My Mom's Yellow Bikini

A couple of years back I had a dream where I saw my mother in a motorboat tied to the pier of a mountain lake. She was a young woman at the time and wearing a yellow bikini. She was helping a man--a stranger and not my dad--get the boat ready. Then a phone began ringing in the shack at the land end of the pier. The phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing until my mom asked the man if he was going to answer it. "Could be important," she said. He replied, "If it's important, they'll send a letter."

As far as I know, my mother had never been in a motorboat on such a lake. Who was that man? Plus I'd never seen her in a bikini, and so I had a lot of thoughts about what the dream was telling me. I decided that the big lesson was the man's nonchalant response to the phone call and compared it to the way we react to our situation in the world. There's a general mood of unceasing anxiety, of constant urgency, that the world is in increasing chaos.

Of course, a reality check keeps things in perspective. During the George Floyd riots, when the country seemed ready to fall apart, I stumbled upon a newspaper article from July 1967 that chronicled the Detroit Riots, which were so destructive that Federal troops on the way to Vietnam were diverted to the city and battle tanks rumbled along the streets in a show of force to quell the trouble.  

Such reminders do help but there's much about our modern-day living that stokes the anxiety. Culling through my email makes me feel like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Dealing with spam texts is like playing Whack-a-Mole at turbo speed. I compare that to what a writer's life was like before computers and the Internet. I imagine Raymond Chandler or Beryl Markham behind the typewriter, tapping the keys, thoughts not disrupted by ring tones or distracted by click-bait. On the credenza sits a basket piled with incoming mail, which can be sifted through at a leisurely pace. During the day, you might take five phone calls. The pace of life was slower, more deliberate, more contemplative. And yet, even with our laptops, we'd be lucky to be as productive or as good as those writers.

Naturally, it's easy to look back upon our predecessors and marvel at the certainty of their times because we know how everything turned out for them. World War Two is regarded with nostalgia. The good old days when total war raged across oceans and continents. On the other hand, modern technology does offer advantages. I was a lousy typist, and still am, and fortunately word-processing software helps me backspace over my mistakes. Give me Word and inkjet printers over Wite-Out and carbon copies. And I sympathize with those poor schmucks who had to reconcile spreadsheets by hand. 

Back to my point of this cloud of anxiety hanging over our society. It's gotten so bad that the demand for mental health counseling includes meeting the needs of the mental health counselors themselves. The pandemic squeezed everybody. Having so much home delivery available is wonderfully convenient but adds to a sense of isolation and that isolation erodes our sense of presence and self-worth. Social media is a cauldron of manic depression. To remain safe and sane we have to relearn what's worked throughout history: stay active, sleep, eat right, avoid self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, socialize, get outside, and cultivate a positive mental attitude.

And don't think about your mom in a yellow bikini.

Lincoln Weeps

I'm at a loss for words. As is the case with our blogmaster, Rick Blechta, I've not  posted any political comments on Type M. It's not what this blog is about. Nor do I comment on political situations when I give presentations.

Nevertheless, the past two weeks have broken my heart. As an African American historian I'm aware of the inequality endured by blacks in America. The brutality of our justice system cannot be ignored. The senseless murder of George Floyd was the culmination of unchecked bigotry in our country's police departments.

I hope that as a result of the protests our law enforcement system will undergo sweeping reforms. I hope that when a black man commits a crime he is treated exactly that same way as a white person. I hope that both white police officers and racially prejudiced black officers (yes, they exist) will find themselves thinking twice before arresting African Americans for no reason at all and for brutalizing them when they do. I hope they are scared to death that they will go to prison themselves when abuse the civil rights of other human beings.

I hope that people casually joining protests will be aware of how quickly innocent participants can find themselves surrounded by persons who are destructive. I'm furious with the hoodlums who are hijacking these gatherings and using them as a cover for looting. I despise the police officers who automatically equate peaceable protests with criminal mobs.

I'm worried for the police officers who are doing their best to control crowds by relatively sensible methods and are then suddenly confronted with dangerous weapons. Because that is happening too.  Of course they escalate their responses.

The murder of George Floyd, the protests, the suffering of his family, and other African Americans must not be in vain.

Sweeping reform of our justice system must be the result.










I

So much to digest

There has been so much to digest this week. The news cycle nearly forgot COVID-19, as the death toll topped 100,000 Americans, and swung to nationwide protests in the wake of the horrific killing of George Floyd.

On Monday evening, I, along with the rest of the nation, watched the president use military force to clear a path through protesters so he could have his picture taken in front of a church. He was holding a Bible as the armed military members stood at the ready.

As a privileged white man, I don’t pretend to understand the emotions my Black friends and colleagues feel this week. I am not teaching right now, so I’m not working to help students process images seen on TV or the words they hear coming from home. My work at present is primarily as a father: in conversations about systemic racism, about the anger spilling into the streets in nonviolent and violent protests borne in the deep and dark waters of slavery, about the ways we, as a white family in this particular nation, have benefitted from a financial system built on oppression and designed to allow us, above others, to own property, and about how owning property alone creates opportunities for things like college loans. Admittedly, this effort on the homefront is not much, certainly not enough.

If you are looking for a compelling read about race and its relationship to the American police forces, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me.

*

When scenes like the one I saw on CNN Monday evening elevate my blood pressure and these next five months loom large, I, like probably many who turn to this blog do, turn to the blank screen –– and write.

I have a manuscript with my agent, so I’m playing the waiting game. Meanwhile, I’m writing a short story with the idea of using it as the frame for the sequel to the novel my agent has. I got the idea by reading Ed McBain’s story “Sadie When She Died” and then the novel by the same title. The story is wonderful. McBain liked it so much he turned it into a novel. I did this with the first Peyton Cote novel, Bitter Crossing.

Using the short story form allows one to take a plot and try it out. To see where it falls flat, see where, if you had another 90,000 words, you could expand it with additional storylines, characters, suspects, and complications.

Writing a story is good practice. I’m keeping a careful eye on my word count. There are no extraneous scenes. No fluff. Hemingway said fiction writing was architecture, not interior design. Nowhere in fiction writing is that more true.

It hasn’t been a good week, but I am hopeful that change is coming.

Be well, be safe.

What do you say at a time like this?

by Rick Blechta

Last Thursday, I already began thinking about what I would write for this week’s post. As the weekend progressed I realized it could not be “business as usual” for me at Type M. We try to keep our pages as apolitical as possible because that’s not why we’re here, but I think recent developments have to override that mandate. I cannot remain silent.

For the record, I was born in the United States, moved to Canada for university, and basically never returned home. My wife and I have now lived in Canada for more than two thirds of our lives, and are also Canadian citizens. For all intents and purposes, we are Canadians. But for several reasons, we also remained Americans.

It is simply overwhelming for me to observe the convulsions sweeping the US. I’m not going to lie: I now fear what I’m watching is the death of that country. Will the United States of America disappear? No. But it is going to change. It has to change. Things can no longer remain the same. It might be for the better, but it also might be for the worse.

America has been hit by a pandemic which is taking a huge toll in illness, misery, and death. With that came an economic downturn only seen once before in its history. The effects of both only seem to be getting worse as the weeks pass.

However, every other country on the planet is currently facing similar challenges, some handling it better than others.

Then a week ago Monday, the US’s dirty history of racial injustice boiled over again in the most horrible way imaginable: a black man slowly murdered by a white policeman live and in living colour right on our TV screens and devices. The actor Will Smith perhaps said it best: “Racism is not getting worse. It’s getting filmed.”

What can be done? I wish there was a clear answer to that. The leadership of the country is pulling in two different directions making things worse, not better — with no end in sight. For anyone living out of the country, regardless whether a US citizen or not, comes the knowledge that demonstrating against racial inequality in the US will be blown off by the administration in the White House. I believe they just don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.

My plea to all of you reading this is to speak out and do whatever you can. The only obvious way forward for me is to make it impossible for racial/religious/whatever injustice to continue being tolerated, to stamp it out wherever it shows it’s ugly face. The time has come to not let this scab over again, ready to be ripped off once another racially-motivated murder takes place — regardless of where it happens.

This problem is not present only in the United States. Vigilance and will must be applied in every society where injustice is found — and in that quest, all of us have a part to play.

Your choice is to be part of the problem or part of the solution. Your actions can make a difference, even if it’s only in a small way. Please consider doing whatever you can.

Thomas used a funny graphic yesterday from Star Trek. I’ve always felt the most profound takeaway from that show was the Vulcan saying, “Live well and prosper.”

That is my fervent wish for everyone on this planet.

I’d like to thank everyone for letting me ventilate, and I’m sorry if I upset you. You don’t visit Type M for Murder to hear political diatribes. But I’m upset, angry, and confused, and I know I’m not the only one. I needed to share my thoughts with my friends, which is something I consider everyone who writes for and reads these pages. I won’t presume to take up your time in this manner again.