Pamela Jean Owens off-line

2nd Congressional District Nebraska, Today’s Poll Numbers at www.fivethirtyeight.com

47.3 Obama, who is opening a 2nd Nebraska office tomorrow, with a 31% chance of victory taking the 2nd District electoral vote!

51.3 McCain, who is now pouring money into Omaha!

Nebraska Polls as of 10-7-08

WHAT  ARE  THE  REAL  ISSUES  TONIGHT?

If anyone is concerned about Bill Ayres, the supposed “terrorist pal” of Obama, please get in touch with us (me and Rick, my husband).  We ARE the same age as Bill and Bernadine, and our older son played baseball against each their younger son and their step-son in Little League when they were in grade school, and played baseball with each other in High School.   They were also buddies in Advanced Latin class and various  Our daughter and their older son went to high school together.  Bernadine and I were active in an interfaith organization Women Against War during the FIRST Gulf War, and also during the Clinton blockade of Iraq.  They are very extraordinaty people, and we have been in their home, just like Obama has.  But what is extraordinary about them is not that they were once part of the Weather Underground wing of SDS.  What is extraordinary about them is how committed they are to making the world a better, safer, kinder, healthier place for us in America, and for the rest of the world.

 Let’s see. McCain doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody.  And he wants to buy up all the bad mortgages, my friends, which is going to be expensive, but he can do it, after all, he’s a maverick. 

I’m sorry, that sounds like funny money to me.  Whats he going to use for money?  Is he using Monopoly money?  Or monopoly money?

Barack Obama and Warren Buffet do not think the American economy is fundamentally sound.  Neither do I.  How does Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury sound?

Let’s see, was it Wall Street that got drunk, or was it George Bush, or both?

How about a tax on all the homes owned by people with more than one, or, ok, since some elderly people have one in the south and one in the north, how about on all the homes past two per family?  That would be good news!

BEST LINE SO FAR as of 8:39 p.m.: “I think [Senator McCain's] Straight Talk Express lost a wheel along in there.”  (with regard to leaving the tax cuts on the rich alone).

Hello, have you told Sarah you think we have a damaged planet, John?  Oh that’s right, she does agree now that the climate is warming, but she has private knowledge from one of her fellow church members that it is another sign that we are near the end of days.  As soon as she gets that nuclear button, she can help Jesus get on down here to start the Millenial Times.

Q:  How many times had McCain voted against alternative fuels?

A:  Zero.

And alternative energy is part of the GOP plan?  I’m confused.

Places where we agree:  America is the greatest nation in the world.  Let’s get that clear.

VERY GOOD QUESTION, Tom Brokaw:  Define your doctrine with regard to the use of American military force in humanitarian situations that do not impact our own national security (Darfur, etc.)

Obama tells us what he will do.  McCain only says what he won’t do, and that we have to do whatever we can.  What does that mean?  Cool hand at the tiller?  Maybe a president with a vice president who can also advise would have a cooler hand, how about that?  Instead of one who has seen Russia off the back deck.

I’m sorry, but telling us that when he sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” was when he was just joking with an old military buddy doesn’t wash with me.  Bombing Iran is simply not something I want my president joking about.  What if I joked about carrying a gun as I walked through an airport?  Some things are off-limits for jokes, that’s the truth of the matter, and the voters know it.

Question, “How do you reorganize U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan?”  Are they giving Petreus the same money to pay the Taliban tribal lords not to attack in Afghanistan like he’s done in Iraq?  That sounds a lot like we helped the Taliban throw out Russia.  I don’t think that is going to work now that we’ve created a stronger Al Quaeda in the hills than they had before 9/11.

CNN’s uncommitted Ohio voters, male and female, seem to be much happier with Obama than McCain.  Good news.  Let’s watch the polls in Ohio closely over the next few days!

Ok, I can answer the question, No, Russia is not an evil empire now, it’s not an empire!  First rule of debate, Define Your Terms!  Dumb question, Tom.

Saying we have to make “Iran abridge their behavior” sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know what it means.  Obama is giving me a straight answer:  He will never take the military option off the table, but first he will go to the table.  McCain won’t go to the table unless he gets to set the table exactly the way he wants to.  I vote for going to the table.  At least let’s give it a try.  Evidence is, it works. Refusing to talk is not working with either Iran or North Korea, so how about trying talking.

Possible titles:

Generations

The Clay Women

More than Survivors

PROLOGUE

Ginny sat very still in Daddy’s old recliner, barely balanced on the edge of its soft brown corduroy seat, suddenly paralyzed –  transfixed by a clarity of heart that floated above the confusion of  thoughts cluttering her mind.  She turned the familiar 1908 postcard over and over in her hand, and again she read the message.  Reading the words, surely for the umpteenth dozen time, but understanding them now, finally, for the very first time. And with her new understanding, Ginny felt deep in her soul a kinship with her great-grandmother she’d never dreamed she had.  Most likely, it’d been plain as day all along.  Plain as the nose on your face, Mamaw would have said.  And undoubtedly Gramma would have said the same thing.  Ginny had just never heard it, until today.

Lawd, chil’, of course we Clay women are all alike.  Didn’t you know your Mamaw?  How many times haven’t you told someone your Mamaw and Papaw were romantics?  Where’d you think she got it from?  Off the turnip truck?  Not likely.  She came by it with her birthright, just the same as I did.  We’re borned with it.  The longing.

Ginny read the words again, wondering how she had been deaf to them for so long.  How many times, since she’d found the card in Mamaw’s boxes of photos years and years ago, had she read the words, more or less as an afterthought?  How many times had she read, but not heard, the message that was, in the end, the only part of this treasured heirloom that really mattered?  Here was her life, but it was written a hundred years ago.  Ginny’s own life, written by a Cherokee woman with one eye, little education, a dozen children, and a wayward husband.  A woman she had always longed to know better than she’d had the chance, and now, suddenly, who she felt like she knew as though they were sisters.

1908

To:  Mrs. F. M. Clay

San Angelo, Texas

Dearest Mother,

I hope all is well with you.  This card leaves us finding everyone well.  Benjie has never come home.  I wish he would.  I do miss him so.

Though the card was not signed and its words ran almost off the edge in their effort to be contained, Ginny knew the writer was her great-grandmother, Fanny Mary Clay Irby, who preferred to be known as Francis Marie. She knew the card had been written to the writer’s own mother, a shadowy figure known to the family now only as “Mrs. F. M. Clay.”  Mamaw never knew her own grandmother’s given name – she was simply “grandma” in the years of Mamaw’s childhood.  Was that grandmother of her grandmother also called Fanny Mary? Or did Ginny’s unknown great-great-grandpa’s name make her “Mrs. F.M.”?  Ginny had never known for sure, never done the genealogy research at the Federal Archives in Fort Worth that could surely give the answer, because it didn’t matter all that much, the name, or even the tribal registration and surely not the “blood quantum.”  Ginny knew who each of these women had been, and what she represented in the family line, and that was what mattered.  Or she’d thought she knew.   But now, in a flash, all of what she’d thought of as truth was not so certain.  Had she made assumptions about her Grandma Irby that were unfounded?  Was she, Virginia, the “modern woman,” more like her great grandmother than ever she would have dreamed, across the generations?  In ways so obvious, she’d looked right through them as though they weren’t there?    Had she just not been listening to what Grandma was saying about Benjie, that wayward husband who she missed so much?  How could she have so completely missed Grandma’s message across the generations, missed it for all these years?

*****

The picture side of the card was a stern portrait of a little black haired girl – by the date on the card she was 4 years old – she was sitting cross-legged on the grass, or on a bed of leaves – the sepia tones of the card disguised the details of the ground which framed the little girl.  The photographer must have stood above her, pointing the camera downward, for the face in the photograph stared firmly upward, chin tilted back, with not the slightest glimmer of a smile crossing her lovely lips.  And they were indeed lovely, for the little girl was a real beauty, just as Ginny knew that little girl had been when she became a woman, and as she was even until her death at 96, in the first year of a new Millennium.  Even at four, Bessie Neva Irby showed in her expression the Cherokee grit and determination, even stubbornness, that was the legacy of the generations from which she came, the legacy she passed on to daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters.  And soon, Ginny thought, it will be passed on to another generation, for the next woman in the line was soon to be born to Ginny’s youngest child.  And once again for the descendants of the Clay women, the first-born of the family line would be a precious little girl.

The legacy, as it had been articulated to Ginny, was a legacy of survival.  But Ginny was ready for more than survival.  As she read her great grandmother’s writing yet again, and as she recognized her grandmother in that determined little girl, Ginny knew deep in her heart that merely surviving was, for her, no longer an option.  She deserved more.  She deserved to thrive.  She was ready to thrive.  She was ready to fly.  It was time for the legacy of the Clay women to be fulfilled.

*****

Wow!  Was this a night, and a week, or what?  I have so many random thoughts, that they are just wanting to come pouring out.  So here they come:

On the juxtaposition of Bill Clinton and Barack:  single moms trying to raise brilliant sons while working and getting their own education, kids who went to college on scholarships and student loans, just like me and most of you.  Which sounds more like the story suiting a president?  That one, or two multimillionaire who are son and grandson of a multimillionaire who contibuted money to Hitler’s party while America and Britain were preparing for war and France was being invaded?

On the housing crisis as seen by Obama, Biden, and McCain.  Biden takes the train back to Deleware every night, doesn’t even have a second house in D.C., and never has.  Barack and Michelle only paid off their student loans and bought a large, but not gigantic, home in Kenwood on the south side of Chicago after his book hit the best seller list.  McCain owns seven homes, or maybe it’s five, he can’t quite remember where they all are.

On pain:  prisoner of war, decorated and welcomed home with banners, or single dad whose young wife and daughter died in a car wreck on the eve of what should have been the young family’s happiest day.  Hard choice, but either one is more than enough, and neither is qualification for being president.  Survival isn’t enough.  We need to do more than just survive.

Barack and Michelle were our NEIGHBORS in Hyde Park.  They were just plain Hyde Park activists like we were.  His first political race was actually a couple of years before State Senate:  first he ran and was elected to the Local School Council, and his opponent?  My husband Rick!  They shared that stage at the candidate forum.  And when he was campaigning for State Senate, and when he was campaigning (unwisely) against our great First District Congressman, former Black Panther Party Education Chairman Bobby Rush, one of the senior members of the House Education committee, Barack came to speak at the progressive political organizations at University of Chicago that our daughter was a member of, and at the little Haymarket Housing Co-op where Rick and John lived for the year I was teaching and living by myself in Ohio.  He cared enough about 12 progressives, aged 12 to 54, to come for dinner there and talk about his campaign.  That was just 8 years ago last spring.  This is a REAL person, not far away from any one of us, except the super rich, and those he knows well enough to work with.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both support Barack.  So he can hardly be seen as a threat to the unselfish wealthy.  And, frankly, I want him to be a threat to the selfish ones who have been coddled by the Bushes, especially the Shrub Jr. one.  The rest of us have been threatened enough financially to last several lifetimes, and so has the U.S. economy.

Why don’t the commentators know how those common folks who spoke ahead of Barack got there?  They must not be plugged into the netroots, shame on them! You know, of course, because you are reading a blog that isn’t a very big one.  Anyone who contributed $5 at a certain opportunity was entered into a sort of a drawing to pick 10 people to be backstage with Barack tonight.  I guess they picked the most eloquent of the 10 to speak.  But they were all there, and their profiles are all on the Obama campaign website.  They have wonderful, typical, AMERICAN stories.

For any of my newer friends who have doubts, I truly welcome open dialogue between now and November.  I respect McCain, and I truly think we would be much safer and much better off if the Republicans had selected him in 2000 instead of G.W.Bush.  But he is not that McCain.  Karl Rove is running this McCain, not John McCain.  All he offers is Bush 3, and only a small percentage of Americans actually want that.  Don’t be fooled into thinking you have the chance to vote for the John McCain of 2000 or the John McCain of the primary season:  he’s long gone.  But he doesn’t want you to notice.  I think you are smart enough to notice.  I hope so.

That’s it — not very connected or coherent — but real.  Michelle is just a woman, not someone who ever expected to be famous.  Chelsea has offered to help the Obama girls know how to be in the spotlight, from the point of view of a girl who was where they were and remembers it well.  Isn’t it time for a president who represents the best of us, not just the wealthiest of us?  Yes, it is, and yes, we can!

It seems to take less than 3 pages of reading Anne Lamott or Melody Beattie before my own thoughts come pouring out, flooding my fingers to get to the paper, or, in this case, the keyboard.  I wonder how many other women, would-be writers or just women with their own private journals, start reading an Anne Lamott book and end up writing their own book instead?  If I thought my musings could be half as helpful to other women as Anne’s have been, I would surely do nothing but write.  But I don’t know if these musings will help anyone besides me, and, on some level, I don’t suppose it matters.  But I’m still vain and I’m still jobless and I still cherish that little girl’s dream of being a Writer, a Writer Whose Books Other People Buy and Read.

How fitting to be reading Anne’s Plan B, with its railing against the Bush presidency, as I’m trying to be figuring out the Plan B for my own life.  I bought Plan B last week at Half-Price Books, on the bookstore trip made with the intention of buying Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. All Rick and Anne have in common, on one level anyway, is that you never seem to run into anyone who has read either of them and been sorry they did it.  My dear friend of a lifetime, Mary Ellen, told me she was reading Warren’s book, and that she had given it to her nephew and was considering giving it to her brother.  She didn’t suggest I read it, but she did offer to stop at the bookstore on our way back from our thrice weekly infusion of Mexican Food from my favorite Dallas restaurant, El Fenix.  (more…)

May 1, May Day around the world. A time to wear red, kiss a Commie for Christ, share the flowers in homemade baskets, and listen to the birds singing through open windows.

I worked and puttered on the ‘puter ’till, 2, slept like a baby, and am awake and at the keyboard only a few minutes after 9.
I’m beginning to think that, when serene, 7 or 7 1/2 hours sleep is my natural rhythm, plus a power doze sometime in the day, perhaps, but not a planned one.

I’ve woken up the upstairs, remade the day bed and opened the screen, sitting here contemplating the sight outside my window while the cpu wakes up, like my house is doing, like I’m doing, like the birds did hours ago.

And oh, the birds. I hear the caw caw caw of the crow or the grackel, today they drown out the peck peck peck of “my” woodpecker, I hear more other distinct calls and songs than I’ve been able to count, since I’ve yet to learn their language. But I will. This season, I am learning their calls, their sounds, because I want to know, really know, if they have found their mates, if their eggs have hatched, if the fledglings are safe, and when they fledge.

I listen to the tree that strains to caress my open window. Just another foot perhaps, a yard at most, and I could pull the leaves right inside the room. I realize it is the maple, the one in the west neighbor’s side yard; oh, my god, it is the same branch that I have prayed from my kitchen window that they would cut off.   The beautiful branch at my window is part of that nearly dead, surely dying tree, ill for who knows how many decades of its long long life. (more…)

A lot of the time I can’t decide if I have great life or a crappy life. If I have to ask, does that say what the answer is? Just now for some reason I couldn’t get the “A” key on my keyboard to work. I kept trying over and over and then it would work, and now it is taking anywhere between one and 3 hits to get an “a” to show up on the screen. Being one of the most frequent letters in the alphabet, a sentence with no “a’s” in it looks pretty strange.

Am I just missing some small but essential “A” key that would make me intuitively know how to do life? Usually, in typing, you only have to backspace when you have made a mistake. When you hit “d” instead of “s” or you reversed “en” and typed “ne”  instead, which I regularly do typing my own last name, “Owens,” you just hit “backspace” enough times and you get a “do over.” But not being able to count on the “A”  key is different. You know you hit ll the right keys nd yet you look bck nd it appers you didn’t. See? So you have to keep backspacing and redoing it, even when you know you did it right. A lot of the time, that’s the way I feel about my life. And at 59, I am starting to also feel that if I don’t get it right pretty soon and have it stick, I’m going to be out of time, and life in the physical sense will be over.

Sure, I believe I’ll get pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, and chocolate cake and strawberries and meadows full of flowers too, and even streets of gold if I want them. And a mansion with all my loved ones will be waiting for me, shining with light. But I want pie now too, the good old mouth-watering kind like Mamaw used to make, and like she taught me to make.

(more…)

Could RFK + MLK = Barack? or maybe BaRacK?

I don’t know who first made the analogy between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, but the analogy doesn’t work for me. Obama himself admits he isn’t old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and Obama is no John Kennedy. However, after what I saw yesterday in Nebraska, I have concluded Obama isn’t less than JFK; I think he may be more. I think Obama may be the sum of two dreams, the Kennedy dream and the King dream and, more importantly, I think the Obama movement may finally be the movement that can unite multiple sets of dreamers.

I am suggesting, if I may be so bold, that Obama = RFK + MLK. Because after what I have seen in Nebraska this past week, I am reminded not of 1960, when I was only 12, but of 1968, when I turned 20. And since 1968, until last week, I had not seen or heard or felt or known the press of the crowd, the smiles and laughter that can only come from hope, the feeling of being in an enormous family of the human race, finally united with one voice, a voice of peace and of justice — I had not again been in the realm of a sense that “yes, the time is now,” since 1968, until last week.

****************

Being only 20 in 1968, I was not yet old enough to vote. But I was old enough to campaign, old enough to protest the war, old enough to work for civil rights, old enough to see men I knew go to Vietnam and come back crippled in body and, as we soon saw, even more crippled in mind and spirit.

I was old enough to have heard Martin Luther King speak at my college in 1967, the only time he ever appeared on stage with Black militant Stokely Carmichael. (more…)

PREFACE:

I grew up in Texas where we always chose our delegates in caucuses — precinct caucuses. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but my dad was precinct chair and I remember going to the caucus with him. They were in the evening. I somehow don’t remember Mother going — maybe my brother was too young to go, or maybe I just don’t remember it all. And then I was an adult in Austin, and we caucused not for candidates but for platform plank issues. Many people don’t realize that the party platform does get presented, argued, and approved at the convention. First the county convention, then the state, then the big D-N-C.

When I was growing up the convention was always in the summer, when school was out, and I spent a lot of time with my Helton grandparents in the summertime. In those days, Walter Cronkite and Huntley-and-Brinkley, and the rest of the guys on TV and radio covered both conventions “gavel to gavel” and were they ever proud of it! That was long before cable, of course, and we only had 3 channels, then we got “educational tv,” and then we got a local station that wasn’t one of the big 3. All 3 covered the conventions and would never have dreamed there would come a day when they wouldn’t — I’d never have dreamed of it either, and I still forget every 4 years that it’s not going to be that way still. I keep wondering if we should get cable but I just can’t imagine paying for tv — that’s just…. wrong ….. that’s unAmerican ….. they pay for tv in England …. we get our tv free, don’t we? That’s what I remember learning. I think pay tv was right up there with socialized medicine and the queen.

TODAY: WOW!!!

Today NEBRASKA held a caucus. Its first caucus. (more…)

I haven’t posted on my blog lately, but I’m actually doing a lot of webwork.

I am working freelance through odesk.com plus tutoring writing and editing for anyone who wants to hire me privately.

Please pass the word.

I’m working from home so that I can focus on my writing and I hope someone will read it and give me feedback as I post it on my blog.

I am working on several books-in-progress and everything on my site is copyright by me.

What am I doing here anyway?

I had not intended my blog to be about dead people.

I had expected to record my intellectual wanderings, my political brainstorms, and maybe a bit of old-fashioned story telling, for posterity, or whatever passes for posterity these days.

I hoped, probably vainly, that my blog might interest some people and get popular. I’ve always wanted to be one of the popular crowd, even though I know they are usually pretty shallow and even rather boring sometimes.

But I couldn’t be part of that crowd anyway, because I was just never willing to permanently move to the other side of the tracks. I get uncomfortable there and come back as fast as I can. Here in Omaha, the other side of the tracks for me is west of about 102nd street, or even west of 90th or so. I’m even a bit uneasy west of 82nd and Dodge. And I think it looks like Mars out Radial Highway past 90th. Or at least what I imagine Mars looking like once we colonize it. I know for sure west of 680 is the other side of the tracks, the popular side. I practically have an anxiety attack when I have to drive that far west. People drive like maniacs over there. And there are just way too many scarey white people west of 680 for me. (more…)