Coffee Klatch as Foretold by Mayme

2-22-2009
A hill in Searcy County, AR

Over the past month, I have listened to people in pre-arranged interviews and impromptu conversations. Both ways of meeting and talking have revealed American insights and wisdom richer than I could have imagined. Of the second kind – the impromptu chats – a good number have taken place in coffee shops.

[True confession: I’ve officially given up giving up coffee until I’m off the road and back home again. Anyway, could it really qualify as a full blown American road trip without coffee? (…This question, a pedantic but historically rooted excuse that might inspire smoky images of cowhands around the morning fire readying again to hit the trail). But, back to coffee talk.]

On January 29 in a coffee shop in Portland, OR Nick, a working class black man told me to make sure to get the voices of the working people. He said “Exchange is like this. It’s Ex + Change and it equals exchanging points of view. It’s communicating and doing. And it can’t be a one way thing.” Then he asked me to tell him what I think of change. I did.

On February 10 in a coffee shop in San Diego, CA a bicultural 25-year-old senior at SDSU named Todd took a break from pouring over his finance text to say, “I don’t really know why I changed.” He went on, “I mean, all through foster care and even adoption the adults all said that I would never be anything but a loser. But here's the thing; I’m not living that prediction. I have changed and I’m committed to building a real life for myself.”

The next day in a coffee shop in Tucson, AZ a 65 year old woman named Cheri agreed to an interview. Cheri wants a government for the people – not for business or for bigger government. She wants freedom. She is a retired law enforcement officer who’s lived in Tucson 55 years. She raised her children to be bilingual and herself learned Spanish because “It’s only right to have both languages if you want to do any job well in this city.” Cheri is a practicing Muslim having been raised in the mosque by her Iranian father and Euro-American mother. She says, “I’m Islamic. That means I’m devoted to God. It also means I want all people to be well and at peace.”

February 19 I was leaving a coffee shop on the banks of the Guadalupe River. I had to make it to Ft. Worth in the next 5 hours. Then I overheard David and Tommy talking about their Sunday school class. They were willing to stop their conversation for a minute to talk about change. David and Tommy, both devout Christians, spoke with pride of their church community in Kerrville, TX. They spoke of the 200-300 youth in their youth ministry and the evidence in a recent personality inventory that these kids are ready to be active in making their community a more peaceful and kind place. Both men emphasized the importance of family and the necessity of shifting values from greed and materialism to concern for one another and for the environment. Tommy, the older of the two, said it was time for Americans to get over being hung up on our differences and to start working together on the urgent matters facing our country. “We’ve been majoring in the minors and not in the majors,” Tommy said. “Wow – that’s really well said,” said David.

Yesterday, February 21, I drove north from Dallas into Sherman, TX. In my little car I was very aware of the strong west wind, a familiar harbinger of a downshift in winter temperature for Grayson County. I made my way through an entirely unfamiliar scramble of new commercial outlets to a newish building back from the highway where my beloved teacher is now receiving special nursing care.

I lived in Sherman, TX for 13 years. Got a BA in the college here, met my husband when he came as a new faculty member, pursued advanced degrees, and birthed my daughter. Mayme Porter, the angel fairy godmother mentor sage of a woman I came to visit today was a constant source of wisdom and comfort across those years. In fact, she has been a guiding light in my life since I was 19.

Late one spring afternoon in Sherman when I was toward the end of 20 or beginning of 21 we sat in Mayme’s shaded backyard. We talked about family and happiness. We talked about health and education. Somewhere in there, Mayme said to me, “Mary, you ought to consider going into some kind of work where you can interview people – listen to their stories and give them back to the world.”

I thought she meant journalism. I ended up choosing to be a psychology professor.

Then last month, I started talking to people in coffee shops. I met Nick and Todd and Cheri. I met David and Tommy. I joined in the Ex:Change.

Today, for about half an hour, dear Mayme brightened up from the fog of Alzheimer’s that too often lays siege to her daytime thoughts. She said she wanted to comment on this thing, change. “Change,” she said, “is taking everything we have and listening to it so we can know where to go next.”

She’s right. Mayme was right all along.

And these days I’m listening and listening.

Cattle Trail

2-18-2009
Kerrville, TX

SCHREINER UNIVERSITY CFO'S OFFICE (MY LONG-TIME BROTHER-FRIEND, FRED THE VP)

The interstate from Albuquerque, NM to Kerrville, TX is … well … long. On either side the land is vast and mostly empty. Exception springs from the brief chorus of rush hour and billboards in Las Cruces and El Paso – fraternal twins of Mexico and the Territory of New Mexico (what we’ve known as the state by the same name since January of 1912).

In the 1950’s, the Eisenhower administration began stamping in this solid band of asphalt where it stretches now like a well-worn cattle trail. All day and all night herds of semis trundle across these deserts and on through bayous and farmlands to convey commerce among the communities rooted to the southern soil between our shining seas.

Dodging in and out of the procession of giants are little cars like mine. In NM we of smaller wheel-bases can get away with 80mph. In TX it nudges up to 85, but drops to 74 or so after sunset when the black signs with white lettering read “NIGHT 65.” The rule: 9 miles over the posted limit usually passes, but don’t even think of cresting 10. The word ‘usually’ and the signs showing lone leaping dear are worth taking under advisement. Driving records can be seriously impaired by being lax in attention to either. And, for all you aspiring road trippers out there, six dark hours of this requisite level of attending, albeit vital, gets mighty wearing.

I’d never pushed my little car into the 80s before yesterday. But the combination of time, distance and a bit of an achy heart served to be all the rationale needed. Environmental sensibilities notwithstanding, I pushed the limit across every mile. And despite its bruises from early in the month, the Mini rose to the occasion without complaint.

Just before noon yesterday, I left my one-and-only at the Albuquerque airport – right where I’d picked him up the evening of Valentine’s Day. I could have stayed in town another night. I was learning my way around the area near the university. There were very fine people who would feed and house me – who would join me again in that rich tumble of conversation exchanged in rooms beneath stars. But the miles of road between Albuquerque and Kerrville offered something more necessary. So, I chose the road.

Love is one of those precious privileges in a lifetime defined necessarily by paradox –by ever increasing measures of joy and pain that pitch me consistently beyond every earlier understanding of either one. Delicate as a sigh, relentless as the contagion of calendar dates and more reliable than the ground beneath our feet, love in any form keeps inviting us to show up.

Time and distance unrolled beneath me for the 11 hours. Strains of country music mixed with news of the day:

"Obama signs a stimulus package in Denver."

Here’s to the trains I’ve missed.

"Stock market deflates toward 7000."

Chasin’ that neon rainbow, livin’ the honky-tonk dream.

The achy heart part of this day and its night fit well with the persistence of highway and the vastness of sky – plenty of room for every song and circumstance, for showing up to love and to every other possibility.

Tomorrow time will empty into its next stream and I’ll wake up to learn from the words and wisdom of Texans.

The Buzz of LA

2-9-2009
Irvine CA

ON THE ROAD BETWEEN LA & SAN DIEGO

The buzz of LA comes in part from its paradoxes.

There’s the manic aggression of drivers on the roads that drape the curving hills – the drivers competing for time and space, the roadways dipping and gliding like strains of Strauss’s Blue Danube.

There’s the local sheriff who is proposing gun control measures to resistant citizens of a county considering cutting funds for both criminal justice and emergency health care.

Then there were this morning’s fashion statements. Adornments of incomprehensible value covering bodies that stood patiently in line at the Starbuck’s off Beverly Drive at Mulholland. And, only hours later, the precise social commentary of uniformed high school students who hope to be the first in their families to attend college.

Yesterday in Santa Barbara, a small side conversation with the veterans tending Arlington West made poetry of paradox. Steve brought up the relationship between solid matter and life’s most agonizing challenges. To have a table, an ocean, or a flag there must be negative and positive atomic forces binding to sustain solid form.

It wasn’t a particularly comforting side conversation – it didn’t make death and war any more palpable. And, we all agreed that paradox seems to typify human experience in and as the natural world.

On her way out of the room today, one of the students in Kathy Goodman’s Advisory said, “Sometimes it’s only when things get really bad that we can see the good stuff we’ve taken for granted.”

Paradox.

Wake Up Call

2-4-2009
Walnut Creek, CA

I’m standing at Mike’s Autobody in Walnut Creek, CA. This wasn’t in the plan.

Yesterday there was a road that, as roads go, qualifies certainly as beautiful. Highway 97 drops out of Klamath Falls, Oregon and onto the long northern shoulders of Mt. Shasta and the state of California. The blue sky was seamless and the mountain, thus unburdened, revealed every inch of its majesty and power. Shasta is said to have a particular and mysterious vibe to it – a presence to be profoundly respected, listened to, and learned from. Yesterday it stood white in its February robes, still in its endurance, indifferent and benevolent all at once to the collection of beings we know as humanity.

The road was straight and empty when I pulled out the flip camera to get one more shot -- one more taste of the mountain’s splendor. The power clicked on. The tiny screen was ready. I turned it to the mountain and spoke. “One more view of Shasta.”

Then there was the sound of gravel beneath the tires. There was a pole bent and crashing across the top of the car. No doubt, a few choice words, but more significantly an extreme calm and presence of mind that lent itself to every nerve and muscle that was needed to guide the car back onto the certainly beautiful road.

“Wake up call,” I thought immediately. I spoke it. “Wake up call.”

This is driving alone on the highways of America. This is the responsibility and it is the opportunity. To pay good attention – to stay focused – to endure boredom and the excitement of magnificence when it moves by the window without giving way to temptations to multitask. For two days I’d been letting myself variously dig through bags in the back seat, reach too far for a new CD, practice my fledgling skills with text messaging, take photos…. Bad idea. How lucky I am to have had a wake up warning this relatively minor.

The Mini is a little the worse for wear. Now George, the supremely genuine and knowledgeable appraiser for Mike’s Autobody, is telling me it will take at least 5 working days to repair the windshield – on account of the dent just above in the roof and window lining.

I’ll wait until Atlanta.

Before I began this trip, I knew it would change me. That’s the metaphor of the hero’s journey – and any journey is a hero’s journey. At the same time I did not (because I cannot) know how the change would and will look. It was the same thing with the birth of Sara – my now 22-year-old daughter. Being a psychologist and all, I was quite confident in the sophistication of my understanding that having a child changes one’s life. I had no idea!

It’s all finally art and improv, this movement through a lifetime.

Yesterday evening, I called my next-door-neighbor, David. We hadn’t had a chance to see one another before I left town. We talked recycling bins, yard needs and identifying characteristics of the people who would be tending my house while I’m gone. Then I told him of the incident on highway 97. I told him of the bruises sustained by my too-cute car. David said, “Sounds like Change to me.”

Yep. That about sums it up.

Change and the great good fortune to pay attention – to learn.

It is all improv. And, in that, there’s a huge range of options for taking responsibility. Attending to wellbeing, as it turns out, only increases opportunity for experience. Duh, huh? If the body isn’t here, the experience isn’t either.

I’m fine. I’m here. I’m into it. I’ve even got a date for an interview with the receptionist at Mike’s Autobody tomorrow morning.

Onward.

Ex:change - Change has come to America

1-21-2009
Portland, OR

One thing is for certain. We love the word.

Change.

It so captured our individual and collective attention that record numbers stacked up at polling booths around the country. No matter whose name we selected on our respective ballots. Change, by whatever connotation, got our vote.

Then, the evening it was all decided, the word became a sentence.

Change has come to America.

And that is so. One way or another, it has. On the downside, we’re acutely touched by economic stressors, fatigued and disgusted with military conflicts and anxiously aware of the degradation of our environment. We know change is urgently needed on these fronts.

But there’s another side. There’s the change that inspires what Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm described as, “fundamental American ingenuity.” It’s a kind of change that rests essentially in vision and hope.

One way or another, Change has come to America, and it is not a dream. It is delivery on dreams.

And like millions of other Americans, I’m feeling it. It feels tentative. It feels bold. It feels long overdue. It feels like no one person can do it alone. It’s an idea that has me willing to suspend cynicism and second guessing – willing to watch and see what happens. And beyond that, willing to take on whatever my part may be for making it real.

This alone is a whole new way for generations of Americans to be American. It’s democracy in action. It’s stepping out of the passivity – out of the long shadow cast by the paternal presidencies of our past and into an active engagement with and as democracy. Because, just maybe, the day of the lone wolf is over.

I’m a social scientist by profession; a teacher, practitioner and ethnographic researcher. I’ve worked with supporting kids struggling in schools, families tormented with ‘dysfunction,’ communities saying ‘no’ to institutional oppression, and management saying ‘yes’ to uncompromised dignity and justice in enterprise. It’s been lucky work. It has challenged, taught and enriched me in countless ways.

One thing I’ve learned is that change is most likely when those who want it know what it is, and can describe how they’ll recognize it when it has happened. That clarification leads quite naturally to a sense of agency, a sense of responsibility. To watch a kid who’s been floundering in school get it that his learning belongs to him and is his right; to show him the skills he already has for being his best educational advocate – that is one major thrill!

Now, here we stand threshold of the equally thrilling prospect for American change. Given my career and experience, I find myself drawn to documenting some of what is actually a necessary and immediately practical conversation – a national conversation on the nature of this change we say we want.

What do Americans mean when we say change? What specifically do we want to see changed? What do we want to retain, or keep the same? How will we recognize change as it develops? What is a fair representation of the range of American priorities for change? And among and beneath the myriad differences in our definitions and goals, what do we agree on?

Declaring what we mean by change leads to action. It shows up in shifts of behavior and relationship – shifts that are personal and thereby public – shifts in sensibility and thus in policy.

All this talk and its attendant enthusiasm brought me quite lately to a huger for the road and an unusual idea. What if I took a few months … say 100 days … to listen to what Americans have to say about change?

On the last day of 2008 … quite symbolically, as it turns out … I sent an e-letter to hundreds of friends and family describing the trip and asking for their help in identifying people to talk with and places to stay. The response has been delightfully overwhelming. People are thrilled. They’re over-the-top generous with their creativity in supporting the … well … infrastructure of this adventure.

All of that points to first hints of a theme: The enduring (yet often unseen) presence of human kindness.

True to good ethnography, my early sense of this theme is, of necessity, tentative and open to adjustment. That’s the way it is with listening to the way people make meaning – and through that getting a sense of the points of shared meaning – the collective intelligence emanating from the hopes and dreams of a Nation.

Also true to good ethnography are the questions. They are general enough to allow for any given respondent to take the conversation whatever way seems right to them. When I hop in my little car with my flip video, my sleeping bag and my lap top, I’ll be looking to spend time listening to people across the spectrum of American experience. People of all ages, genders, political affiliations, spiritual communities, sexual orientations, physical abilities, socioeconomic circumstances – all cultural, ethnic and geographic backgrounds. I’ll transcribe what they say so that people across the country can hear, directly and in their own words, what these brother and sister Americans mean when they say “change.”

That’s the plan. And the reason for this particular description is to ask for readers’ input. How does this strike you? What subtle considerations of content might we have missed?

My virtual pit crew and I are calling the trip EX:CHANGE. The website will be live at: exchange09.com. The exceptional skills of the all-volunteer crew will make it possible for me to blog and to post photos and other information as I move across the country. Thanks to their talent and expertise, I’ll be freed up to drive and to concentrate on listening.

Our goal is to provide for general review a collection of diverse perspectives on American Change in 2009. Central to the project is the proposition that if we are to be full agents of the change we seek, we need to know what we’re talking about.

EX:CHANGE will make available a chronicle of individual insights and collective notions of what American Change means to American people – right here, right now, on the threshold of the new day we’re all stepping into together.

What do we need to make sure not to miss as this trip develops?