Pamela Jean Owens off-line

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.  Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it was bound to happen. I learned Fortran at SMU School of Engineering when I was a senior in high school back in 1965, when the Engineering faculty hadn’t figured out yet how to teach Fortran to their Freshman Engineers. So they enlisted our Honors Math teacher from Hillcrest (High School, Dallas), Mrs. Lee Ellwood (beloved she will ever be by all her students, Amen) to teach us and then teach their teachers how to teach them. I fell immediately in love with the whole idea of a Flow Chart. I reveled in searching down and fixing bugs. I giggled with glee as page after page of computer paper flowed over the spindles of the printer, with its beautiful alternating green and white pattern (oh, be still, my heart!).

Then I strayed from the world of geeks, save for a brief foray as a college senior taking statistics in my Sociology Methods class and again writing a program to do a factor analysis of a set of data for my senior paper. Once again I marveled at the Flow Chart. I passionately swatted and thwarted all bugs in my program. I caressed that print-out and eagerly consumed my results. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I was first introduced to computers in my senior year of high school, Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas. I graduated high school in 1966. As a young math whiz, I was part of an honors math class that learned so much Calculus that I placed into the third semester of Advanced Calculus as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, and during that semester I tutored the sophomore science and engineering students in the class with me. And we didn’t get to anything that was new to me until most of the way through the semester.

Our amazing math education was not just because we were young prodigies, although some said we were. More important than who we were had to be who our teacher was, Mrs. Lee Ellwood, a genius of a teacher who had taken every math course offered at S.M.U., undergrad and graduate, but wasn’t interested in writing a dissertation so they couldn’t give her a doctorate. But the math profs at S.M.U. were in awe of Mrs. Ellwood, so when they kept bombing out trying to teach Fortran, the new computer language that was so important in the early days of serious computer use, to their freshman Engineering students. They appealed to Mrs. Ellwood to figure out what they were doing wrong. The deal they offered her was that she would learn Fortran, which she was bound to do anyway, then she would bring us out to S.M.U. once a week for an evening class and teach us Fortran. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

When I first started a personal blog last year, not having any real plan in mind for it, someone who had meant a lot to me had just died. Not surprisingly, I decided to write about her. I was blogging every Sunday night, or that was the plan, and by the following weekend I had gotten news of the deaths of three more people important to me. And again the next week. Suddenly it seemed like, one after another, all my teachers were dying. Then I realized that I was experiencing the same thing that everyone my age must be experiencing.

I had already known that my Aunt Eva, who died in 2004, was the first of what will inevitably be eight deaths of beloved relatives from the World War II generation. Since all my aunts and uncles are now in their eighties, most likely their deaths all will come in the next ten to fifteen years. Since nearly all of my ancestors lived long lives, well into their eighties or nineties, I’m not expecting any less of my immediate aunts, uncles, or parents. But they are only eight of many elders of their generation who have enriched my life and made me who I am. Read the rest of this entry »