited once on vacation and fell in love with.  Often, though, it's an imaginary place — heaven, for instance, or the cabin in the woods that you dream of retiring to.

As a child, I only visited Detroit once, when I was ten.  My folks brought me to see a Tigers game and the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.  I returned for one night when I was nineteen, to see my first real concert, Queen playing Cobo Hall.  That's it.  I have no real first-hand experience of Detroit.  So why does it weigh so heavily on my imagination?

The industrial Midwest has undergone a diaspora.  Detroit has lost over 60% of its peak population; Youngstown and Saginaw and Gary more than 50%.  Michael Moore's first movie, and still his greatest, Roger and Me, is filled with the juxtaposition between the swells playing polo and attending the annual Great Gatsby event (the wealthy have no capacity for irony) and the former GM employees of Flint's working class carrying their Christmas tree from the home they're being evicted from, or told that they're not qualified to work a $4/hour job at Taco Bell.

There's a scene in that movie (at 1:12:22, if you're watching on Vimeo) where Moore shows an issue of Money Magazine that had rated the worst places to live in America.  Flint was placed number 300, the very bottom city in America.  But I remember seeing that list mainly because the city immediately adjacent, at 299, was my own hometown, Muskegon.

I remember the factories of Muskegon, blocks long and a block wide and four or six stories tall.  I remember them closing.  I remember the weeds growing up through cracks in the employee parking lots.  I remember the windows shot out.  I remember my father laid off after 22 years, along with 800 other men, just before Christmas.  I remember being corrected, when I mistakenly told someone that my father had been fired.  "Was he fired, or was he laid off?  There's a difference."

Yes, there's a difference.  You're fired when you screw up.  You're laid off when someone else screws up.  But those folks still get to have their Great Gatsby picnic at the country club.

Why are we talking about community engagement in a place so sequestered from its community?  What do we, in higher education, know about people who raise rabbits "for pets or meat," and who hope to go back to school to be a veterinary assistant and dog groomer, " 'cause there's a lots of animals that needs taken care of."

Detroit is a psychic homeland for me, a marker of my own conflict about my class identity.  It holds the same place in my imagination as Jerusalem:  a symbol of what was, and what could be if only we were better people.  A desire not only that the place recover its majesty, but that we enter an age in which work and workers are again respected.

Next year in Detroit.

Adequate, convenient care

It is clear that H and I are morphing into a new species given our backgrounds. Well, maybe it isn't so new come to think of it, as many people before us have left urban lives to choose rural communities. There are push factors to be sure, but each day in this house makes us more aware of the pull factors.

Of course, the picture isn't always rosy. There is poverty to be sure. There can be a sense of isolation that is the other side of the coin from blessed privacy and solitude. And there is the state of medical care, which is not news.

• Only about ten percent of physicians practice in rural America despite the fact that nearly one-fourth of the population lives in these areas.
• Rural residents tend to be poorer. On the average, per capita income is $7,417 lower than in urban areas, and rural Americans are more likely to live below the poverty level... Nearly 24% of rural children live in poverty
• There are 2,157 Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA’s) in rural and frontier areas of all states and US territories compared to 910 in urban areas. 
• Twenty percent of nonmetropolitan counties lack mental health services versus five percent of metropolitan counties. In 1999, 87 percent of the 1,669 Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas in the United States were in non-metropolitan counties and home to over 30 million people
• Medicare payments to rural hospitals and physicians are dramatically less than those to their urban counterparts for equivalent services. This correlates closely with the fact that more than 470 rural hospitals have closed in the past 25 years. --Statistics from National Rural Health Association

I spoke with an old friend yesterday who once lived in Vermont when he was 20 something and able to build his own house. Now, though he is reluctant to stay in Seattle, and not interested in spending his life in New York where he grew up a few blocks from where I grew up, he says that he wouldn't return to Vermont because he isn't up to the physical requirements and he and his partner have a host of chronic medical problems that would make healthcare an issue.  It certainly isn't the first time I have heard this story.

A year or so ago, I got a call from someone at the state Democratic organization, asking me to write an editorial about the Republican "lies" about the planned universal health care plan in the State. We got to talking and I mentioned a friend who had stayed in his job long after he began to hate it, because he is HIV positive, and he has health insurance which he would be hard pressed to get elsewhere if he left that job. He is effectively imprisoned at work. She was "disappointed" to know that he lives in New York, and we couldn't use him as an example, though there are no doubt many others in Vermont who could tell the same story.

Over the weekend, H and I went walking in the woods behind the house with our friends.  They left immediately to get home and shower. We did the same, stripping off clothes in the laundry room and showering off potential ticks. H found three on the floor under the clothes. I found one hours later embedded in the center of my back. H took it off with a tweezers and alcohol and an antibiotic cream, but three days later, it is a black spot in a place I can't reach. Looking at it last night, a friend advised that I go to the doc. My doc is 4 hours away in Boston. "Well then, the emergency room." That is a minimum 4 hour wait with people who are far sicker. There is the "urgent care facility downtown". Sounded like a great idea. Not sure they would take our health insurance, but....

It took the better part of a half hour to find them in the yellow pages on the web under "Convenient Care."  One might hope for "skilled" care, but in this situation, convenient would do as long as they had a sharp blade, some antibiotic cream and a prescription pad.  I called.

"The doctor is still in Kuwait."   Kuwait?  OK... But there is no other doctor? "He extended his time. He was supposed to be there for 3 months, but he is staying 6 months. He has been there since November. There was a 'nurse prac' until April, but she had to go back to North Carolina. So (let's-call-her) Debbie is here two days a week. If you get here tomorrow at 8:30, she will take the first twelve people who are here. She starts at 9 but I would suggest you get here at 8:30 if you want to be seen.  She is here two days but she works elsewhere the rest of the week." Ahem.... Convenient. No. Skilled? Well that remains to be seen.

A tick bite is annoying, not much more. Lyme disease is much more. But this is a small threat considering the nature of illness in this country. From chronic care for the explosion of "lifestyle" diseases of obesity and our sedentary lives, like diabetes and asthma, to acute injuries of blue collar people working with big machines that can amputate limbs in a heart beat, the system is increasingly overburdened and under-equipped. Back in the mists of the distant past, when I was writing for the New England Business Journal, I wrote a paean to the care of the top-tier hospitals--Fletcher Allen in Burlington and Dartmouth in Lebanon, NH--where most people go. They have built elaborate telemedicine programs to deliver care to rural underserved areas. They have all the radiological bells and whistles of urban hospitals, though care for diseases  like asthma is no longer provided by their circuit-riding docs in places like the third largest city in Vermont. In the article, I discussed the local smaller hospitals as well, but I am wondering about the reality, as the nature of medical care delivery is more than an abstraction, reported in newsprint that will be tossed out with the trash.

Rural medicine is broken, but so is urban care. I spent 14 hours in an emergency room with a burst appendix awaiting surgery while triage put me lower on the need scale than those with gun shot wounds or car crashes - and this in the ultimate teaching hospital in an urban place.

The reports in the media are endless; the debate in political circles is mind-numbing pablum or a reflection of the desire for the media-minute.

And then one day you are trying to get care. H had heart palpitations a year or so ago. I had whooping cough that went undiagnosed as I exposed people around me. And now this tiny little bug has made me look again at the care that is available.

Oh yes, and one more thing...the local hospital has disbanded its rehabilitation program saying there is adequate care in the nursing homes and other facilities which happen to be a 4 hour round trip drive away.

Adequate? For whom?

Who knows where the time goes?

 Time passes slowly up here in the mountains
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains
And we catch the wild fishes that swim in the stream
Time passes slow when you're lost in a dream...

Ain't no reason to go in the wagon to town
Ain't no reason to go to the fair
Ain't no reason to go up
Ain't no reason to go down
Ain't no reason to go anywhere.-- Judy Collins / Bob Dylan

When I began this note, it had been nearly a week since we changed the date on our blog. That may be the longest time we have gone without updating. It isn't that we have been inundated with work or crises--at least any more than is our usual, but we have been busy. The days have passed without time for this particular pleasure.

H has been here on the weekends, and he has been able to play pool on THE table in THE pool room. He has begun to set it up with his art and furniture from Medford. (That includes the cat's favorite webbed chairs. H found large quantities of matted fur under the seat.) But so far, H hasn't spent much time playing. I think he has actually spent as much time cleaning and arranging as moving the balls around, but it seems satisfying just to be there.

I have been learning about the garden. Someone once said that the way to approach a garden is to think of it as rooms, taking each one in turn to clean and prepare. If that is the case, we have a 14 room garden-house. Certainly some of the rooms are more complex than others. There is the spot on the lawn that has nothing more than three or four blueberry bushes; all it will need is some bird netting. There is the spot that has a sole Spirea, and the bed of ferns and lilies needs little, but the east side shade garden has a dozen or more varieties of plants and the garden beds will support another dozen types of veggies. Our friend Derrick has just finished rebuilding them with 3 inch wide hemlock sides and reorienting the center stone pavers to match the height of the new sides. The beds need composted manure which I ordered by the truckload, and some fish emulsion. I need stakes and markers for the plants which I am making out of old cutlery which I am engraving with a Dremel tool. And of course, the new beds will need new plants. Snap peas, Walla Walla onions and some of the spinach are already in the one to the southeast, but there are 4 other  beds to measure out, hammering in brads a foot apart on the sides and tying string to make a big planting grid. I have, of course, also pulled out the sour grass and creeping charlie and chickweed - well, most of it.  It could take most of the day, if I let it.

There is also the section along the lattice by the sheds, and "the rooms" to the north, south, east and west, and each one of those has sub-areas that need different care. The good news is that it rained at last, for what is probably the first time in two weeks. The aforementioned veggies and the herbs and lettuce will be dancing. Or they would be if they weren't going to be frozen by tonight's temperatures in the thirties. And tomorrow's. I am hoping the lilacs and crab apples make it through the night.

Otherwise, everywhere I look there is new growth. It isn't there one day, and the next the hostas are up or the crabapple or the forsythia has blossomed, or the daffodils have gone by. I look at this place once again, through the eyes of the people who lived here and planted all this - and I am gratful for their enormous care and skill.

We have a plethora of birds here at the feeder- purple finches and gold finches and tufted titmice, and black-capped chickadees, and Red breasted grosbeaks and, at last count, 8 or 9 blue jays in a flock, and woodpeckers and 1 lone starling. I am noticing that the very fat squirrels that like to feed at the "squirrel proof" feeders are gone by afternoon when the jays take over. There was a hummingbird at the feeder last weekend, and Herb heard an owl.

All in all, it has been busy. And as I said, I am seeing the landscape through others' eyes - a dog we nearly adopted (long story), the prior owners, the cats (who have gone out twice unsupervised and come home), and yes, my husband, who has taken the lawnmower out of winter storage, and has begun patrolling for windfall that can be used for kindling next Fall. And perhaps that is the most interesting piece of all - that we are seeing the landscape as a progression in time, as part of its seasonal cycle, as it changes day by day.

In the city, we see the world of the "T" or the subway or the bus to work as rituals of the commute; "third places" like the coffee bar we stop at each morning or the deli where we get our afternoon snacks; these are also  rituals, as are the newspaper headlines and the meetings at work. But here? Each day is another lesson in change and in seeing, really seeing, what is before me and how it is all connected. The bucket of wood ash from the stove has been standing too long outside by the garage door. Something I read recently said it was a good addition to the soil for peas, and so it was distributed yesterday on that newly planted garden bed. That wood began as trees on this land. Late last summer, the guys who tap our trees for maple syrup took down some of the dead trees and cut the wood into 16 inch lengths for the wood stove. In early Fall, we worked with our friends to split it into usable chunks for the fire. We stacked it in the wood shed, and then through the winter, we moved it, one wheelbarrow load at a time, into the garage. We then carried it into the house in canvas bags and stacked it, first beside the stove, and then in it. And now that ash is fertilizing our peas. There is an old saying about warming yourself three times by a wood fire...we warmed ourselves far more frequently.  It takes a lot of time, but little is wasted. We have  a compost bin that has taken our food scraps and sod clumps and Fall leaves and spent flowers and is still taking more. We recycle more than we throw away, and the old food containers are making plant cloches to protect them from tonight's chill and tomorrow's near freezing temps at night.. Am I sounding a bit too...well..."Hints from Heloise"?

What I am realizing here is that I can watch time passing as the plants sprout from the soil, mature, and go by nearly as I watch. I am realizing that each day and night and day cycle contain the seeds of the next one, and that if I watch carefully, I will understand that each action I take has an impact on something else - what I plant, and whether I cover it or water it, and where I set my foot. We walked with friends in the woods behind our house yesterday. He is a hunter and I asked him whether he could see the places the deer traveled. I asked him whether it was the fact that we stood in a clearing with many broken branches that was his key. "No," he said." It's their prints," and as he motioned to the leaf litter at our feet, I realized that I couldn't see what was right before my eyes.

My cousin wrote recently, that the guy who occasionally prunes her trees has been telling her that her dogwood should be removed since it is half dead. She says "his idea of the proper role of trees is much more parklike (human designed)" than hers and that he worries that the dogwood will attract damaging insects. She says, "good, more woodpeckers and nuthatches. The older I get the more I identify with that tree, so I can't begin to contemplate cutting it down."

Every time someone asks me if I am working now, meaning am I back in the classroom, I feel guilty. But I am working as hard as I ever have, at learning to see what is before me, whether deer prints in the leaf litter or the progression from a green spike to a Hosta, or the link between the squirrels and the jays. A friend once said that I was like a five year old with a rock or a salamander in my pocket, pulling it out and asking "what's this?" or exclaiming "Look what I found!" over the things that he takes for granted.

One of the late great Social Psychologists, Stanley Milgram, wrote that the city dweller is more acutely attuned to the environment. The walker needs to make a host of assessments before he or she crosses the street--the color of the traffic light, the nature of the traffic, the distance and speed of approaching cars, the desire to cross and time needed to complete their route to the destination. In contrast, he said, the rural dweller has few decisions to make. The implication was that the urbanite was somehow "fitter" and more prepared for survival. I knew when I heard it, that this was bunk, but as I live here, I learn over and over again how to see, how to hear, and how my actions are tied to the land - both driven by it and a contributor to its health or its demise. Truth be told, I am working as hard as I ever have, at understanding how our sense of time influences the way we think about what matters in our world, and how that impacts the decisions we make. Who knows where the time goes?

Across the morning sky
All the birds are leaving?
How can they know
It's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire
We'll still be dreaming.
I do not count the time.

Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad deserted shore 
Your fickle friends are leaving
But then you know, 
It's time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time

Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone
While my love is near me
And I know it will be slow
'Til it's time to go
Still come the storms of winter
And then the birds of Spring again
I do not count the time

Who knows how my love grows?
Who knows where the time goes?

  - Sandy Denny and Judy Collins