First Draft

It’s just some funky old photo to most of y’all.

Looking closer, you might guess, correctly, that it was taken on a Sunday. For the record, it was an Easter Sunday. Also for the record, I believe it may be the only (and last) photo ever taken of me carrying a purse.

But if you’re from Texas, you see more. Almost certainly, in at least one of the springtimes of your childhood, you too were situated, possibly against your will or better judgement, in a field ofLupinus texensis so your parents, aunts, uncles, and/or Meemaws could snap your picture.

Transcending boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, and photographic abilities, tens of thousands of bluebonnet pictures have been taken of tens of thousands of children. As well as not a few adults, dogs, new pickups, and other objects of affection. That’s just how we do down here.

But here’s the deal: more than the bluebonnets (which, by the way, were more likelyLupinus subcarnosus, the sand-loving cousins oftexensis), more than the Easter dresses, more than any actual reason that led to the picture being taken, it’s the incidentals that give it power.

That little goober in the red didn’t know this location but the kid she would be and that I used to be knew every inch of it by heart. It wasn’t my backyard or an actual playground but it might as well as been. “Going down to the bay” was how most of my wandering kid adventures started out. The best ones, anyway.

I look at this and I’m standing on the very spot where it was taken, I know the stray cats living under those exact salt cedars covered with wild mustang vines. Even over the pushy prevailing wind from the southeast, I can hear the noise from the mobs of courting Least Terns that have turned the little spit of an island in the background into their rookery. The wind, the salt in the air, grassburs and sand in my socks, the oyster shell road we’re standing next to, the sense memory of all of it comes in waves. Not imagined or blurred nostalgia, but involuntary and absolute experience. Time travel, or as close as I’ve gotten to it.

Everybody has at least one old Polaroid or some other momento like that, don’t they?

Tell us about yours.

The real surprise isn’t thatthis happened, it’s the fact that the plant actually got caught. That they did this in the first place speaks to the impotent (by design) oversight of our “reasonable and predictable regulatory structure” that guy with the purty hair brags about.

Damn those good-for-nothingunmanned drones.

My maternal great-grandparents and children. This is on my wall at home, next to one taken around the same time of my great-grandparents on the paternal side. In both pictures, of these two families that were very different from each other, there is one commonality: an older husband, younger wife, and two sets of kids, the older set from a first marriage. Here, the two older girls and the older son were from the first marriage. My great-grandfather above married my great-grandmother less than six months after his first wife died in childbirth.

Needless to say, if the shoe was on the other foot and my great-grandmother had been widowed with three kids, she would have been waiting a lot longer for a second husband, if anyone married her at all. Said hypothetical second marriage would probably only have happened if she’d been able to hold on to whatever property she had inherited upon her husband’s death. The likelihood of that inheritance happening, of course, depended on what state she lived in. Women’s property rights varied widely by state in the second half of the 19th century. “Reforms” that allowed women to inherit property from their husbands were not passed to advance the rights of women but to lessen the burdens to creditors and society posed by impoverished widows and their kids.

(NOTE: the baby in this picture grew up to be the very tired woman inthis picture.)

My mother is the dark-haired girl sitting between her father and her older sister. They’re on the steps of her grandparents’ house in Hext, Texas. Said grandparents were probably the source of presents, the dolls, the baseball bat, a stiff new pair of overalls for the oldest boy. My great-grandfather ran a general store and while hardly well-off, at least had enough to spare. His daughter, my grandmother, on the right, isn’t even 30 in this picture. You can’t see the sunglasses underneath my grandfather’s hat. He’d been gassed in World War I and barely survived, living the rest of his life nearly blind and plagued by a slowly deteriorating cardiopulmonary system. By later standards, he would have been declared fully disabled on discharge but full benefits for WWI veterans, even the non-wounded and able-bodied, were a very, very, long time in coming.

My grandparents’ existence at this point, at the beginning of The Depression, swung between the places and times my grandather was able to work, assuming there was paying work to find, and the eventuality that his health would fail, if the job didn’t end first, or the weather would turn too harsh. They traveled back and forth between the Gulf Coast, where the warm winters were easier, and the Hill Country where they could stay with family during the lean times. A lot of the time in between was spent camping or living out of a truck.

Want to just riff a bit on A’s excellentHow, Exactly Would We Know This? post from yesterday, as well as some of the comments, because I believe it’s a critical conversation, central to our very own little First Draft neighborhood and the larger community, our shared net-rooty identity, to the extent we have just one.

Here’s the deal. We are all, every one of us, the Idiots of America. This idea that we on the left, and the people we elect to represent us, are in the position to serve as some kind of missionaries to the beknighted knuckledraggers out there, that wecould do that, not even that weshould do it, well that’s a lot of crap.

Don’t get me wrong, I know what team I want to be on, and I like US and the things we tend to believe in, better than THEM and the things they tend to believe in. But as pointed out yesterday, it’s a struggle to know everything we need to just get by these days, not to mention weighing the relevancies and prioritizing our goals. It’s a fucking uphill climb to do that asindividuals, not to mention as communities.Sifting and winnowing ishard, y’all. And it’s not like we can stop the game clock, evolve as individuals, as a society, fix all the broken crap, and then start the game over and play better for the rest of the quarter. We have to do it all on the run, in real time, fixing and breaking and fixing as we go. It’s a struggle for all of us, we are all equally vulnerable to the overwhelm, we all make flawed choices with respect to what and how we filter and amplify, or who we choose to depend on to do it for us.

The obligatory digression:

Let’s talk about water, H2O, agua, something sort of important to, you know, carbon-based lifeforms. So, where does yours come from? Is it surface water or ground water? How does it get to you? Does it come from the watershed you live in, or from someone else’s? What are the major pollution threats? Point source or non-point source? Starting with your town/region/county and ending with the EPA, who and what regulates your water, protects it, decides or recommends how much can be used and in what ways? Are these decider/recommenders elected or appointed? If elected, when was the last election? Did you vote in it? If appointed, who appoints them? Are meetings and other processes that bear on your water made available to the public? Do you attend and participate? Are there any volunteer organizations involved in water issues around you? Are you a member? What are the desired future conditions for your water region and how were they developed? When were they last reviewed and updated?

Okay, I’ll stop. If you knew most of the answers without googling, good for you. If you didn’t, you’re in the biggest of big tents. Most Americans, no matter their political party, religion, or education, don’t know shit about their water supply, their watershed, or much of anything past their faucets and garden hoses. So, no shame if you are one of them but I will ask you one last question. Let’s take the top three issues you DO know about, you DO involve yourself with. Of those three, which are more important to your survival, your kids and grandkids’ futures, to all carbon-based life, than water?

See where I’m going with this? Regardinglots of really important stuff, we are all, every one of us, “low-information” voters, non-participatory citizens shirking our responsibilities.

So, back what A said. “AMERICA IS REALLY FUCKED.” All of it. All of us. With respect to framing, how about let’s start from right there instead of “THEY are WAY More Fucked than WE are and WE need to Help THEM Be More like US.”