Last Night I Dreamed of Manderly...

Winter finally arrived. The temperature presently is a balmy zero degrees, up from -3 an hour ago. In Monterey, I used to wonder about B’s constant preoccupation with the weather, but I understand it now, it’s a survival skill here and one of those survival skills once learned you can’t shake, you carry it everywhere like a neurosis. I have a thousand of those myself but they’re all connected with having grown up in a dense urban metropolitan area with excellent public transportation.

I thought about the Little Store last night, Slow Burn. The Martin Luther King Day weekend was always a slight uptick in the dead period between the New Year and Memorial Day weekend. It was one of those Last night I dreamed of Manderly flashes, so I immediately repressed the thought – too painful, too painful – and immediately thought instead about the circus which brought with it a particular emotional state. I actually quite enjoyed that period of limbo, the rootless, tinker existence, living in a hundred foot trailer with two other humans, two dogs and a psychotic cat, wandering to a new place every day, and frequently get… Well, I suppose you could call them flashes, mnemonic images of the strange little Minnesota, Iowa, Oklahoma towns we skimmed through. I did absolutely nothing for six months. I suppose I was cognizant that it couldn’t last, that my head was on the chopping block and sooner or later the ax was going to fall, but I pretended not to know it.

The present tense is certainly pretty awful. There were things I knew to do and I didn’t really do them. In that sense, a good deal of what has happened to me, what is happening to me is my own responsibility. But I had no support system. No cheering section. What I labored under was this feeling that I was/am being punished, that the Powers That Be had finally run out of patience for the awful person I truly am and had washed Their Hands of me – You! You deserve to suffer! So suffer!

Of course whatever you may feel in your unspeakably filthy bathrobe, huddled in front of a small electric heater, typing away in your scrivener gloves, surrounded by restive animals to whom you are God and who don’t understand why You have decreed the house must be so cold, is something you must hide from the rest of the world so yesterday I ventured out for the VITA tax training. It’s more complicated than I thought but an awfully useful program. Most people don’t know about the Earned Income Credit which can put literally thousands of dollars in the pockets of low income workers. Perfect volunteer opportunity for me: Good Work plus the possibility of professional advancement! The other people in the training were all Cornell students in law and accounting.

The secret is to try to get these people not to splurge on X-Boxes and trips to the local Indian casino when they get their refunds but to bank it instead, so when (inevitably) their cars break down, they don’t have to apply for a PayDay Loan – they’ll already have the money in the bank! There’s a federal grant program that’s allowing federal credit unions to offer as much as 10 percent interest on savings account over the course of a year, with a minimum deposit as low as $200! Keeping it in the community is what it’s all about.

The tax stuff is neither easy nor intuitive so I’m going to have to study it.

Other than that, tentative coffee date with Garrison Keillor lookalike later this afternoon, housecleaning – how does this place get so filthy? – RTT FAFSA stuff. Really, I want to sit down in a coffeehouse or a bar and spin the afternoon away in intense conversation about the meaning of the universe, the meaning of life on this planet, the meaning of life on other planets, the fleeting phenomenon of consciousness. But I think only college students care about stuff like that, and I’m an old broad pushing 60 uphill – I’m completely invisible to them. Which, really, is how it should be. I suppose.