Aug. 10, 1995

Dear Pat,

A school teacher reminded me that half the world is walking about with a bad dream in their eyes these days. It's back to school time.

Not time to go back to school, but the time of year when kids start counting how many days of freedom are left. Kind of like prisoners in reverse.

The signals are everywhere. Tweedy clothes in the stores, a little reminder on the marquee in front of the high school, shadows falling on the wall earlier and earlier.

Alan must be excited, beginning first grade. You, too, single mom. Next thing you know he'll hate girls -- it's necessary to gain admittance to the Boys Club. Once you're in it's OK to like them again.

I wonder, though, if some girls might not take this period of being scorned by boys too much to heart. And if some boys might not ever quite grow out of it, though they date and marry.

I saw a good movie called "Something to Talk About." Set in the South, where the women in the charity league are still debating whether to use their own first names or their husbands' in the cookbook they're compiling.

The men in this culture always have the last say and pursue their extracurricular pleasures with hardly a thought about the consequences. And if they get caught, well the women have been trained in keeping the peace and keeping their expectations low.

Falls from grace come as a great shock to these men and as tests of will for the women.

This is, I think, a culture that is fading from the landscape. Most men I know speak of women much less in terms that objectify them, or even as mysteries to be sought and, once won, ruled over. Maybe that's just because we're older, working on wiser.

Years ago in Southern California I met an otherwise intelligent man who rated women according to their "tight unit-to-airhead ratio." It was a joke, but at all of our expense. He's now the editor of a surfing magazine.

People can grow up, even if it takes us 30 years or 40 or 80. The thing is, it seems to be a never-ending process. You're always finding a new definition of what growing up means.

Sometimes people who use drugs come to see DC. They are difficult to treat because their tolerance for painkillers is high but their tolerance for pain itself is low. I think of them as people who won't grow up, who think they can't live with the realities. And as painful as realities might be, the fear of them is worse.

Once I went to watch a Japanese dancer named Eiko lead a workshop for young students. She was simply trying to teach them how to walk.

The way to walk, she said, is like someone whose path takes them across a field of wildflowers. In order to walk across the field you must step on some of the flowers. You must walk, she said. Do so with the awareness of the damage you do.

Walking softly on the Earth or on the feelings of people we may even love isn't the easy way. So much easier to annihilate the knowledge of what we do, rejecting responsibility with rationalizations about "the way it is" or with the essence of wildflowers.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.