© 2 May 2011 (Gustava)

 

Cows, Kenya and Donald Trump

 

     When world news, national news or even non-news penetrates Gustava's rural haven--where bovines still outnumber humans--people because they're puzzled, and cows for their own reasons (flies? gnats? itchy ears?), shake their heads.

     What can be more puzzling than the "birther" issue?  Do real birthers exist, or are they the product of journalistic license, an interesting story intended for entertainment only?  Is Donald Trump real?

      Imagine that it is 1961 and The Sixties haven’t happened yet.  You are an 18-year-old Kansas-born white girl attending the University of Hawaii.  You become pregnant with the child of a fellow student, an African, and  you marry him. 

      You drop out of college after the fall semester because of your pregnancy.  Your husband continues with his studies until June 1962, when he graduates.

     In mid-1961 you, 18 years old and heavily pregnant, leave the United States, your husband,  your dad and mom, and zip off to Kenya in order to give birth, alone, to your first child, on August 4, in an African hospital on African soil.  After all, isn't that what most pregnant American girls of any color would choose to do, then or now?

     Your physical location in the final moments of parturition is not pertinent to the citizenship of your child, because you yourself are a citizen of the United States, and you have lived within those States for far more than the requisite five years  (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/8/1401.html). Your son is an American at the moment of his birth, whether that occurs in Hawaii or Kenya or on the Island of Doctor Moreau. 

     So-called birthers should be brave enough and honest enough--with themselves and with us--to own up:  their issue has never been Obama's citizenship or place of birth.  Their issue is his legitimacy in their eyes.  He has to prove his credentials, present his papers to them, so to speak. These Trump-like papers-please people could probably have devised no strategy more certain to offend and insult America's minorities and their allies. 

     Now Obama has released his birth certificate, but that won't be enough. Donald Trump and Sean Hannity and their like are saying, Why did he take so long?  The rest of us say, What made you think he should? 

     They will never accept Barack Obama for what he is, as smart and savvy a politician as a Clinton or a Reagan or any other man who has held the office of president of the United States.  They will now fixate on whether his birth certificate is a fake, or whether his college record  would show him to have been too incompetent a student to have, sans affirmative action, been accepted at Harvard.

     Nothing will satisfy them because the issue, for birthers and their apologists,  will forever be the dark skin on this man who, despite it, dared to seek and win the highest office in our land.

 

(The article above is a slightly modified version of a 442 word letter-to-the-editor which won for Gustava a very nasty e-mail--it is tempting to copy and paste that e-mail here--from a certain Robert Baker, the present editor of both the Wyoming County Press Examiner in Tunkhannock, and the Susquehanna County Independent in Montrose.  Gustava cut the letter down to 299 words and resubmitted it to the papers in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.  One of these papers is and one is not owned by the same Lynett family which has recently purchased, along with nearly every other paper in northeastern Pennsylvania, both the Tunkhannock and Montrose papers; the former editor of the Montrose paper was replaced with Bob Baker by the Lynetts.  Gustava submitted her letter also to the editor of the Wyalusing Rocket, still an independent paper not owned by the Lynetts. The editors of the Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and Wyalusing papers all chose to publish Gustava's letter, but Bob Baker--as stated, the editor of both Montrose's Independent and Tunkhannock's Press Examiner--did not. These are the two papers which formerly published Gustava's weekly "Lymanville News" column, which was, following the "Cows, Kenya and Donald Trump" brouhaha, cancelled by editor Bob Baker.  Fortunately for Gustava, who has written the column for over 20 years--taking up the pen from her late aunt, who had produced the column for six decades--no income has been lost:  such writers of local news columns are not paid.)

 

© 21 Oct 09 (Gustava)


    Rats, if they live with you, are a touchy subject.  To share a rat story you must trust your listener...a lot.  For instance, L shared excerpts of our rat story with his co-workers.  The response of at least one was nostril-flaring disgust and the comment that, "Gee, you seem like a relatively clean sort of guy."  Till now.
     This seemed extreme.  After all, we live in the country.  Muskrats in the pond, deer in the front yard, possums in the cellar.  Wildlife is okay, evidently, but rats, though usually undomesticated, are another story.
    In an attempt, probably misguided, to entertain and amuse a pair of home-bound elderly acquaintances, one in her 80s, the other in her 90s, I too shared our story.  The first, the octogenarian, is a meticulous housekeeper.  Her smile when she'd heard my story was polite, but there was a considering look in her eye.  I could almost hear her thoughts.  "Is it wise, or even sanitary," she was saying to herself,"to allow into my home this woman who not only has rats in her house, but admits she has rats in her house?"
    The nonagenarian, though an equally meticulous housekeeper, was less dainty.  She had recently trapped a varmint of her own, one that had been marauding her cookie stores.
     She was shocked and very amused by our especially brave and impudent rats, which was gratifying.  In retrospect, I should probably not have related my rat tale while she was enjoying her meals-on-wheels dinner.  She didn't require CPR, but it was touch and go for a bit.
    
     Now the rat tale:

    Okay so the thing that happened was that on June 26, 2009, a tree fell on our roof, opening up a large hole in both the roof and the side of the house.  For three months the house was partially draped in a blue tarp.  Birds, bats, squirrels, chipmunks, and even non air and tree dwelling critters like mice and rats had every opportunity to take advantage of the situation, and many did.  It is possible that horses or small elephants also found their way under the tarp and through the hole.  It often sounded as if something at least pony sized was galloping overhead in the attic.  This must have been a magic pony, because sometimes it galloped up and down and back and forth between the walls.
    In deference to the emergency, the contractor was there within three months.  He removed the blue tarp, patched the hole in the roof, and reattached the piece of plywood that had been covering the opening in the house wall.  In actual fact, the tarp had been more secure than this plywood now was.  He then went off to attend to important contractor-type matters elsewhere.
    Some weeks later his crew returned briefly to build the giant porch which would replace the two smaller porches destroyed by the tree.  Porch done, contractor and crew departed again.  At that time, the hole was left  as it was, and is.
    A month has passed and the rats have come home to roost, and maybe the hens too, by the looks of the bird droppings in the attic.
    The weather turned cold, and on the night of October 16, it snowed.  What was a chilly rodent to do?  Why, move right into the grinning house, as we now refer to the home place, the old house with the huge new porch.
    The traffic in the walls and floors and ceilings was nonstop.  Nowhere in the house were you alone.  It was chomp chomp scrabble scrabble chomp scrabble chomp everywhere.  Obviously there was not a rat in the house.  There was an army of rats.
    It got ridiculous very quickly.  We set traps–albeit mousetraps–even though we were pretty sure the teeth chomping their way systematically through the innards of the house were far bigger than any mouse's mouth could contain.  However, one long ago rat got himself killed in one of my mousetraps, so I had faith that if they approached the traps just right, our present rats might conceivably get caught and die too.
    And we caught something.  We caught a mouse, and we viewed his little corpse with great relief.  He was not a rat!  We told ourselves we had mice after all, nothing bigger, but we were just kidding ourselves.  Some of the doo-doos in the vicinity of the trap were not mouse-sized, though we wanted to believe they'd come from kind of a big mouse, and that the rats, if there'd been rats, had gone away.
    The chomping went on.  On Sunday night, October 18, I made at least a dozen runs to the kitchen, trying to catch the prowler in the act.  He was behind the fridge, he was behind the stove, he was under the sink, he was under the cupboard, and he was IN THE SINK.  I heard what I thought were pan lids clanking and I ran out once again.
    Finally I went to bed.  At 4:30 I was dreaming about Mom, who was living in a huge old leaky house that seemed to be this house and the old Hitchcock house–which is two or three miles over the road–combined.  She and I were looking over some dusty old mementos on a kitchen shelf when I came across a 1940s chalk ware camel/wiseman, one piece, in pristine condition.  I really kind of wanted it.  I hinted  around to that effect, but Mom didn't seem inclined to give it to me.  I said that she should have Christmas for the family there at her house, and she could put this figure with her crêche when she set it up.  She said, "Oh, I don't  think I'd be able to find all the pieces to that old crêche."
    She'd just spoken those words, in my dream, when I sat up in bed, wide awake, and said out loud, "It wasn't the pans clanking, it was my canning jar rims...that little prick was after Dad's peach pits!"  Why it took five hours, a sound sleep, and a conversation with my dead mother to make the light dawn, I don't know, but I knew as sure as anything that that rotten rodent had been running across my canning jars and rims  in order to reach the dish containing the peach pits, and that was what I'd heard.  I ran down the stairs and into the pantry.  There sat the dish in which I'd been drying Dad's peach pits, and it was empty. 
    This was a tragedy.  I'd suggested to Dad, shortly before he died, that when you make a compost pile, you don't usually include in it the plastic bags in which you've carried the compost materials from the kitchen.  He muttered something about that just being the way he does it.
      Evidently it's actually an innovative and productive idea because a very nice little peach tree has grown up between the garage and the stone wall.  My sister discovered the tree this fall, and it was loaded with fruit.  Obviously the best and easiest way to grow a peach tree is to throw bags of pits and other garbage out beside a stone wall and ignore the mess for six years.
    I read recently in Mother Earth News that peaches, unlike apples, grow true to the parent seed.  They bear at a young age and are easy to start on your own.  The idea is to buy local peaches, choose the best of the lot, save and dry the pits, carefully crack them open, chill the kernel in the fridge–to simulate winter–and plant the little sprouts in the spring.  Well, how much more local can you get than just up the road.  Besides, these were, specifically, my dad's peach pits.
    I had brought down about a dozen peaches from Dad's tree and saved every pit, and every one of those pits was gone.  All I could think was:  couldn't you have left me just one, you little creep.  I called L at work just to liven up his night, but he wasn't at all appreciative.
    By this time it was after five so I got dressed and set to work on the kitchen.  I soon discovered that the rat's mouth wasn't quite big enough, or his little mitts weren't quite dexterous enough, because he'd dropped four pits.  I put them in a safe, reasonably rat-proof container. 
     When L got home that morning he moved the old dishwasher, which had been a friend's and which we had never, ever used anyway, out onto the brand new porch.  I was really hoping to find a rat's home under it, stashed with peach pits, but all there were were rat doo-doos, a measuring spoon, two plastic forks, a cat's toy, the lid to a Tupperware, and a paring knife I've been missing for about three years.
    After L'd gone to bed for the day, I began rat hunting.  Behind where the dishwasher had been, there was a hole that led down into the cellar.  I got a flashlight and, starting on the ledges of stone in the cellar wall beneath the hole, I searched for a rat's nest, or pits.  On the floor of the cellar, I found another pit.
    Back upstairs in the kitchen, I took everything out from under the sink and shone the flashlight through the pipe hole into the space beneath the floor of the cabinet.  Back in a corner that I was just able to reach, there was another pit. 
    I now had six.  As it turned out, my sister still had three peaches on the counter up at what was my parents' house and is now hers, so I've got nine, and as far as peach pits go, I'm happy.
    Cut to Monday night, October 19, L at work again, Hazel oblivious on the kitchen floor, and the rats having a heyday.  I set four mousetraps and as fast as I'd leave the kitchen they snap them, just for fun, evidently.  It got late and I was tired, so leaving Hazel on watch, stupid dog, I went to bed.
    At 1:30 I was up again, prowling the kitchen.  Using a flashlight, though the light was on in the bedroom, I set off for bed again.  Halfway up the stairs I caught an impression of shadow crossing from the head of the stairs to Grandmother's sewing machine in the hall.  I shown my light under the sewing machine, and there was the source of all our troubles, or one of them, looking for all the world like our young friend Kari's pet rats, staring back at me. 
     For moments we remained frozen, both of us.  I hoped if I looked at him hard enough he'd morph from a rat into a mouse, but he never did.  Including his tail, he was longer than my foot.  I had the distinct impression that if I didn't scare him, he'd let me pick him up and pet him, just as Kari's rats do.
    But when I moved he ran INTO MY BEDROOM.  Now I'd intended to go back to bed, but I was not going to go back to bed if there was a giant rat in the room with me, or any size rat.  Instead I dumped out a wastepaper  can and went into the room to catch him, intending to clap the can over top of him. 
    He was scrabbling around behind the dresser so I moved it a little.   He shot out so fast I had no time to employ the waste can.  I tried to stomp him as he ran past me, but my slipper slid over his body.  This rat did not just run down the stairs.  He flew.  I don't think he touched a single step.
    Down the stairs I went in hot pursuit, but I never saw him again.  Hazel, in the kitchen, was still oblivious.  By now it was after three so I thought I'd call L again in case work was boring him.  As usual, he was not appreciative.  He suggested that I (a) bring the banished cats back into the house and/or (b) get the poison out of the beige cabinet and set it out.
    I don't normally like the idea of poison because, (a) it can kill other things besides rats, (b) it does not kill immediately, and I don't want even a rat to suffer, and (c) if the rat, after suffering, dies in your wall or under your floor, you get to smell him for weeks as he rots.  But, this was an emergency. 
    I fetched the nasty stuff and read the label, the wording of which was totally dire and terrifying.  There was no way I was going to be able to deal with deadly poison at 3 a.m.  It would have to wait till later in the day. 
    I went out on the porch and called the cats.  No response.  I went into the garage and called the cats again, because Tamsen has a secret entry that she sometimes uses.  A stack of beer boxes began to quiver; there was a scrabbling and a shuffling.  I waited for either a rat or Tamsen to emerge, and it was Tamsen.   I took her in the house, explained her mission, left her staring, head cocked, at a noisy wall, and went back to bed.  In the morning there were no signs of carnage, and Tamsen was sound asleep on H the Younger's bed.
    Now it was Tuesday, October 20.  I left for work, eager to get back home, find Mom's old Warfarin bait traps, and get busy poisoning rats.  Enough is enough. 
    When I returned, L, who had purchased an arsenal on his way home from work, was already up.  We now owned a rat trap that looked like a bear trap, as well as four sticky traps.  In our search for the best spots to place this stuff, we discovered what all the chewing had already accomplished.  Our rats had chewed a passageway through the baseboard between kitchen and dining room, they'd gnawed the bottom of the bathroom door, and the flooring of one of the cupboards, and while hanging out behind the refrigerator, they'd chewed almost through the telephone cord.  The rat that did this, while doing it, would have been just about three feet from the nose of a sleeping Hazel.  I have no idea why the phone still worked.
    L had to cut and splice the phone cord.  I don't want to know what they've done between the walls.  I'm expecting the house to either fall down or burn up.
    I could only find one of Mom's two ancient Warfarin traps.  It had been through the flood of 2006 and was filthy so WEARING GLOVES, as advised, I scrubbed it and L, WEARING GLOVES, got out two of the bait cubes.  I loaded the trap and we positioned it and it hasn't been touched.  The bear trap hasn't been touched.  The sticky traps haven't been touched.  The walls are silent.
    All I can figure is that at least one of our prey learned that we are now armed and dangerous, and the word has spread.
    Or, the advent of lovely Indian Summer weather has lured them back outdoors.  When the temperature drops again, we will see what we will see.

Reflections from Gustava, on the morning after the 2008 election.

It is just starting to sink in. 

I called out to G as she set off down the road to meet the bus that she should be gracious.  Don't gloat I said.  She said yeah right, after what they've put me through at school, this is going to be fun. 

She was second in her class, academically, throughout seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grades, which made her automatically eligible to apply for admission to the National Junior Honor Society. 

However, she is not a member, and has never been; the handful of teachers sitting on Elk Lake's NJHS selection committee voted down her application, twice, after which she never applied again. 

The reason her membership was disallowed was this:  after the U.S. invasion of Iraq she and her sisters decided, in protest, not to stand for the pledge to the flag.

H the Younger was in eighth grade and H the Elder in tenth at the time, and both had been named members of the NJHS, in their turn, before the issue of the Iraq war and their protest to it came up.

To not stand for the pledge was a dramatic, traumatic decision which affected all three girls significantly.  Many teachers were outraged.  Fellow students were often abusive. 

H the Younger and H the Elder were already up in the high school at the time, so there were two of them to face the music together.  And, for a while, two or three of their classmates sat too, in solidarity, but one by one, under pressure from the faculty, the administration, their peers, and their parents, all but H the Younger and H the Elder were forced back to their feet.

G was twelve and in the sixth grade.  She waged her protest all alone in the elementary school.  She was sent to the hall.  She was sent to the office.  She was browbeaten and bullied, and still she stood (or sat) her ground.

It was in the fall of 2004, when she was in eighth grade, that G received the letter stating that she was eligible for membership in the National Junior Honor Society.  She completed the paperwork, obtained the necessary references, and submitted her application.  In due course she learned that Elk Lake's board of selections had voted to deny her application for membership. 

Being of a curious nature, I spoke with a few of her teachers.   According to Mrs. H, G  was "...an excellent student, helpful, with a good attitude";  Mr. E said that she was "...among the best students in the school, period"; and Mr. W said that she "...does well (and her) academics speak for themselves."  Even the school superintendent, Dr. B, said, "She is an exemplary student.  She works very hard."

On the other hand, Mr. D said that he knew it was because she wouldn't stand for the pledge that she had not been admitted to the NJHS; Mr. H said that although G was exercising her constitutional rights by refusing to stand, that was the reason she was rejected; Mr. E said that he did not approve of the NJHS, that "It has turned into a popularity contest for students among teachers."

I also spoke with Mr. C, who headed the selections board.  From him I learned that G had met all of the membership criteria--based on scholarship, leadership, service, character and citizenship--except citizenship.  "G is a superb student," he said.  "She fell short only in the area of citizenship.  She doesn't stand for the pledge of allegiance."

"So G was denied because she is a bad citizen," I said.  He replied, "Yes."  So much for sarcasm.

Now she is a senior.  The 2008 election is over, Barack Obama has won, and I can't blame the child for wanting to enjoy the moment. 

I watched her reach the end of the dirt road, turn the corner, and start up the hill to Brooks Road.  I looked down the valley at the scattered houses of my nearest neighbors.  I heard the school bus reach the top of the hill and begin its descent.

I pondered the concept of good grace in victory, briefly.  I let out an experimental yell.  It felt really good.  I yelled again; I think I whooped. 

With great difficulty I managed to lift my great-great-grandmother's dinner bell high enough off the porch to set it ringing:  that bell hasn't been rung in over forty years; there must be some significance in that.

The noise woke H the Elder; she has volunteered tirelessly for weeks for the Obama campaign, while simultaneously attending college classes and working almost full time.  She yelled out her window for me to be quiet, so of course I rang the bell again.  By then the bus had collected G and was on its way across the flat.

H the Younger emailed from her dorm at Mansfield, "Even before Obama won but it was obvious that he was going to, people were outside my window screaming 'Obama!!  Go Obama!!'  I think pretty much the majority of the students wanted him to win.  : )  It is really exciting!!  Yay!"

L is celebrating by shoveling out the granary.  Life goes on.  Good luck to us all, and...yay!