Hillbilly Aunt's Open Salon Blog

My new banner

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:04:45 -0400

Rocks!!! Thank you Ric Tresa for making my space so much cooler! I can't tell you how excited I am! I think it looks awesome and I love it.

You rock in every way :).

Arkansas OS Anniversary Meetup Report

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:04:32 -0400

So apparently the only two people in the greater Little Rock area obsessed enough with OS to show up at the anniversary party were me and Fabflamingo, my artist compadre from across the river in Argenta.

We met up at a place close to my heart -- The Oyster Bar. I got married there last year, I practically grew up in the place. It's a good old down-home dive that serves the best shrimp etoufee I've ever eaten. Fabflamingo has her own history with the place. She's best friends with the owner's sister.

We spent the next two and a half hours drinking beer and talking about our lives. She's waaaay more funny in person. In fact, I don't think I've laughed that much in a very long time. We also have entirely too much in common, including the tendency to be a little top-heavy. It's a little scary. . .

I ate etoufee (of course, it's the only thing I ever eat at OB. I'm obsessed) and had my limit of one beer (I am still cursing whatever little god gave me this stomach problem. I miss drinking. Really, I do. *sigh*) and Fab told me stories that if she doesn't write I"m going to come over there to Argenta and knock her upside her sweet southern head.

I had no idea so much time had gone by when we got ready to leave, which is the sign of a superior conversation in my opinion. I hope there's more OSers who show up next year, but if not that's okay too. I don't mind sharing the title of Representative Hillbilly OSer with Fabflamingo. It'll just give us an excuse to drink beer at the OB once a year.

Cheers!

My Review of Dave Cullen's Columbine

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:04:32 -0400

(photo from the USGS)

I was a Dave Cullen fan before I read Columbine. He once very generously sent me an extremely thorough and interesting note explaining the inner workings of publishing to me. It was more useful than anything anyone told me in five years of graduate school. I was biased when I picked up Columbine. I wanted to like it because I like Dave.

That combination doesn’t always translate into a successful read. This time, though, I can honestly say that Dave completely fulfilled my expectations. More than anything, I was amazed at the breadth and depth of his research. Dave’s goal here was to explain the myths of Columbine, how they came to be, and then lay out the reality as honestly as possible.

He manages to do this a clear-eyed way that doesn’t allow anyone, especially local law enforcement, to completely escape whatever culpability they may have had in the situation. At the same time, he presents almost everyone with an exquisite sense of sensitivity. Dave is interested in the humanity of his subjects, not just in their status as victim, parent, principal, or killer. He gives everyone, except maybe those folks who deliberately engaged in various cover-ups related to the case, the benefit of the doubt.

His portraits of Harris and Klebold have the same quality. Dave isn’t afraid to draw conclusions where they are clearly warranted: Harris was a psychopath; Klebold was suicidal and easily manipulated. At the same time, he refrains from drawing conclusions where they aren’t – since no one has ever spoken to the Harris family in depth and on record, there’s no way to explain how his family life may or may not have had anything to do with the tragedy.

I am an everywoman reader in this sense: The closest I came to a school shooting is to have been a media witness – meaning I watched on TV with everyone else – to the Jonesboro shootings. A couple of friends are faculty members at Virginia Tech. Other than that, I am simply a member of what Dave calls Eric Harris’s “audience” – the masses that consume and repeat media characterizations. I appreciate Dave’s book because it speaks directly to someone who wants to understand the complexity of Columbine, or anyone who wants a case study in how “myths” stick to our popular history.

One myth that I enjoyed having corrected was the notion that Harris and Klebold picked April 20 for some deep symbolic reason. I am one of those people who have lived under the (apparently mistaken) belief that there is something special about the month of April, that is holds some special significance for militia types.

Dave presents aftermath of the tragedy as equally important as the moment itself. He carefully outlines the reaction of various factions and personalities within the community to law suits, the ongoing investigation, the “Christian martyr” story, the rebuilding of the library. The structure of the book saves the final judgment, the answer to the “why” question for last. It was the most difficult part of the book for me.

Dave doesn’t ever say it exactly the way I’m going to summarize it, but I think I’ve managed to understand his overall gist. Eric Harris was a psychopath who manipulated, as psychopaths will do, to fulfill a fantasy only a psychopath could really conjure up. There’s no way to guard entirely against this sort of killer. The only thing we can really learn is that we have much more to learn.

Obviously, my reading of Columbine is colored by recent events. Just days ago, there was a murder-suicide on a community college campus in Michigan. Two teenagers in Colorado were recently arrested for planning a Columbine-style attack against Dove Creek High School. A decade after Columbine, I think that point stands in sharp relief.

Spring Fatalism

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:04:27 -0400

(Photo from the public domain).

It is Sunday morning and we are deep into our respective rituals: The Norwegian listens to 103.7 The Buzz, to worship at the altar of local talk-show host Bill Vickery. I read OS and work on whatever little projects I’ve got going on in my mind.

Occasionally, he talks to me through the wall, which drives me a little crazy. I can never hear him exactly and I always have to get up and go into his office to ask him to repeat himself. This morning, though, I heard him loud and clear: “If you have anything outside, you better go get it. You have 24 minutes.”

I took off my headset and stumbled into the hallway. “Tornado?” It is spring in Arkansas.

Around here, it’s not unusual to expect a devastating storm to blow up out of nowhere, even when there’s nothing going on outside but an overcast sky and a strange stillness. Last week, Mena, Arkansas was practically demolished by an E3 tornado half a mile wide. Over 100 homes were destroyed. Last year, a tornado stayed on the ground for 150 miles through parts of the Ozarks and East Arkansas, destroying towns in several counties.

My family’s close friend Britt had to help his own family recover from the destruction of two houses, a barn, and pretty much their entire farm operation. The family survived by standing in a hallway, the only part of their house to survive.

“Not this time, just high winds and large hail,” the Norwegian said.

“Oh, good.” I said. We don’t even bother trying to get our vehicles out of the way. Even if we had a garage, at least one of our cars would be out in the elements. We just accept the fact that it’s possible something we own could be randomly demolished by wind, or hail, or tornado.

Last year, just after we bought our little house and moved into the neighborhood, an E1 touched down literally a block away. It uprooted trees in dozens of yards. It also destroyed at least two houses, which have just now been rebuilt. It was the first time, in my 35 tornado seasons, to actually hear one. It didn’t sound exactly like a freight train, the old cliché that everyone repeats. It sounded more like a little god taking a deep, violent breath.

Since I have lived with the threat of tornados all my life, my first reaction is to go crawl in the bathtub or a closet. It is extremely rare to find a house with a basement in Arkansas, so a lot of people in the country have storm shelters. In town, though, there’s really no protection except the interior rooms of a house.

I always heed the warnings, especially if the sirens go off. It’s annoying, because the news is interrupted at least once or twice a week during certain times of the year. Our own homes are really rarely threatened (maybe once or twice a year), but someplace in the state is at risk pretty much continually. It would be easy to ignore them, even when they are close by.

I think I’m more cautious than most people, by even bothering to head into the hallway when things look dicey. Last year was the second time a tornado hit a block from my own house. I spent a long afternoon in 1997 sitting in the hallway of my downtown apartment building, watching a neighbor’s portable television while a tornado destroy McArthur Park, within sight of us. A woman who lived down the hall from me had just moved to Arkansas from Hawaii. She came into the hall to find the entire building packed into the downstairs hallway with their kids and their pets (dogs and cats and at least one bird) and she laughed.

“Are you all that scared, seriously?” She said.

Everyone looked at her like she was insane. “There’s a tornado about to touch down a block away from here,” someone said. “You better be scared.”

The Hawaii woman looked incredulous. “I think Tornados are a myth. It can’t really be that bad.”

“Turn on the TV,” someone said. “And watch the radar.”

“I have been watching it. I think you people are freaking out about this like you freak out about snow,” she said.

I thought that was rich coming from someone fresh from Hawaii, but whatever. She proceeded to head out to her car. She needed groceries, she said.

Five minutes later, the tornado flattened the grocery store she mentioned. That experience was just a little too close for comfort for me. I took the warnings seriously after that.

In 2005, when politicians were squawking about how the people of New Orleans were somehow responsible for their own fate because they didn’t heed warnings to evacuate, I sympathized with the locals. When you live in a place where hurricanes are that common, you have to adopt a little bit of magical thinking in order to survive it. Instead of thinking, “we could be blown away at any moment,” which would just be constantly depressing and frightening, it’s much easier to think, “It won’t happen here, it so rarely does.”

It always seems to happen to someone else. It happened to Britt’s family, but I’ve never been hurt or even truly threatened by a tornado. There’s no logic to what it will hit, no way to control it. Who can really face that possibility and do anything but simply wait and see whether the wind hits, or not?

Robert Frost was right

Tue, 7 Apr 2009 23:04:03 -0400

I’ve been sort of absent from OS the past couple of weeks. It’s a matter of things piling up that interrupted my momentum. The Norwegian and I went to Memphis during the last weekend in March to celebrate our first anniversary. Then I got sick for several days, which didn’t help. In the middle of all of that, the Norwegian uttered a sentence that spun me into a frenzy of domesticity, something that hardly ever happens.

He said, “I hate the back yard. I want to pay someone to fix it up.”

Every spare moment since then I have spent designing, planning, spraying the backyard with lines of spray paint. . I can’t stop playing with Sketch Up . I have the materials all figured out: decking, Ozark fieldstone flower beds, gray Arkansas flagstone stepping stone walkways. I’m going to plant Paw Paw trees, Jack-in-the-pulpit for a wet shady spot, some native Arkansas sedges and wildflowers for butterflies.

This is my first chance to actually transform something I own into something I like. It’s also the first chance I’ve had to fulfill a dream I’ve had for years: to grow a vegetable garden. I’ve grown exactly one garden in my life, during college. I tore up the front yard of my rental house, despite warnings from the owners not to, and grew melons, tomatoes, and peppers. I had such a bumper crop that year that I decided I must be good at it.

And then I moved off, again, to another rental house where I couldn’t get away with turning the front lawn into my personal farm. I spent years after gardening nowhere but in my head. I made lists of native plants I like (because what would grow best here but what is native here, yes?), decided I wanted to grow my veggies in boxes, I quietly imagined what I’d do if I ever got my own piece of land. I wasted months of my life daydreaming about gardens, if you add it all up.

I always wanted a useful garden, an edible garden. I want to be able to walk into my back yard during the right months and pick a meal. I want to grow strange varieties of tomatoes, pick my own muscadines for jelly, and crush up my own fresh basil. In my head, it’s already Southern Living style masterpiece.

Now that I actually have the chance to make it all happen, the first thing I want to do is put up some privacy fence. We can’t afford to fence the entire back yard, but I’m really sick of looking at my neighbors’ yards. I’m also paranoid. The lady behind us keeps a nice yard, but I’m pretty sure she spies on me regularly (and therefore must hate me. I do sometimes walk through my kitchen with nothing on but a smile).

The house to our left is a disaster. There’s always some kind of drama going on over there, and so the yard is completely neglected. They mowed it once last summer. The guy to our right keeps everything mowed and orderly, but he creeps me out a little. He’s one of those guys that look like he’d call the cops on you if your flag accidently touched the ground. I’m always wondering what he’s thinking when he finds me out there smoking a cigarette in my pajama bottoms and bathrobe.

I sit there and wonder if I ought to wave or to flip the guy off, just to be snarky about it. It is my little piece of land, after all. I will smoke on it if I want to, by god. And if I do it wearing a bathrobe, well that’s my right as an American citizen.

Still, I get the sense that I’m the weird neighbor that they talk about. I imagine their voices sometimes: “Why don’t they do something about that basset hound howling every time there’s a tornado siren test? Why don’t they move that green truck with the North Dakota license plates before a tree falls on it during tornado season? What the hell does that girl do for a living? She keeps the weirdest hours. Why does she stay up to three in the morning all the time?”

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the country, but something just doesn’t seem right to me about being able to actually see my neighbors hanging out in their back yards. It is indeed a fact that when I was eleven years old, I regularly stripped down to my underwear and ran around outside in the pouring rain. We lived in a huge house on a hill, at least a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor. No one was going to be annoyed by a half-naked kid doing rain dances in the front yard out there because no one was there to see it.

Here, we live in little tract houses built in the 1960’s. Our place is 1200 square feet, with a four foot chain link fence around the backyard. Almost no one has a landscaped back yard and hardly anyone has a privacy fence. Plenty of people still hang out in their back yards, though. Creepy guy to the right of us is always out there working on some project. The neighbor to the left has a teenage kid that regularly comes out to the yard, picks up a rake while he surveys the damage before him, and sighs before he gives up and goes back inside.

I want a wall of wood or trees between me and the neighbors. Only then will I feel comfortable actually buying those Paw Paw trees and putting them in the ground. I am convinced, like Frost said, that those bits of good fence will instantly improve the neighborhood dynamic.