jury duty

I received a summons for jury duty at the beginning of the month and I wasn't looking forward to it.  I have never been called for jury duty before, and it really didn't sound like my favorite way to spend a hectic work week (i.e. away from work, locked in a sad windowless room, etc).  I was instructed to call a certain phone number after five on the evening before I was supposed to report.  I'm not sure why it all had to be so complex, but whatever.  I called.  And they told me to report at the Shawnee County Courthouse at 8:30 the next morning.

So I showed up this morning, baby at the sitter and coffee in hand.  I was perfectly on time, and then proceeded to sit in a big waiting room with sixty other people all facing one direction and not talking.  We must have waited an hour.  We watched a DVD that was reminiscent of senior-year AP politics.  One thing that caught my eye immediately was the disproportionate whiteness of the group.  Shawnee County is 9% black.  In that group of sixty, I saw two persons who appeared to be African-American (I understand that racial preference can be signified in ways other than outward appearance, of course).  Folks, that ain't 9%!  My wheels immediately started turning about what would cause this skew toward whiteness:

1)  Sitting on a jury requires you to have the sort of employment or home situation where you can either request off in advance, call in the day of and not have negative consequences, or find a babysitter or relative to watch your kids easily.  Or perhaps you're unemployed and have no children.  During the fun of voir dire, I discovered that many people there seemed to be in this category.

2)  The little video stated that names for jury duty were pulled from the rolls of registered voters, those who hold driver's licenses, and those who carry state-issued identification.  All I can gather is that perhaps these sources are disproportionately white as well.

Anyway, before I had too long to think about why everyone was so white, we were split up into smaller groups of about twelve and subjected to the sort of invasive questioning that I thought was reserved for actual suspects of crimes.  I'm serious.  Everyone there was expected to state:  name, current address, any past addresses in the last five years, occupation and time at place of employment, whether you're married, where your spouse works if so, if you have kids, and what ages they are if so, and if you belong to a church or other public institution.  All of this in front of perfect strangers, attorneys, and the defendant in the case.  So, you know, if you find them guilty, they can send a hit list back to their colleagues with nice, specific information.

After the show and tell session, we were asked a bunch of questions that pretty much filled in the details of the case for me.  Had anyone ever gotten a DUI?  How do people feel about law enforcement officers?  Have you ever been tazered (my personal fave)?  Is anyone in your family alcoholic?  Do you think the legal blood alcohol limit of .08 is reasonable?  Does anyone here not drink?  Do you have a bias against people who don't speak English well?  Do you think people who use derogatory language and racial slurs are bad people?  If anyone shook their head differently than the rest of the group, they were singled out and questioned more specifically.  I learned SO many fun facts about our group.  One lady volunteered an embarrassing amount of information about her alcoholic brother, whom she had to remove from a group home because of his chain smoking (??).  Another man thinks that anyone who drinks is stupid and he won't associate with them.  My favorite was the THREE different guys who had been tazered at some point because "in high school a buddy was messing around with this tazer he bought."  And then, of course, learning the minutiae of everyone's DUIs took up a significant amount of time.  Turns out they give these things out like candy at Halloween. 

I myself got caught in the line of fire after being asked about whether I thought law enforcement officers were any more or less trustworthy than any other person.  I said I thought so, because we afford them extra respect and courtesy in our society because of their training and vocation.  This was not a popular answer.  Turns out NO ONE else there felt this way.  So, like, if a police officer walked in and told you to leave the room because it was unsafe, you would just disregard them?  After I persuaded a few people around me that they actually did feel this way, the attorney stopped asking.  No surprise, I was dismissed after that round of questioning!  I don't think attorneys want anyone who could possibly be more persuasive than they are to sit on a jury.  It just makes sense.

I had always heard that religious officials are not usually impaneled for juries.  I didn't really understand why, but now I do.  When I had to state upfront that I'm a pastor, and where I pastor, people looked at me.  When the women on either side of me stated that they belonged to United Methodist churches in town, they saw me as some kind of leader (I hope!).  They were among the two who changed their minds and agreed with me when I was questioned further about law enforcement.

All in all, much food for thought from my first brief jury experience.  Sadly, since pastors seem to make unpopular jurors, I'm not sure that I will ever get to sit through a whole trial.  As much as I hadn't wanted to be there in the first place, I did begin to get curious about what the outcome might be.  And you know, civic duty, blah blah blah.  I'm 'Merican, by God.

no cavities!

I had a dentist appointment this week.  I was one of those kids who always had a cavity when I went for my checkup.  Awful.  So much drilling.  So many amalgam fillings slowly leaching mercury into my system and making me even crazier.

But then when I was about seventeen, they just stopped.  I didn't do anything differently.  In fact, when I went away to college, there were probably a lot more nights when I was a little too . . . preoccupied? . . . to brush my teeth before collapsing into bed.  But the cavities didn't return.  I've had maybe one since I graduated from high school ten (gasp!) years ago.

The fear of the dentist, however, remains.  I still go to the same dentist who saw me as a child.  (Dr. Kincaid in Lawrence - look him up if you want thorough dental care mixed in with a strange sense of humor and lots of nitrous.)  I also retain the sense of ebullient triumph when I hear those words at the end of an exam:  No cavities!

One thing that always comforts me in the waiting room is this toy:

What are these things even called?  I have never seen one outside of the dentist's office.  I wonder if they are marketed specifically to dentists for some reason.

r-12 and saying goodbye

Growing up, we were always a cat household.  There was a stray gerbil here and there that I thought I could handle after keeping the class pet, but they always died of wet tail within a few weeks.  I think I got some fish and tried to keep them in a tupperware . . . once again, didn't work well.  (It didn't help anything that Pet World was three blocks from my house.)

We had Madison first.  We got her at the shelter and she was the sweetest cat.  She was gentle and loving and she got hit by a car near our driveway.  This is the price you pay for having an outdoor cat near a busy street, I suppose.  I think her burial was the first time I saw my stepdad cry.

Then, we got Cleo because my childhood friend Jessie had gotten her mother a bunch of kittens for Mothers' Day as a surprise and her dad said she had to get rid of them all or he would drown them (true story!).  So, I showed up at home with a little white kitten, explaining that I would take care of her and no one would even notice she was there.  Needless to say, it didn't exactly work out that way.  Cleo may or may not have some kind of congenital birth defect because she is totally antisocial, terrified of being held or petted, and not very bright. 

Cleo's plight worsened when Minnie came to live with us.  If I remember correctly, my mom got her from a lady whose child attended the daycare where my mom was treasurer.  The lady lived out in the country and a bunch of feral cats had been born in her barn.  This particular kitten had been shaken around by some farm animal and had to go to the vet for nerve damage.  She couldn't recuperate well at the farm, so we took her in "just for a little while."  (Something like thirteen years later, she still lives with my stepdad and his wife, as does Cleo.)  My theory on Minnie is that the nerve damage never healed well, because she is mean as hell.  She doesn't like being touched, frequently claws and bites, is aggressive toward other animals, and gets this twitchy thing in her lower back and tail when she's agitated.  She has made it her main life's mission to aggravate Cleo:  stealing her food, batting her tail, chasing her around the house.  If Cleo was already neurotic and a little "off," living with Minnie has pushed her over the edge into full pathological behavior. 

My stepdad really likes giving Minnie and Cleo whipped cream out of a can, and tends to feed them whenever they're "hungry," as opposed to on a schedule.  As a result of this, Minnie grew to epic proportions after I left for college.  Cleo got even skinnier, because Minnie was eating her food too.  I never saw it, but my stepdad claims that Minnie got so fat that she couldn't even stand up to eat anymore.  She would lay on her side with her face in the bowl.  The picture of this is so mind-blowingly funny to me that my husband and I talk about it on a near-daily basis.  However, my stepdad took this as a sign that it was time for an intervention, and put her on a diet.  Now she's down to probably somewhere around twenty pounds. 

I tell you all this because I like thinking about the cats, and I think they're funny, but also as a preface to the story of R-12.  Once upon a time, my husband was the property manager for the camp where we met (he did lots of other stuff too, but overseeing one of the camp properties was in his portfolio).  He lived in a trailer on the edge of the property, and one night he and his roommate heard some meowing.  It sounded like it was coming from under the trailer.  They ignored it, but it continued for a few days and was driving them crazy.  So they peeked under the trailer, and found that a cat had given birth to a litter up inside the insulation under the trailer.  The kittens had been abandoned, and were crying out for help.  Jeff and his roommate Pat decided to keep one of them.  They named her R-12, after the grade of insulation in which she had been found. 

R-12 is an absolute beauty.  As you can see below, she is prone to doing all that cat stuff that is so cute.  Through a series of misadventures, she came to be Jeff's cat after he left camp, and then she was our cat after we were married.

Unfortunately, R-12 is also a feral cat.  She domesticated pretty well, but she didn't like being touched much, went into frequent crazy spells where she would attack anything, and after we got the dog . . . well, she was never quite the same.  The dog loved chasing her around and taunting her.  The cat usually won because she still had her claws, but she was antagonistic toward all of us after Pup came around. 

When we found out we were going to have a baby, I pretty much knew R-12's days with us were numbered.  She didn't do very well with adults who knew how to act around animals.  With a baby, or a toddler?  I feared the worst.  She is not what I would call a good "family pet."  The final straw came when I brought home a bag of groceries when I was about seven months pregnant.  She jumped up on the counter to sniff them, and when I went to pet her, she reached up and stabbed me in the hand with her claws.  It drew quite a bit of blood.  If she had done this to me, a human she had known for years who was just trying to give her an affectionate rub, what would she do to a little human pulling her tail!?

So, we took her to the shelter.  I was not optimistic about her chances of being adopted, because she is the kind of cat who pulls back into the cage and hisses at you when you try to get her out and play with her.  With heavy hearts, we said farewell and went back home to just the Pup.  The next day, our good friend Lauren mentioned that she would have taken R-12 - she was looking for a cat with claws to be a playmate for her cat Hank.  So we enthusiastically told her to call the shelter and go pick her up - I was absolutely certain she would still be there.

Lo and behold, she had already been adopted!!  Sad for Lauren and Hank, but I was overjoyed that someone had taken her into their home already.  I hope it was a sweet old cat lady who bends over backward to make R-12 happy.  I could never have done that for her after the baby came along.  It was hard to say goodbye, but having a little closure on the whole experience made it easier.  And we still have all the darling pictures to remember her by.

same faces, new places

Do you ever feel like there are only so many faces and personalities in the world?  Like, there are platonic forms of people or something?  Somewhere around college-aged, I started to feel like every new person I met reminded me exactly of someone I already knew.  I have had the good fortune to meet a lot of different people, but it seems there are only about fifty actual people in the world, and they each have fifty variations. 

If I can't figure out who someone reminds me of, it bugs the bejesus out of me until I can place them.  It's like not being able to remember a word that's on the tip of your tongue. 

Just this last weekend, I was doing a wedding.  The best man was delayed in Milwaukee and wasn't able to make it to the rehearsal.  So, when I met him just before the wedding on Saturday, he immediately struck me.  It was John Hodges, a guy I'd been to Divinity School with.  Only it wasn't John Hodges, it was Robert Glaubius.  Robert Glaubius = John Hodges.  Of course, I don't know either of them well enough to identify them completely as one person.  But the aura they gave off:  the way they looked, talked, smiled . . . it seemed awfully similar.

Just another day inside my strange thoughts! 

proper names

Have you ever noticed that there's a power in the naming of things?  I remember having crushes on boys when I was quite little, and saying their names was like a sort of incantation or something.  My mom had lots of weird little nicknames for all of us, including "sister Susan" for both my sister and myself, pumpkinface, EB (my initials before I was married), Em, Emmy, and more that I can't recall right now.  There was very little proper name calling unless there was anger involved. 

Jeff and I seem to have carried on this tradition.  We very, very rarely use one another's names in our conversations.  Instead, we are both "babe" or "baby."  Or "babu," which came into heavy rotation after an auto-correct mess-up.  I realize this is probably nauseating for anyone who has to spend a significant amount of time with us.  Again, proper names only come out when the dialogue takes a serious or frustrated turn.

We have a dog, and we had a cat.  They both have proper names (Pepper & R-12).  What do/did we call both of them?  Puppy & Kitty. 

And now we have a baby.  Her name is Vicki Jo - we named her for my mother.  No, it's not short for anything.  I can verify that on my mother's birth certificate it says "Vicki Jo."  I'm sure, at this point, you can guess what we call her:  Baby, or the Babe.  It almost sounds weird to me when people say her actual name.  I suppose I'm going to have to get used to it - when she goes to school, they won't be able to put Babe on her desk tag!  Sometimes I worry that she's not going to recognize her real name when the time comes.

My theory on this is that proper names are a little bit too powerful.  It's akin to the hesitation in certain Jewish circles to use God's special name revealed to Moses (JHWH).  God collaborated with Adam to name every single creature on the earth (or so the story goes) - I wonder if he felt the power of that privilege?

theory on pregnant belly-touching

One of the things that is hard to adjust to when you're expecting a baby is that your body enters the public domain.  People feel free to say things to you that they would never, ever say to someone who wasn't obviously pregnant:  "wow, you're huge!"; "you look absolutely miserable"'; "you're even more swollen than last week!"  People also take a kindly interest in your story:  I often joked that I needed a t-shirt that explained my stats.  36 weeks.  April 7.  Girl.  Vicki Jo.  Yes I'm fat and miserable.  That way, people wouldn't need to stop me and ask about all these details. 

My theory is that this interest we (as a society at large) take in pregnant women is a sort of indication of the shared responsibility that we feel for raising children in our culture.  It is for this reason that I didn't get too irritated with people who wanted to know more about the child I was having.  Our culture seems to thrive on radical autonomy rather than community, so I'm all for encouraging the impulse to care for another as much as yourself.  We tend to see ourselves as separated (as in, "your health care problems shouldn't be mine to pay for," or something like that) and the things that we do as having no effect on others.  But we still care about our babies.

We see babies as our next generation - as the ones who may save us from some of the messes we got ourselves into.  So we have an interest in making sure that they are produced in the best possible conditions.  Although not many people randomly touched me on my belly when I was pregnant,  it probably would have made me mildly annoyed if more did.  But I would also have been a bit glad to see that there are still some things that we can all agree upon.

a theory

I have a theory - a highly developed, well-researched theory - that all babies look a lot like their fathers.  I think this is an evolutionary response to assure fathers that their children are actually theirs.  After all, no one can question the identity of the mother if they were around for the birth!  But fathers need a little reassurance.  This ensures that the family unit stays together to care for the child.  I just wish I were an evolutionary biologist so I could say this with any real certainty!  Here is my casual observation on this theory:

 

That's all for today!  Enjoy your Monday, world.