My Friend the Pimp

I had this conversation with a pimp once. Actually, in my job taking ads from pimps and prostitutes, I had many conversations with pimps, prostitutes, and madams. But only one of those conversations has stuck and become part of the fabric of my day-to-day. If there were a Top Hundred Countdown of the Most Important Conversations in my life, it would be right in there somewhere.

You see, there was this young pimp who came in every week to place his ads. He ran several of them. We required that all transactions be in cash. I guess it works best for all concerned parties that way. He'd pull the giant roll of hundreds out of his pocket and hand me ten of them, with no more thought than I apply to using a fistful of dollars to buy burritos at Anna's Taqueria. Young pimp was always impeccably dressed in what appeared to be designer suits - like I would know what a designer suit looks like. What he was wearing? That's what I imagine a designer suit would look like. He was always super-respectful, in a deep South sort of way that is rare up here. "Yes, Ma'am" and "No Ma'am" even though I was probably only a few years older than him.

He seemed so bright; he could have been running any sort of business. His future didn't seem, to me, to be limited to trading in flesh.

After months of weekly cash exchanges that were only a few words at a time, "Could you change that headline to read 'Georgia peach' instead of 'Spicy Latina', Ma'am? Thank you so much.", I asked him what got him into this line of work. He looked up from his bankroll like I had slapped him in the face. There was a long silence while we stared at each other.

I wish I had a videotape of the conversation that followed. Time has not been kind to my memory. I remember everything up to the conversation like I'm in it, but his exact words have gotten misty. I do remember his first response, "What would you have me do?"

I had no answer. He continued on, then, explaining that he needed to make money, and that this was the only way he knew how. There were no other successful working people for him to look up to as a kid. He climbed up the ladder of success that was presented to him at a young age, and he was doing brilliantly at it. He said kids like him didn't go to college or go into the above-ground business world and that it was something I could never possibly understand. He thanked me for placing his ads and left.

I didn't cry then, but I did cry afterwards, in my office. And I quit the job shortly after that. We needed the money, but we didn't need it that badly.

I support a lot of anti-human trafficking organizations. I look for other ways to make amends for having supported myself on the backs of young girls and the men who sold them. A lot of the anti-trafficking groups demonize the men and boys who pimp. I learned that day that a lot of those men and boys are trapped in the same web as the girls they sell. I'm not saying they don't do horrible things. I have read about the ways they entrap girls and keep them bonded to them. There's a flaw in the system, though, if men like my friend the pimp go into this business because they see it as their only option. And, yes, Backpage and all the other businesses (including the one I used to work at) who profit from this system of exploitation and slavery should pay.

On Transformation, or Werewolves and Butterflies

I've always loved monster movies, especially the ones where the normal, run-of-the-mill folk get transformed into hideous monsters. I prefer my monster movies with the rough, pre-CGI transformations, like the original Wolf Man or American Werewolf in London.

That American Werewolf transformation is a particularly painful one to watch.

Any transformation can be painful, even the ones where you are not turning into a horrible monster. This yoga teacher training I am in has been anything but peaceful and serene, though it has provided moments of those feelings, too.

I am gearing up for Module III, the last ten day module of teacher training, after which I will be a 200 hour certified teacher. The teacher training is only part of the transformation that I have been going through, American Werewolf-style, for the past four years or so. After the birth of my twins and then my third son a brief spell after, I burned in the fire of anxiety and panic, got swallowed up in depression and fear. And somewhere in the process of trying to keep my head above water, trying to continue to be a loving and mindful mommy while my insides were churning and I was consumed in completely unregulated emotions, I learned some ways to cope with dread and still find beauty on a planet that wasn't (and frankly still isn't) living up to my high expectations. This transformation has been painful. I can see myself on the screen, writhing and howling, eyes turning yellow, teeth getting sharp, hair growing all over my body. Actually, since I turned 40, hair HAS been showing up in odd places ...

Some might find it more comfortable to compare the transformation from certified crazy person into yoga teacher to the transformation from caterpillar into butterfly. I certainly WAS chubbier before the transformation, and I DID eat a lot like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I imagine the transformation that a caterpillar goes through is probably pretty brutal, too. We just don't get to see it behind the screen of the cocoon. In the end the butterfly floats off on the breeze, blissful and serene (we imagine). Yes. This transformation isn't like that.

Again, there are moments of the blissful and serene, but there are more moments of hard work and continued challenges along the path to continued transformation. I still occasionally have panic attacks when I miss my "medicine" - daily yoga practice. My body is sore and my brain is tired more often than not. But I still feel like I'm transforming into something stronger, more resilient, and more aware than before.

The comparison to the werewolf movies really hit home this weekend, after Saturday morning yoga class with Bo. I have been working hard to bring space back into my cervical vertebrae, into relaxing my neck and upper back muscles while strengthening the muscles that pull my shoulder blades together and down my back. All of these areas have been set asunder by pregnancy, nursing, having giant breasts that really no one should have to carry around all day, and by stooping to compensate for being six feet tall in a world where ladies are expected to be much smaller than that. At any rate, Bo worked these areas on Saturday, and on Sunday I woke up looking like I was going through a werewolf transformation. I was sore all over, my neck was kinked, and the muscles of my shoulders were burning like they were on fire. I had that hung over feeling that you sometimes get after a really strong workout or after a massage. It was all just the pain of muscles truly exercised - no damage - but it still hurt. That's what this transformation has been like physically and emotionally more often than not.

While I have been contemplating my transformation and the upcoming finale of my teacher training, there has been a debate raging over the relative merits of yoga practice. More on that in another blog. But this quote from Barbara Benagh (from this Sunday's Boston Globe) sums up my feelings on that subject as well as my feelings on yoga and the transformation it can bring:

"...I conclude that [yoga] is neither inherently dangerous nor guaranteed to be safe and healing. Yoga is a process that requires a willingness to look at one's own physical and mental patterns with honesty and humility, and to develop the discipline to seek physical and emotional hardinesss. It's a lifelong and imperfect process for which I am thankful daily."

The House is the Shoes

We are preparing for a move. But we don't know where we are moving to yet. We know we need to leave, but we don't know where to. It is unsettling.

We bought this house when we thought we wouldn't be able to have kids. We bought a cute, small house for the two of us to live in. We promptly painted it purple. It was a cute, small house so close to the train tracks that it shakes when they go past and its walls get coated in black soot from their exhaust. A cute, small house so close to the neighbors' houses that we can hear them speaking softly in their houses. We also can hear them yelling and hurting each other and smell their food and their cigarette smoke. It was a cute, small house that doesn't have a parking space and where little rows over parking become big, heated battles with the people we share our street with.

Within a year of buying our cute, small house, we had filled it up with twins. Then another baby a couple years later. We continued to be committed to our town, the place where we have lived longer than any other place in our lives. We went to public meetings, we agitated for positive change. We volunteered for things. We put in roots. We got chickens as pets and put them in the yard. They promptly tore it to pieces and pecked us in the eyes, but they were still our pets.

And now we are looking to move. A million small things have piled up to make us realize that we need to go. But we don't know where. We know we need to go soon. We know we need to have our house ready to show in the spring rush for housing. So we have been going through all of our years of belongings and putting them in a "Keep" pile or a "Donate" pile or a "Trash" pile. The keep pile has things like baby shoes, pictures of us when we were much younger, art that we have made and don't make any more. But the baby things are the hardest. Preparing for this move is admitting that our babies are growing. And that our baby years are over. Our baby things go in the "Keep" or "Donate" piles, but they are not necessary items any more. They are just memories. Our chickens moved to a farm where they will live out their days. The house wouldn't show well with chickens, we were told.

All of our "Keep" pile will go into storage. We will live simply until we know where we are going. We will have to keep our limited possessions neat and put away so that strangers can walk through our house and imagine their things in place of ours, their lives superimposed on what remains of our stuff.

Our kids get sad whenever we go on trips, whenever it is time to leave. They attach their sadness onto possessions, usually. For example, when we left a family trip to Georgia for Thanksgiving at their great grandmothers', they had to leave behind old carry-on bags that were falling apart. They cried for the hourlong drive to the airport over their luggage being left at Great Grammy's house. When we left a Christmas trip to my parents' house, we left behind very old, very ill-fitting shoes to be donated to smaller cousins. On our drive to the Tampa airport, they cried big, hard sobs for the shoes being left behind.

We get it: the sadness we feel for the house is the sadness the kids feel for their shoes. The house is the shoes. It's just a place. It feels like it holds the memories, but it doesn't really. The memories are in us. But it's easy to get sad at the thought of moving on and leaving these things behind. We will all be together in our new house. The family is intact and unchanged. It's just the place that will be different.

Impermanence is a theme often studied in meditation and yoga. Pema Chodron addresses change in her book Comfortable with Uncertainty:

"What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you react when you're not measuring up to your image of yourself, everybody is irritating you because no one is doing what you want, and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict? At these times it helps to remember that you're going through an emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed. It's as if the rug has been pulled out from under you. Tuning in to that groundless feeling is a way of remembering that basically, you do prefer life and warriorship to death."

The Chicken Lady

We are selling our house, and among the many things we had to do to get it ready to put on the market was to get rid of our pet chickens. I was afraid this would mean eating them, or giving them to the Live Poultry Fresh Killed place in Cambridge, but after a call to my friend Paula Jordan (the Queen of Arlington - she knows everybody), I emailed a woman who knew a woman ...

So, the chicken lady that I met via email had a self-proscribed "large flock of birds" in Bolton including two bantam hens and a bantam rooster who were wild and could use the strong presence of a family of domesticated hens. Plus she had her eyes on my very nice wood coop that I was giving her for free for taking the chickens off my hands.

The chicken lady gave us her address and told us how to prep our birds for the trip - wait til they went to sleep, when they are basically dead - you could do anything to them when they are asleep and they won't notice - then put each one in a box and let them sleep there overnight and through the trip.

Everything went precisely as planned, and I woke up bright and early on Saturday morning to break down the coop. Thank goodness it was a balmy 50 degree January morning, because that was back-breaking work already, and having to pry a frozen coop apart would have been much less fun.

I loaded the chicken boxes, the coop, and all of our various chicken supplies in the car with my youngest son, Hank, who was recovering from a nasty reaction to a Measles vaccine. He was excited to go see "the farm" where the chickens would live, plus it was an opportunity for him to hold Garmin, our GPS. He is in love with Garmin. It makes it hard for me to find unknown addresses, however, as he has to HOLD Garmin - in the backseat - and then interpret Garmin's directions for me. Did I mention he is four? At any rate, we usually find the places we are looking for, but not always by the most direct route. He's starting to learn his right and left, though, which helps.

We drive out to Bolton, into a subdivision, and I think, "Uh-oh ... I was describing this as a farm to the kids ... " We pull up to the Chicken Lady's address and first notice the giant trash pile in front, the Christmas tree laying in the middle of the yard, the enclosed front porch with sheets hanging over the windows, blocking our view. Hank didn't want to come with me onto the porch. He was flummoxed by the lack of a doorbell, by the empty tanks that probably once had animals in them, the collection of axes by the front door, the ram skull, the various other skulls, the piles of things ... We knock once. We wait. We knock again. We wait. We knock again...

I'm starting to hear rustling inside. I'm getting a sinking feeling of dread myself. I'm thinking about the guy who posted on Craigslist that he needed farmhands and then killed the people who showed up. And then the door opens and a very nice looking middle-aged lady smiles at us and asks us in. I look at the skulls, the axes, and I follow her inside.

The front room of the house is piled with stacks of ... things. There are large stacks of little cakes of cheese or soap or something. There are cooked animal carcasses in various states of decay. There is a giant stack of waffles. The kitchen counter is covered in old food. The lady invites us into the kitchen where she starts pulling out skulls of things and showing them to Hank, who has lodged himself so deeply into my thigh that he can't possibly see anything. He keeps mumbling, "let's give her the chickens and go, Momma." She explains that the skulls get left out in the yard for the animals to clean off for two years and then they are ready to bring in. She shows the hole in the back of the baby lamb skull from where the bolt when in to kill it. The cakes of things are soaps made out of baby lamb fat. Hank says, again, "Let's give her the chickens and go, Momma."

So we go out to the yard to look at the coop. She has about ten geese, giant geese, flapping and yelling at her. She has ducks, about a dozen ducks, flying all around. She says, "The geese are mad at me right now because I keep eating them." She points to one of the ducks flying around and says, "She'll be the last one that I eat because I can't CATCH her!!"

She puts us in the chicken coop.

As I'm trying to figure out if I can break out of the chicken coop if necessary, she comes into the chicken coop to show us around (it's the size of a walk-in closet). We are in there with the ducks. Hank says, "Let's give her the chickens and go, Momma."

So we go get the chickens. They seem to love her. They are unsure of the coop. They have never roosted higher than a foot off the ground. The Chicken Lady's roost is about five feet up. The chickens are VERY unsure of the ducks. The chickens bok questioningly at Hank and I as we get led out of the coop by the Chicken Lady.

The Chicken Lady shows us her rabbits. She's eaten all but two of them. She says she won't eat the two that are left - one because he is too old and mean and the other because he is too sweet.

She shows us her beehives. She talks a lot. She tells me that her neighbors in her fancy subdivision hate her, but that her town has recently passed a Right to Farm act so she is legally allowed to do all of these things in her backyard. She gives me a block of baby lamb soap to take home. It's going to be good for my skin, she assures me. Hank is literally dragging me, with rapidly increasing force, towards the car, and his pleas to leave the area are getting louder and more forceful as well. So we bid farewell to the chickens, and the Chicken Lady. She promises us she will send us pictures as the girls get settled. She promises us to invite us out when she gets new chicks and baby lambs in the spring so that we can see the menagerie in full swing. She promises us she won't eat our chickens.