{mean old world}

Can we agree that the media puts a higher premium on stories that get ratings? 

Yes? Okay. Great. 

Can we also agree that shocking, upsetting, and tragic stories often score higher ratings than cheerful stories about neighborhoods coming together to care for the elderly or board up dangerous abandoned buildings? 

Excellent, we're still on the same page.

Finally, can we agree that a majority of shows on television (in all its various modern incarnations) rely on violence, murder, cheating, and other generally bad behavior to drive plotlines?

Yes? Awesome. That's settled. Now let's talk about why this is a concrete (not theoretical) problem in our current society. 

Baby, it's a mean, mean world

Yesterday I learned about the social psychology principle termed mean world syndrome by George Gerbner.  It explains what we are currently seeing in the United States, in terms of peoples' incorrect belief that things are more violent and dangerous in our country than they were a year or ten years ago. This term was used to encapsulate Gerbner's research demonstrating a direct correlation between how fearful people feel about the world around them and the amount of television watched. What people see on television, even though much of it is fictional, has an enormous impact on worldview. 

This is a problem because by the time children have reached maturity, they have seen hundreds of thousands of violent acts on television. In spite of the fact that crime rates have declined steadily and dramatically in the United States over the last decade, the images promoted by the media are consistently the most violent. Furthermore, I have read different statistics that state that anywhere from a third to 75% of people committing criminal acts on television go unpunished. This skewed anti-reality is informing reality for many people. 

I looked up the numbers to see if the U.S. was really experiencing more violence, as is pretty commonly accepted anecdotally. (I don't even watch tv, and I often feel that things are falling apart after listening to NPR on my commute to work).  Turns out the numbers clearly show the opposite is true. If you don't believe me, check them out. You can find the FBI Crime data from 1960 here.  

Truth and Fiction

So how can we hold the kind of complexity necessary to successfully navigate reality, in our media scrambled brains? How can we embrace the truth, which is that life is awfully complex and two things that appear to be opposite can sometimes both be true? How can we separate our emotional reactions from the ones grounded in reality? How can we teach our brains to discriminate between the fiction we feed it and the reality required to sustain us? 

Quite simple, we think! We reason! We use the big, beautiful, massively powerful brains we have been given and start actively questioning reality. We ask ourselves why we hold the beliefs we hold. We challenge ourselves to be better and more aware. 

Disclaimer: I do not love television. I think it's dangerous and depressing. This has been my position for many years.

Shout out to Snopes to making so many of us better, more inquisitive, analytical people!

{nothing lasts forever}

This weekend, as a preparation for seeing Star Trek Beyond, we decided to watch the last few Star Trek films. We began with the 2009 Star Trek. Inside on a sunny day, a setting inherently fertile for depression, we hit play. 

I grew up watching Star Trek each week. That quavery space theme song reminds me of the smell of dinner on Sunday evenings. It reminds me of the feeling of the weekend being over and the school week about to start. The feeling of losing something and getting something far less appealing in its place. Gloom and disappointment. I know, it was a great show. Absolutely. Just an unfortunate time-slot. So, all this to say, I was primed for overcast feelings. I just didn't realize how intense they would be. 

Spoiler here, for anyone who has not seen the film – but if you haven't it clearly isn't  important to you, as it's been years since it came out. There's a parallel universe / time travel situation which allows old Spock to meet his younger self. I can't tell you if it was just seeing Leonard Nimoy so old, or if it was something about the juxtaposition of the old and young that turned a dial in my brain, but something clicked, loudly. I became clearly aware that I was going to die. That the world would go on after I was long gone, in much the same manner as it aways had. It was not a theoretical knowing, it was different. I felt the world without me in it. And it was a profoundly strange feeling. 

There are three other experiences in my life that have ever caused me to feel similarly lonely feelings.

First, there is this scene from 1954's Gojira is one of the most crushingly sad things I have ever seen. There is something about being abandoned underwater or in outer space that is suffocatingly sad. The loneliest possible fate.

Next, a dream I once had left me with the same feeling. My father's mother and my mother's mother died months apart. I was living in New Orleans at the time.  I had gone home for my father's mother's funeral and was unable to go home for a second funeral so soon after. The day I heard the news, I called in sick to work and laid in bed. After a time, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream of rare intensity. I was underwater, in an old submarine. I went out into the water in an old suit and somehow, my tank and I got disconnected from the main ship. I floated at the bottom of the dark ocean, knowing I would soon be without air and there was no possibility of making it to the surface or finding the ship. Again the solitary, suffocating sadness, and although it seems literal is a figurative expression.  

Finally, I remember learning about Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe in college. In 1911, he came out of the wilderness in Northern California and was taken by anthropologists to UC Berkley. Ishi, a word that simply means "man,"  lived out his remaining 5 years in a San Francisco university building. He told anthropologists about the last survivors of his tribe; his uncle, mother, sister, and himself describing the events that caused him to seek the company of others. After a traumatic series of events that amounted to the decimation of the tribe. Surveyors found their camp and ransacked it. In the scuffle, he lost his uncle and sister forever. His ailing mother passed away shortly after. From about 1908, he lived alone in the wilderness before finally emerging into modern Western society on the 29th of August, 1911. Ishi quickly captured the cultural imagination of the time, a culture so riveted by tales of the capture of European settlers by "savages" they gave birth to a literary genre.  

Ishi spent his first 50 years in the California wilderness, he had no immunity to the diseases of the city. He died of Tuberculosis in 1916.

I could never tell which part of his story made my heart ache more. The fact that he had to live for years knowing there were probably no others members of his tribe left – that he was likely the last. The fact that he shared no history or traditions with anyone and not one person shared his language or remembered when he was a child. Or the simple fact that he was the last of his people to breathe and wake and feel the sun in his face in the world and after him was extinction.  

{rosetta stone | tabula rasa}

Carved in 196 B.C. and found by French soldiers in Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt in 1799, the 1700 pound Rosetta Stone now lives in the British Museum.  This stone, written in Hieroglyphics (the script used in Ancient Egypt for key religious documents), demotic (common Egyptian writing) and Ancient Greek scripts,  enabled Researchers and Egyptologists to unravel the mysterious meaning of hieroglyphics.  This discovery was a key that enabled Jean- François Champollion to decipher hieroglyphics, unlocking the texts of Ancient Egypt.

Nowadays, the phrase Rosetta stone is used colloquially to indicate something which brings illumination, a breakthrough, or enables one to solve a puzzle. A tabula rasa, on the other hand, is blank. It’s Latin for scraped tablet, or, as we often say, a blank slate.  Your mind is no tabula rasa. You have layers and layers of content and context. There are memories tucked away in there that you aren’t even aware of yet. Sometimes it may seem that you need a Rosetta stone to figure out what is going on. This is where dreams come in. And daydreams. And inscrutable desires.

Our understanding of dreams is, at best, incomplete.  Dreams have been described as our mind’s sorting process, whereby we order the events of a day or week like good little psychological file clerks. They have also described as adventures and travels, in which the soul leaves the body to explore. The truth is that though there are various explanations, dreams are puzzling. We consider them commonplace because each of us has them, but almost no one understands their baffling language or cryptic symbols.

Dreams are something truly enigmatic that we each experience with relative frequency. All humans (as well as, birds and mammals) dream. Whether we recall these dreams or not, we all have them.  Interestingly, science tells us that when we experience activities in our dreams, the same parts of the brain fire as when we do the actual activities, meaning that at some level dreams are quite real, but that is the subject for another post.

Throughout human history, dreams have held significance for many societies. They have predicted the falls of kingdoms, inspired enduring music and literature, scientific discovery,  and medical advances.

Dreams can tell us something or nothing. Dream dictionaries attempt to explain all kind of symbols, like that a dream of sauerkraut indicates good health or the common dream of losing teeth means one lacks self-confidence. These definitions may seem silly, but some interpretations are fairly ubiquitous. For example, dreams of a house often correlate with the body and water often tells the dreamer something about their emotional state. The rest of the typical dream motifs tend to be deeply personal. To simplify: what a bat symbolizes for an American and what it means to a Chinese person is different. In essence, each person is the Rosetta stone needed to understand their own dreams. And this applies as well, to all subconscious desires and inner stories. All the mysterious things that come to our minds, can only be categorically understood by our own minds until properly deciphered and brought into the daytime world. Interpreters can repeat our dreams back to us, enabling us to make necessary connections, but we alone have the Rosetta stones to our depths.  

{that polka dot charm}

I adore polka dots. They never fail to bring a smile to my face.  This is particularly true when they cover a beautiful silk dress or a demure wool skirt. There is something delightful about a playful pattern on a deadly serious fabric. Those classic disks take the edge off of any outfit, giving a piece of clothing a level of cheerfulness not otherwise achievable. They are tiny hoops of joy.  According to the Hairpin, 1926’s Miss America wore polka dots for the swimsuit competition and thrust the U.S. into a fashion love affair with the little spheres. For years they were a signifier of femininity and now, as women try to sustain meager levels of gender equality in society, the polka dot has fallen out of favor with some who think of it as retro or old fashioned. For lots of people, polka dots are a reminder of a time when women were much more repressed and they hesitate to don the pattern. Psychic Universe tells us that not only are polka dots charming, they are also protective acting as tiny evil eyes of protection when worn.

They can be seen on the elaborate costumes of flamenco dancers.  Minnie Mouse wears polka dots. Rosie the Riveter had polka dots on the red kerchief around her head reminding us that though she was engaged in masculine factory work, she was still a lady. Eleanor Roosevelt, the powerful intellect, and champion of social justice liked elegant polka dotted dresses. The glorious Marilyn Monroe and the hilarious Lucille Ball both wore them. Dior famously employed the pattern in the 1950 and Mary Quant worked with them again in the 1960s. Bob Dylan,  Carolina Herrera,  Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and Katy Perry, have artfully worn polka dots. Think of Zoe Deschanel and every vintage or retro girl trying to look like a pinup or glamor girl from another time.  The comic panel close-ups of  Roy Lichtenstein, the installation art of Yayoi Kusama, and the dot matrix of Damien Hirst all showcase this graphic pattern.

So, how did the polka dot get its name? I was unable to find a true connection between the dance called the polka, which became extremely popular in the 1800s, and the pattern of little circles, but there seems to be a loose connection. According to the Word Detective, the term polka dot first appeared in the mid-1800s. Polka is also the Polish word for Polish woman. The word dot comes from the Old English synonym for speck: dott.  

The polka dot is not the trashy animal print, nor is it the solid business suit stripe. Though it can cross over into the worlds of burlesque dancers and businessmen.  It is an invitation to joy, but it can also be an instruction in order. I was just pondering this pattern and I thought I’d compile my thoughts. 

I am going to conclude this dotty overview with a quote from Yayoi Kusama, “Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environments.”

{breaking things down}

Recently, I wrote about the dead animal that had been left on my street in a plastic bag. To me,  this act of  leaving it in a plastic bag, as if it were trash and not a life, spoke volumes about how humans relate to the rest of the creatures on the planet. It was sad in a way that we don’t quite have language for and continued to bother me for days because no one moved the corpse. To discard something in such a manner nullifies dignity. If I were of a stronger constitution, I would have buried it, or at least moved it into the woods to decay in private. I thought of it for several days, unsure of how to deal with our gift, but unwilling to vomit at the end of my street, I did nothing but watch the process of organic deterioration. Each day as I turned to go home, I would roll the window of my jeep up to avoid the smell.

Then, after a few days, I spied the most gruesome creature, a huge turkey vulture, waiting patiently atop a telephone pole near the body. As is always the case, I cried out when I saw the thing, but quickly followed with a little prayer of thanks. Vultures are, after all, among our most unappreciated allies.

Decomposers are so important and we really fail to give them the recognition they deserve. I remember learning that vultures are quite remarkable, first, they have those awful-looking bald heads so that they can dig into decaying animal flesh and not get harmful bacteria stuck in head feathers.  Additionally, their digestive tracts are uniquely equipped with special acids that dissolve deadly bacteria such as anthrax, botulism, cholera, and rabies, to name a few.

Vultures prevent the spread of disease and without them, can you imagine how bad things would smell?

Organisms that that do the fundamental work of breaking down organic matter are called decomposers. Some of these marvelous, unglamorous creatures include fungi, bacteria, worms, and small scavengers like flies and cockroaches. Larger decomposers are vultures and other carrion. They do the work that no other organisms want to do, but more importantly, they do the work no other organisms are equipped to do.

Best of all, they have a passion for it!

Without all-star organic recyclers  fungi, mycologists are quick to remind us, life as we know it would not exist and we’d be buried in dead plants and animals in a matter of months. We take these organisms utterly for granted, but they are literally indispensable.

I recently read an article about how to be a better leader (or something of that nature) and one of the first suggestions was to do the jobs that need to be done that no one else wants to do. Taken them on voluntarily and do them well. Perhaps the secret of the decomposers is the key to making yourself indispensable.

{strangers on barstools}

Barstool poets, prophets, and philosophers are not just drunks, but they are often drunk. I meet them sometimes, though admittedly, not often. The infrequency makes it noteworthy.  

Early in my romance with David, we met a man. Well, first, he met this man, Ivan,  downtown at Great Lakes Coffee. The man was a physicist and philosopher and quite intense – they sat at the bar chatting for quite a while. He rubbed David the wrong way but intrigued him enough that he told me all about the encounter. Two days later, I was sitting outside of Avalon and a gentleman engaged me in conversation, it turned out to be the same man. We talked about levels of consciousness and I found him intriguing, but the conversation was just short of satisfying. If you have read articles or books about subjects you really wanted to understand, that promised to explain it, but never really added anything to your existing knowledge, you will understand the feeling I got from that conversation. I kept thinking he was just about to speak the sentence that would tie all the loose ends together and establish some cohesive theory, but that never happened. The conversation was just a series of concepts that floated in different directions. Interesting, but unsatisfying. David and I have since seen him around the city, but neither of us engaged in another conversation.

Earlier this week, David and I met a gentleman, at a bar, drinking syrupy Grand Marnier and coffee and scribbling in a composition book. Now, the teenage poet, is still alive somewhere in me – and she stands right up and starts looking over the shoulder of anyone with a speckled black and white notebook at a bar. I immediately noted the little squiggle connecting a heart to a hastily drawn star and the fact that he was using some crappy ballpoint pen. These facts immediately made me suspicious, I mean, how many legit philosophers doodle that kind of doodle with an ordinary pen?

His name was Bob or Bill, I think. He and David had been chatting when I came in and when he walked to the restroom, with two beautiful wooden walking sticks to assist him, I was given the overview. He had been living in the Santa Fe mountains, refused to use computers, was a Religious scholar, was called to Ferndale, Michigan by God who had told him to begin working on a book about Main Street America. Interesting. David was eating and finishing something on his laptop, so when the guy returned, I started asking questions. He told me I looked like a preacher’s daughter, then he explained his Main Street theory. We spoke about his travels and his children. But, we never really go to the heart of anything.  It was the same kind of conversation I had experienced with Ivan. Intriguing but unsatisfying.

Sometimes a stranger is just a stranger and a conversation is just a brief exchange of facts and banter. Perhaps hoping random encounters will be magical kills the possibility of magic.  

{what matters}

I am so heartbroken by what is happening in this country. It isn't about guns or violence- they are just horrible symptoms of the real malaise, which is deep and pervasive fear.

People fear each other, they fear that someone will get what they think belongs to them. They fear the scarcity of resources. Fear being scorned for talking about issues like sexism, racism, and inequality. Everyone is afraid to be uncomfortable, to insult, to be insulted. We have turned inward and have forgotten that family and community are what make life worthwhile. Overcoming obstacles together make our relationships grow- it does not diminish them.

We are constantly tuned into electronic boxes that tell us to be afraid. TV has inflamed our collective fear of life to such a degree that we’ve forgotten that we are here to LOVE one another and make and experience beautiful things.

People often look at me like I am a complete lightweight when I talk about LOVE after circumstances like the ones we are currently facing. BUT ITS IS THE ONLY FORCE POWERFUL ENOUGH TO CHANGE OUR HEARTS AND MAKE THINGS BETTER. LOVE for one another is the only way we are going to understand each other and stop feeling afraid of each other.

LOVE is how we are going to heal this tremendous pain in our hearts, and make no mistake, we ALL feel it this pain regardless of color or gender or sexual orientation because it is like cancer at the very heart of our society. This great fear is the natural legacy of an entire society built on the domination and subjugation of other human beings, and frankly, until that is addressed head on, it is going to continue. This strange capacity for establishing fanciful hierarchies is the natural legacy of the genocide of native peoples and slavery of Africans that NO ONE seems willing to discuss. Keeping painful things hidden away never makes them go away. It makes them fester until they burst. Every upheaval in human history demonstrates this fact.

But, when we begin to have honest conversations, acknowledging that we all suffer, albeit differently, we all do suffer as a result of this horrible legacy, we can start to heal. Black folks feel angry, white folks feel guilty, women, non-Christian, brown, and LGBTQ folks feel anxious and fearful, really, WE HAVE GOT HUGE ISSUES to work through, and unless we say these things out loud to each other, we cannot really begin the long, difficult process of healing.

The media is hellbent on convincing us that everything is terrifying and dangerous. It simply isn’t true. LOVE is the antidote to fear. Loving one another is essential now. There are bad people of every skin color and age and religion and gender, but there are still significantly more good and loving people. People who are willing to go out of their ways to help each other and who want to understand one another.

I keep advocating for more conversation because it ultimately leads to compassion and LOVE, it also leads to better action. If we listen to each other then we inevitably grow to LOVE one another, and you simply cannot shoot someone you love. It has been my experience that if you know a person's story, it is impossible not to feel empathy and compassion for them. So many white Americans feel like they have no right to discuss racism and this feeling keeps them silent when they witness it. We are all going to have to get very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations if we want to come through this without a great deal more violence. We have to rebel against the power structure that relies on our fear and start listening to one another instead of letting fear own us.

I am sending my LOVE out to each one of you, today. It is the best thing I have to give.

{desensitization and its opposite}

Over the last decades, there have been numerous academic discussions about the way that violent  television, film, and video games (to name a few sources) are desensitizing American people by creating a culture of violence without consequence. These types of media, the arguments say, are disconnecting us from the real dangers of things like guns and murder. While I do believe that you are what you consume (food, news, literature, media, etc.), I simply can’t believe this is the whole story.

To desensitize means to make a person (or an entire society) gradually feel less shock, anguish, and distress at scenes of violence toward and suffering of others by continually exposing them to images and representations of this sort of cruelty, making such things commonplace. I don’t know about you, but recent events have done just the opposite to me. I cannot stop crying. I am not even sure how to begin to take action, because there is SO MUCH, and so much of it matters deeply and is going to be instrumental to how our society’s future unfolds.

Think about some of what we have witnessed in the last few months; lack of any kind of justice in the Freddie Gray trial, the bigoted slogans and misogynistic behavior of Donald Trump being accepted and rewarded, a heroin epidemic so out of control that cops have begun to carry the heroin “antidote” with them, Stanford rape victim’s letter and absolutely inadequate sentence for rapist, Davontae Sanford freed after 9 years of wrongful imprisonment, Orlando massacre, and this is just what comes to mind without really spending time to reflect, this is just what’s at the immediate surface. I don’t have the fortitude to spend time making a better, more complete list. I am not a weak person. I am a strong, righteous person of action, but the enormity of all of this fills me with such agonizing frustration. What is going on? What can I do? Why aren’t we better? Brothers and sisters, why aren’t we doing better?

Here is what I think is going on, and you are probably not going to like my opinion.

I began thinking about this yesterday before I learned about Alton Sterling and before the news of the shooting of Philando Castile. I was leaving my house and saw that someone dumped a dead animal, probably raccoon or groundhog, on my street. It was mostly covered in a plastic bag. Whoever did it, obviously thought it was just an animal and deserved no kind of burial or respect, that it deserved to be thrown on a random street in a plastic bag to rot in the sun.  This got me thinking about how this same kind of thinking has been applied to all cultural others for time immemorial. Most significantly for us, in U.S., as a justification for massacring indigenous people and for the enslavement of African people, and continued mistreatment and subjugation of both. But, of course, it has happened on an ongoing basis for every new group entering this country from Irish to Muslim. This capacity that humans have to think of those who are different as somehow less important, and less human, is the basis of just about every problem we are now facing. Saying this is not a lack of patriotism. It is the very definition of patriotism. Sitting around feeling afraid that by extending equal rights to your fellow citizens (and refugees) because that might diminish your freedom, and thinking of them as less human as a way to justify this behavior, is a complete failure of patriotism. To hoard and withhold the freedom you claim to prize and mistreat those who have less power is an abuse of power. It is a failure to be a good American and worse still, it’s failure to be a good human. This scarcity thinking isn’t serving us, it is destroying us.

In the same way that a person’s psychological demons keep on coming back until they get resolved, the legacy of the inhumane treatment of other humans, upon which this country was built needs to be ACKNOWLEDGED and worked through or we are going to keep seeing the reverberations and they are going to increase in intensity and discomfort. We need to start discussing all of this. All these false hierarchies people erect are not going to protect them when the foundations upon which they are built crumble. Unless we start working toward a society where there is real equality for everyone, no one is going to be safe in any tower. Things are becoming so volatile and all of us who are others or allies are getting fed up. We want things to change, but instead, they appear to be regressing.

Humans need progress and when the tide of history moves backward, we band together and revolt- we fight for progress. That time is coming.  One thing that seems to be a sign of this coming revolution is the opposite of desensitization. When I looked up antonyms, I found ideas like compassionate, humane, softhearted, sympathetic. There are all components of what I’ve been feeling, and what I imagine many of you are also experiencing, but I would call it more of an over-sensitization or a hyper-sensitization, a saturation of feelings that never really absorb because they don’t have time, they are flooding us. The rains of injustice keep coming and we don’t have anywhere to escape to. The status quo is no longer adequate. We all deserve better.

{when you are certain}

Last night, before our bike ride. We were standing on Cass outside the Hub bike shop with a couple dozen cyclists when a woman and a man came our way. The woman approached me first, she was thin and had short cropped hair. Her clothes were clean and she was wearing a netted navy tank. It could be seen through, which alarmed me. Public nudity, or partial nudity, typically alarms me. A man was trailing behind her. He was carrying an unlit cigarette and saying something to the crowd of cyclists about biking. Whatever he said was odd, but funny. Neither of them seemed to pose any kind of threat.  His clothes were also clean. He seemed, based on what he’d said and his overall manner,  to be intoxicated.

The woman spoke to me, I was the only woman directly near her. She mumbled and looked just past me. “He’s an idiot, men are idiots, aren’t they? What an idiot…” She waited for my response. I told her liked men and knew some pretty wonderful ones. She pointed to David and asked me if he was wonderful and I told her he was. I then told her that I grew up without my mom and my dad raised me, which was pretty wonderful, too. She nodded towards her companion, “Well he’s an idiot. Do you get hot flashes? I am having hot flashes- they are horrible.” She tugged at her tank to move the air. I told her I didn’t get them yet and she said I better hope not to get them. Then she asked me for money.

If you know me, you know that I play these requests by ear, I don’t feel bad giving cash to strangers, as long as it feels safe. David and I try to plan ahead, packing small bills in a place where we won’t have to make a big deal out of opening a wallet or purse. And when the person asking is a woman, I always give what I have, because I cannot imagine how much harder it is to be a woman living on the streets or addicted to drugs. This has not always been my policy. I used to give Cliff bars or little packets of tuna fish, but it was disheartening to get yelled at because people don’t usually want food, they want alcohol or drugs. Anyway, all of that to say that if I had had cash, I would have given it to her. I was all prepped for the bike ride and did not. So I told her I did  not have my purse and she quietly and calmly told me to have a great day and walked on. Her partner lingered in the crowd as she moved down the sidewalk.

At just that moment, out of nowhere, several Detroit  police vehicles approached, blocking the Southbound lane of the street. One of the officers corralled Michelle (I learned that this was her name) and routed her back to where her partner was. They circled around her. Standing behind the doors of the police vehicles.  She sat on the sidewalk and they took turns yelling things at her. She was disoriented and clearly mentally ill, possibly on some substance as well. She sat on the sidewalk complaining about hot flashes and tugging her shirt. The officers did not express compassionate behavior, they were aggressive and antagonistic,  like boys poking a dog with a stick. I began to record the scene on David’s camera very obviously so that they knew I was recording it. Some Wayne State officers arrived and calmed the Detroit police down. I stopped recording and walked over to talk. I told the one who indicated that he was in charge of the situation, that I had been speaking with her minutes before and she was not hostile or aggressive, just hot. We talked about how challenging it is to handle situations with folks who are mentally ill because jail is not where they belong. He was gentle and he diffused the situation, which I have no doubt the Detroit police were planning to escalate. He told me that they try to send people who are mentally ill and causing a disturbance to the hospital but they are out the next day and that there were no great resources available. I have no doubt the scene would have played out differently if not for his wisdom and compassion.

The police left the scene letting Michelle and her partner resume their journey. As she passed me, she again told me she was so hot from the hot flashes. I told her to take a few deep breaths, it always helped me, and she did, then she went on her way. I  felt strong emotion as she walked away,  wondering how she lives in the world. What kinds of things happen to her, as a small, vulnerable mentally ill woman with little protection from anything.

About 10 minutes later, our ride began, and as we approached Warren, we passed Michelle, who was now wearing a new shirt that covered her breasts. She was screaming at the top of her lungs to everyone who passed. Not violent, but definitely causing a disturbance. I was so certain she was gentle when she walked away earlier, but now she was fairly hysterical. It reminded how uncertain certainly can be.

Later that night in Hamtramck, we stopped to fix a flat tire and the group was all standing around on Conant. We noticed a tiny calico kitten across the street about to jump into the road where it would surely be hit. We ran over and scared it back into a yard where its mother and siblings could be seen in the distance on the front porch. It had some kind of infection or little scabs in its eyes and I had to fight not to shove it in my sweater to take home. There was a metal fence around the yard and the kitten kept getting bold and heading back toward us, so we’d stomp our feet and make noises to scare it back to its mama. Finally, an older woman with a heavy accent came out and we told her the kitten was about to run into the street. She said they were wild but she fed them and wanted to keep them rather than calling the Humane Society. All the other kittens began tumbling clumsily and adorably down the steps and goodness, they were darling. She and my soft-hearted friend Vikki kept talking, but I walked away feeling certain that all the kittens would be dead before the month was up.

Reflecting upon the events the next morning, I realized that I felt a similar desire to protect both Michelle and the kitten, knowing that neither was for me to protect.