Rose-Colored Glasses

Published in slightly edited form July 26, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week I confessed the little fling I’m having with girly pink glasses.  But most of my life I’ve been associated with a deeper, and more consequential shade of eyewear:  rose.

           

     The phrase “rose-colored glasses,” of course, refers to the lenses, not the frames.  It’s a metaphor for a way of seeing the world in which its darker side is not visible.  People who are accused of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses are being criticized for not seeing (and not being willing to see, since glasses are removable,) the tougher, grimmer parts of existence.  They only want to see the good, not the bad.

           

      I can remember a time in my life when I qualified for that criticism.  It was before I left for college, when I still could watch the news on television and simply not comprehend the civil rights uprisings in LA, Detroit, Chicago and the entire southeastern U.S.  Then I left home and started trying to make a new one.  Then came the oil embargo of the 1970’s and the tortuous end of the Viet Nam War.  That’s when reality set in:  bad exists, as well as the possibility that it reigns.  Since then, the question for me has been where and how do you take your stand against that?

           

     I’m sure that people who met me when I first moved to Lindsay in 1993 thought I had rose-colored glasses strapped tightly to my face.  In response to their sentiments bemoaning this community’s losses, partly due to the 1990 Freeze but perhaps even more to Lindsay Olive’s collapse and Sunkist’s decline in market-power over the prior decade, I would smilingly say “but look at what you still have.”

           

     And I meant it.  What I found in Lindsay then was a level of authenticity and environmental intimacy that I hadn’t known since I moved away from Puyallup, WA.  As our economic shakedown continued, however, I began to experience losses in the community, too.  By the time the City started ripping apart the park and downtown, I was attached enough to this place to mourn its demise, even though the replacements promised to resurrect the community’s viability (which they haven’t.)  For years my metaphorical glasses were dark.

           

     Then came the Lindsay Uprising of 2010, when local residents found their voices and raised them in protest of exorbitant wages and unfair lending practices at City Hall.  They called it corruption, and though the people never found a way to legally prosecute these nefarious activities, it started a call for governmental accountability and transparency that still has teeth.

           

     All we wanted then was a city government that was responsible to its residents, not to special interests.  I think that’s still what we need, and what we still can work to achieve.  Call me hopeful, not blind.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who works to be clear-sighted.  You can send her your thoughts on lens colors c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

pink glasses

Published in slightly edited form July 19, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There’s a commercial on television these days that I find particularly offensive.  It’s from the world of big-box optometry, and features an aggressive man dressed in a pink leotard and tutu mocking a ballerina, who lands in the middle of a middle-class living room and proceeds to ridicule a woman for wearing pink glasses. 
           
     In the living room, some women are discussing a book they are reading.  The condemned woman is trying to share her views on the book when she is rudely interrupted by the intrusive man (unfortunately not an unusual event in women’s lives.)

           

     He claims these other women can’t possibly take her ideas seriously because she’s wearing these pink glasses that SCREAM ---- and he doesn’t even have to explain why or what the glasses scream.  He simply has to claim that they do – and everything stops.

           

     Forget that the man looks ridiculous, and clearly has no room to point fingers.  What lacerates me is the reminder of the double-bind of femininity:  damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  But there’s a class message here, too, and that one brings me out to bat.

           

     The commercial is really aimed at those of us who think buying cheap reading glasses is an adequate solution to the problem of increasing fuzziness on the page.  They’re trying to convince us that we don’t have to take this embarrassing route.  For only $69 we, too, can have real glasses that SPEAK of economic well-being equivalent to people with health plans that include eye care, not scream our insurance-less bargain-basement survival strategies.

           

     Of course, if you’re paying good money for glasses, you’re not going to choose pink frames.  You’ll choose the standard silver or gold metal, or faux horn-rimmed, all of which imply a certain class or intellectual capability.  Those rims certainly will not distract anyone from anything.  They’ll make you fit right in.

           

     I remember when I bought my first pink glasses from Dollar Tree.  I already had several pairs of cheap readers in standard colors and shapes, the kind you’d wear in the presence of other people.  Then I found a pair of colorful paint-splattered white ones.  I wore them when I worked at RN Market, and people complimented them all the time.  When those broke, I replaced them with a plum-colored pair from Rite-Aid, since I had a little cash and they were on sale.  The compliments stopped, but I wore them anyway because they stayed on my head.

           

     But when I found the pink pair, and put them on my face, I felt just a little bit more feminine.  That’s a difficult place for me to stand some days because of cultural sentiments like the one in this commercial, but the glasses helped.

           

     I now have several pair.  Mostly I’ve worn them at home, but those days are over.  From now on you’ll see me in public with pink glasses perched on the top of my head if not on my face.  Take that, you wolf in women’s clothing.

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Trudy Wischemann is an aging reader who writes in Lindsay.  You can send your views on rim colors to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 92347 or visit leave a comment below.

 

Summertime

Published July 12, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


    Summertime has arrived.  From now until Labor Day, we plow through the worst of our midday heat and the best of our mornings and evenings.  Everything grows abundantly with water and shrivels when water is withdrawn, including our children.  Our old people.  Our souls.

           

     I don’t hear that word without turning on the record player in my mind and hearing Bess sing “Summertime, when the living is easy.”  I’ve sung it myself a few times, mostly over the kitchen sink but once or twice before an audience.  I always find myself reaching for the meaning between the notes. 

           

     People not familiar with the musical “Porgy and Bess,” especially people right here in California’s sweltering breadbasket, might snort and say “Easy? Yeah, if you’re not a farmworker.”  But Bess is black, singing to an orphaned black infant cradled in her barren arms.  The chorus behind her and the community they represent, too, are black, poor, and obtain every scrap of food they eat by the labor of their hands.  They live tightly conscripted lives under white rule.  Nothing is easy.  Summertime is just easier: “Catfish are jumping, and the cotton is high….”

           

     Then Bess croons some fabrications to the baby, which puts the “easy living” idea in context.  “Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good lookin’,” she lies, comforting herself more than this tiny soul who has yet to speak its first word.  The truth is, Bess’s soul is rising to the occasion of this unplanned motherhood, expressing perhaps her first words of protective parental instinct.  “So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.”

           

     Then parental hope arrives.  “One of these mornings,” she projects, “you’re gonna rise up singing. You’re gonna spread your wings, and take to the sky.”  In one rendition I heard when I was growing up, this prospect brings Bess not only hope, but also a kind of terror that we hear in the singer’s voice.  What mother hasn’t freaked at the thought of her chicks fledging the nest?  And when the world outside Bess’s community is so incredibly hostile to people of her class and color, the natural fear is tinged with terror.

           

     These things come to mind, I think, because summertime for so many people is tinged with terror.  This summer could be worse than previous ones, not just due to climate change, but because we’ve become short-tempered with each other and politically hamstrung, and because some people in power think the way to deal with fear is to increase it.

           

     I’m glad I live here and not in New York or New Orleans, Chicago or Cleveland.  Grateful, last weekend we took a joy ride up to Three Rivers at sunset.  As we zig-zagged up the western slope of Rocky Hill, the Friant-Kern zig-zagged below, glimmering fluorescent orange against the dark groves, reflecting the polluted horizon.  This year, with its abundant water supply, summertime living is easy – for some.  Let us not forget the others.

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Trudy Wischemann is an unromantic Western writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your sunny thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.