by Rachel Zlatkin
1. For a short time growing up, I slept in my own room. The room once belonged to my parents, who now slept on a fold-out sofa in our living room. My sisters and brother slept on two sets of bunk beds one room from me, while I felt dwarfed on my parents’ old queen size mattress. I had no idea what to do with the space, no idea what posters to hang on the walls, what toys to keep. Everything I’d ever owned I’d learned to share and now I found myself in a cavernous space all my own. I’ve still no idea what prompted my parents’ decision, perhaps my adolescence. Mostly I read or slept, as if to escape the demands of quiet. We were seven people living in five rooms. It was a loud house, and the silence made the room even more foreign.
One night my dad woke me from my criss cross slumber. The room was dark. A sliver of street light peeked through the curtains, a jagged line across the blue and black bedspread. “Roll over.” All he said. All he needed to say. Bleary eyed and short sighted, I squinted up at him standing in silhouette. I made out the figure of a young woman with long hair and average height standing next to him, and I promptly scooted over. He left the room and closed the door behind him, and I was not alone. “Well, are you getting in, or aren’t you?” I asked who I knew was one more hitchhiker he and mom picked up and brought home. And then I was alone, because she promptly left the room. Not long after, my mom entered to tell me I’d be sleeping downstairs on the second couch that night so that the young woman had a place to sleep.
On the way home from a date, my parents might pick up a hitchhiker, make him a meal or buy him a Big Mac, and then let him shower and shave before dropping him off at the next stop. Or dad would bring someone home off the railway that ran behind the nursing home where he cut the grass. When he asked me to “roll over” and share my bed, I did not feel endangered and I did not think it an odd request. Hitchhikers were people who ate dinner with us and who we addressed by name. Some of the hitchhikers sent us letters when they reached their destination. Mostly we never heard from them again, but we’d still talk about them by name at supper time, wonder where they might be now, whether or not they’d made it, found what they were looking for.
My father was the music director of our Catholic parish and my mom stayed home to raise five kids. We weren’t a factory family, ourselves, but my mom’s dad had made a career in the car factories, after serving in Japan during the Reconstruction, and had a position of leadership in his union. My dad’s dad owned his own neon business and tried to get a farm started until he died in a car accident during the Vietnam War. My dad was a staunch Republican and my mom was a closet Democrat. Despite their different politics and backgrounds, I think both identified with blue collar workers and the working class. Both were raised as if the Great Depression never ended, despite the upsurge of middle class during their post war childhood. My maternal grandparents never ceased collecting bacon grease in old coffee cans. My mom graduated with her BA three hours before I did, and thus became the first in her British, Irish, Welsh family to do so. The fourth oldest of seventeen in a German Catholic family, my dad was the first and only in his immediate family to receive a four year degree.
Being a church organist is not a typical blue collar job, but my dad, smart as he was, chose to work with his hands. And mom babysat while we were in school, so that other women might go to work. Even though I was born in 1972, it feels more accurate to say that I was raised in the 50’s with a dash of the Great Depression thrown in. It was a patriarchal house with a lot of rules, right down to how many squares of toilet paper we were permitted to use(That would be 2, 3 if necessary). My political leanings are about as different as politics can get from that of my father, who enjoyed Rush Limbaugh, but my sense of citizenship rises from my father’s tendency toward political debate over the dinner table and his habit of bringing hitchhikers home for supper.
My dad believed in small government because he believed people had a responsibility to care for each other, as Christians, sure, but also as citizens. I remember how confused some of his friends and colleagues were after my parents divorced when I was sixteen, as if the divorce proved him morally bankrupt… I mean, they were already confused, as are many liberals, that he could be a Christian while so politically conservative. The divorce made it harder still, because suddenly all of his hard lining fell flat. But confusing as the divorce was, I could never share in that particular confusion. Even sharing the hitchhiker story for the first time, in my twenties, it never occurred to me that anyone would be upset by it. My friend shifted in her chair, clearly uncomfortable, pulled on her hair, avoided eye contact, angered on my behalf while I was not. I had never thought about how dangerous it was to bring someone home, for me to scoot over so that she had a place to sleep, until my friend was so vividly upset. Even now, it’s hard to feel angry, though I know that it is a mistake to invite a hitchhiker into a daughter’s room while she is fast asleep. My dad and I volunteered at St. Vincent dePaul over Christmas sometimes, but it never came close to making the impression that feeding a person in our home made. Never came close to the effect of sharing my bed. The next day, I woke and the hitchhiker had already left. It was as though I had dreamed the whole thing, but when I asked my mom she confirmed the hitchhiker’s stay. “No. She slept in your bed.” No further comment. “Okay. It happened,” I thought as I walked away and turned upstairs toward my bedroom. Not knowing her, never actually seeing her face, never speaking to her beyond “Are you getting in, or aren’t you?” made the whole event deeply affecting because she really could have been anyone. Anyone.
2. How does this story mean to family members not myself? To people outside my family? To those who lived with my mom or dad before I was even born? Or to those who sang in my father’s choir? To those who he brought home from the rails? What meaning does it create for those of you kind enough to read the blog I share with Aaron? To those who know me, as opposed to those who know him? I have written for a long time, densely on a good day, cryptically on a bad, but long enough to witness how writing changes over time, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to a perspective that comes with age, but never changing wholly within my control or even according to my desire. Lately I am trying for a different kind of communication, a kind that goes a little against my academic training, a communication more transparent than difficult, more contemplative than argumentative.
For about two years in my twenties, I wrote a certain kind of poetry. I’ll call it religious, not due to its content, but due to its use of language. I’d just lost three very important people, quite all at once: my grandma, and two friends, women in their forties who played the part of the big sisters I’d never had. There was no making sense of this. I handed over poems as if I handed every reader my shattered heart or the broken bodies of the lost, as if to say to every random stranger “I don’t know you, but hold this, will you? Feel how much pain I’m in? Feel the weight of the lost?” I wrote poems like a Catholic raised on transubstantiation and a resurrection in suffering. Which I was.
I suppose this is how many poets enter poetry — through a broken heart — but recreating the broken in every reader is not a meaning making communion. I think, though, that this is how language functions for many conservatives — patriarchally. Language as one OCD attempt to stop time, to control the world, to hold it still in one graspable moment, to make and enforce a reality in the image of the speaker, who remains body centered, without any thought to a readers’ personhood or needs, without any thought toward a meaning’s reception because the meaning is nothing more than a contagious ghoul (it will eat your flesh, if you let it). “Roll over” and it never occurred to me to do otherwise.
This is how power works, and I’ve become, as I age, more tentative (or more understanding) in my use of language. In one of my first poetry workshops, the instructor asked me if I was on drugs when I wrote. The piece I’d written was so enraged, mixed so many metaphors, was so imagistic and passionate, that I suppose he assumed I had to be. When I said “No,” he turned to my classmates and said, “Writing this way requires absolute faith in language.” It never occurred to me that anyone would not trust language, but then I’d only ever written to myself.
In my research writing, I am drawn to scenes of intense loathing of the female body or intense longing for that body. It occurs to me that in studying this language, I am studying how it is used patriarchally, how language functions as a means to organize knowledge and understandings in accordance with differences that are either idealized or demonized. I do not support the demonization of Hillary Clinton, but I also take issue with how the very word “idealism” is used to demonize or other Bernie Sander’s supporters. The word gives the speaker permission to discount any view on policy that the “idealist” holds, which is more a patriarchal move than a democratic one. (One can, in fact, be both idealistic and informed, for example.)
Now that I engage in political discussions with the commitment to seeing them through, now that I hold multiple views in mind, asking questions and contemplating responses, I enter a different use of language, one that is more democratic and vulnerable. It’s the kind of language I think we need now… at the dining table, on social media, and on the streets. We have time to ask questions, to listen to other voices, to study a candidate’s policies and decisions, and to contemplate what a vote for our candidate might mean beyond our own personal narrative. As bewildered as my father may be by the role he played in my politics, my inclination toward systemic change is an extension of the care my family shared in our home. Just so, we citizens have time now to situate our vote within the context of what is best for “the people.” These days when someone says “Roll over,” I stop to read the fine print. And when I vote, I will know what my vote means; I’ll not be sleeping.
1. For a short time growing up, I slept in my own room. The room once belonged to my parents, who now slept on a fold-out sofa in our living room. My sisters and brother slept on two sets of bunk beds one room from me, while I felt dwarfed on my parents’ old queen size mattress. I had no idea what to do with the space, no idea what posters to hang on the walls, what toys to keep. Everything I’d ever owned I’d learned to share and now I found myself in a cavernous space all my own. I’ve still no idea what prompted my parents’ decision, perhaps my adolescence. Mostly I read or slept, as if to escape the demands of quiet. We were seven people living in five rooms. It was a loud house, and the silence made the room even more foreign.
One night my dad woke me from my criss cross slumber. The room was dark. A sliver of street light peeked through the curtains, a jagged line across the blue and black bedspread. “Roll over.” All he said. All he needed to say. Bleary eyed and short sighted, I squinted up at him standing in silhouette. I made out the figure of a young woman with long hair and average height standing next to him, and I promptly scooted over. He left the room and closed the door behind him, and I was not alone. “Well, are you getting in, or aren’t you?” I asked who I knew was one more hitchhiker he and mom picked up and brought home. And then I was alone, because she promptly left the room. Not long after, my mom entered to tell me I’d be sleeping downstairs on the second couch that night so that the young woman had a place to sleep.
On the way home from a date, my parents might pick up a hitchhiker, make him a meal or buy him a Big Mac, and then let him shower and shave before dropping him off at the next stop. Or dad would bring someone home off the railway that ran behind the nursing home where he cut the grass. When he asked me to “roll over” and share my bed, I did not feel endangered and I did not think it an odd request. Hitchhikers were people who ate dinner with us and who we addressed by name. Some of the hitchhikers sent us letters when they reached their destination. Mostly we never heard from them again, but we’d still talk about them by name at supper time, wonder where they might be now, whether or not they’d made it, found what they were looking for.
My father was the music director of our Catholic parish and my mom stayed home to raise five kids. We weren’t a factory family, ourselves, but my mom’s dad had made a career in the car factories, after serving in Japan during the Reconstruction, and had a position of leadership in his union. My dad’s dad owned his own neon business and tried to get a farm started until he died in a car accident during the Vietnam War. My dad was a staunch Republican and my mom was a closet Democrat. Despite their different politics and backgrounds, I think both identified with blue collar workers and the working class. Both were raised as if the Great Depression never ended, despite the upsurge of middle class during their post war childhood. My maternal grandparents never ceased collecting bacon grease in old coffee cans. My mom graduated with her BA three hours before I did, and thus became the first in her British, Irish, Welsh family to do so. The fourth oldest of seventeen in a German Catholic family, my dad was the first and only in his immediate family to receive a four year degree.
Being a church organist is not a typical blue collar job, but my dad, smart as he was, chose to work with his hands. And mom babysat while we were in school, so that other women might go to work. Even though I was born in 1972, it feels more accurate to say that I was raised in the 50’s with a dash of the Great Depression thrown in. It was a patriarchal house with a lot of rules, right down to how many squares of toilet paper we were permitted to use(That would be 2, 3 if necessary). My political leanings are about as different as politics can get from that of my father, who enjoyed Rush Limbaugh, but my sense of citizenship rises from my father’s tendency toward political debate over the dinner table and his habit of bringing hitchhikers home for supper.
My dad believed in small government because he believed people had a responsibility to care for each other, as Christians, sure, but also as citizens. I remember how confused some of his friends and colleagues were after my parents divorced when I was sixteen, as if the divorce proved him morally bankrupt… I mean, they were already confused, as are many liberals, that he could be a Christian while so politically conservative. The divorce made it harder still, because suddenly all of his hard lining fell flat. But confusing as the divorce was, I could never share in that particular confusion. Even sharing the hitchhiker story for the first time, in my twenties, it never occurred to me that anyone would be upset by it. My friend shifted in her chair, clearly uncomfortable, pulled on her hair, avoided eye contact, angered on my behalf while I was not. I had never thought about how dangerous it was to bring someone home, for me to scoot over so that she had a place to sleep, until my friend was so vividly upset. Even now, it’s hard to feel angry, though I know that it is a mistake to invite a hitchhiker into a daughter’s room while she is fast asleep. My dad and I volunteered at St. Vincent dePaul over Christmas sometimes, but it never came close to making the impression that feeding a person in our home made. Never came close to the effect of sharing my bed. The next day, I woke and the hitchhiker had already left. It was as though I had dreamed the whole thing, but when I asked my mom she confirmed the hitchhiker’s stay. “No. She slept in your bed.” No further comment. “Okay. It happened,” I thought as I walked away and turned upstairs toward my bedroom. Not knowing her, never actually seeing her face, never speaking to her beyond “Are you getting in, or aren’t you?” made the whole event deeply affecting because she really could have been anyone. Anyone.
2. How does this story mean to family members not myself? To people outside my family? To those who lived with my mom or dad before I was even born? Or to those who sang in my father’s choir? To those who he brought home from the rails? What meaning does it create for those of you kind enough to read the blog I share with Aaron? To those who know me, as opposed to those who know him? I have written for a long time, densely on a good day, cryptically on a bad, but long enough to witness how writing changes over time, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to a perspective that comes with age, but never changing wholly within my control or even according to my desire. Lately I am trying for a different kind of communication, a kind that goes a little against my academic training, a communication more transparent than difficult, more contemplative than argumentative.
For about two years in my twenties, I wrote a certain kind of poetry. I’ll call it religious, not due to its content, but due to its use of language. I’d just lost three very important people, quite all at once: my grandma, and two friends, women in their forties who played the part of the big sisters I’d never had. There was no making sense of this. I handed over poems as if I handed every reader my shattered heart or the broken bodies of the lost, as if to say to every random stranger “I don’t know you, but hold this, will you? Feel how much pain I’m in? Feel the weight of the lost?” I wrote poems like a Catholic raised on transubstantiation and a resurrection in suffering. Which I was.
I suppose this is how many poets enter poetry — through a broken heart — but recreating the broken in every reader is not a meaning making communion. I think, though, that this is how language functions for many conservatives — patriarchally. Language as one OCD attempt to stop time, to control the world, to hold it still in one graspable moment, to make and enforce a reality in the image of the speaker, who remains body centered, without any thought to a readers’ personhood or needs, without any thought toward a meaning’s reception because the meaning is nothing more than a contagious ghoul (it will eat your flesh, if you let it). “Roll over” and it never occurred to me to do otherwise.
This is how power works, and I’ve become, as I age, more tentative (or more understanding) in my use of language. In one of my first poetry workshops, the instructor asked me if I was on drugs when I wrote. The piece I’d written was so enraged, mixed so many metaphors, was so imagistic and passionate, that I suppose he assumed I had to be. When I said “No,” he turned to my classmates and said, “Writing this way requires absolute faith in language.” It never occurred to me that anyone would not trust language, but then I’d only ever written to myself.
In my research writing, I am drawn to scenes of intense loathing of the female body or intense longing for that body. It occurs to me that in studying this language, I am studying how it is used patriarchally, how language functions as a means to organize knowledge and understandings in accordance with differences that are either idealized or demonized. I do not support the demonization of Hillary Clinton, but I also take issue with how the very word “idealism” is used to demonize or other Bernie Sander’s supporters. The word gives the speaker permission to discount any view on policy that the “idealist” holds, which is more a patriarchal move than a democratic one. (One can, in fact, be both idealistic and informed, for example.)
Now that I engage in political discussions with the commitment to seeing them through, now that I hold multiple views in mind, asking questions and contemplating responses, I enter a different use of language, one that is more democratic and vulnerable. It’s the kind of language I think we need now… at the dining table, on social media, and on the streets. We have time to ask questions, to listen to other voices, to study a candidate’s policies and decisions, and to contemplate what a vote for our candidate might mean beyond our own personal narrative. As bewildered as my father may be by the role he played in my politics, my inclination toward systemic change is an extension of the care my family shared in our home. Just so, we citizens have time now to situate our vote within the context of what is best for “the people.” These days when someone says “Roll over,” I stop to read the fine print. And when I vote, I will know what my vote means; I’ll not be sleeping.