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The Retail Worker's Dark Weekend

For various reasons, I try never to shop on "Black Friday Weekend", avoiding the post-Thanksgiving madness and the media-constructed frenzy of shop-til-you-drop consumerist Americans and their lemming-like trip to the malls. I've worked in retail too long to see the romance, I don't like crowds, and frankly, the "bargains" of this shopping holiday are overstated.

It's also the case, these days, that I will probably also be working for most of it.

Black Friday this year was notable for a couple of things - one was the encroachment of the shopping into the actual Thursday of Thanksgiving, and the second was a planned, notable, if debatably successful attempt at labor actions outside of many Wal-Marts around the country. Even by the organizers' generous assessments, the number of workers participating in these protests was in the hundreds, though media coverage did clearly amplify the noise and the effect of the protests.

The remarkable thing, really, is that it's taken much of my lifetime for Thanksgiving to be breached by retailers as sacrosanct; only Easter Sunday - and Christmas Day, I suppose - remain as the day of no shopping, and that anachronism may be the hardest to topple, but it's also the one that makes the least sense (at some point, Christian traditionalism will be damned). Literally 20 years ago, I was having conversations with family and friends that one day, obviously, retailers would launch the "Thanksgiving Day Sale" - I mean, heck, one day, Macy*s was sure to notice that there was a crowd of people outside the store after that darn parade, if nothing else - and one more domino would fall on the notion that for one day, at least, we could forestall the real American pastime (shopping, not football).

Let's be clear: we don't close stores for the sake of shoppers. Keeping shopping out of Thanksgiving wasn't some kind of "have respect for this important American holiday, consumerism can wait." No, the point of closing stores was simple human decency for the American worker. Let's take one day, just one day, and nobody, or almost nobody, should have to work. The problem with Thanksgiving, arguably, started with my company, Starbucks; we're the most major corporation I know of that sees no particular reason to close its outlets on any holiday at all. Almost all Starbucks are open on Thanksgiving, for at least some portion of the normal day. Many are open on Christmas. We are almost all open on Easter, normal hours. We close early on days like New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. But we are open. Always open. And people get bewildered when we close, even for obvious practical reasons, like a hurricane.

But Starbucks isn't just a restaurant - food being the general exception to "closed on the holiday" - we are a retailer, and we are located in shopping centers and malls like the other retailers and we sell more than just drinks and food and we're helping, I think, to erode the idea tbat there's one day, any day, when a retailer should be closed. 

And the people who get punished, when we lose even one day of being closed... are workers.

I was struck, this year, by the fact that, however small, people (and the media) seemed to take nte of the workers. It wasn't a big story, and it was surely subsumed by the stories of stampedes and fights and all the attendant madness of crowds. But the Wal-Mart action and the Thursday opens did get people talking, and talking about what these things mean to workers. Which is, after all, almost all of us. We are a nation of service workers, now, and it means that many of us work to serve the rest of us. It's a different equation about work and what we think of people who serve and it's complicated... and I think we're only just beginning to sort out the cultural and social implications, never mind the political and economic ones.

The Wal-Mart action revived the favorite liberal topics of how bad the big W is, how badly its workers are treated... but Wal-Mart in many ways is really just a stand-in for most of retailing, where the wages are low, the hours are long, and the rights of workers mean but so much. Attempts to unionize most retail workers, in or out of Wal-Mart, are rarely successful, and are unlikely to succeed en masse or long term. To say this is to be labeled "anti-union", and I'm not; but the realities are stark. I've been in retail a long time, and I've known many, many of the women (mostly) and men who work there. Don't take my word for it... but most of them are not interested in a union. And won't be. They are students and mothers and transient and free thinkers. Not being organized provides a kind of flexibility and set of options many workers want, and even need. Unions have not found a way to convince retail workers, generally, of their value long term. And still, that's unlikely to change much.

Even more to the point, as I've said before, because we are no longer a nation of mostly manufacturing jobs, Unions do not really respresent the majority experience of most workers in this country now. Yet "Organized Labor" is allowed, mostly by Democrats, to serve as the "Working Person's Voice" even when the policies unions promote don't necessarily refelects the needs and opinions of most workers. What we need, really, is a change in how we talk and think about the issues of work and labor in this country, and try harder to develop a sensible labor policy that reflects who we actually are and what we actually do. That's why, I suspect, the Affordable Care Act has managed, quietly, to be  a key selling point of President Obama and the Democrats this past election - it's not perfect, but it makes sure many workers will get health insurance, a practical slution many people need. Similarly with the debates of contraception and abortion - in the place where airy philosophical debates mean less than the practical issues of real people actually face.

I don't think we can "save Thanksgiving" from the retail encroachment; the wall has been breached, business needs have overtaken simple decency and humane respect for workers and their families. We will, as we do, work around these new relaities. We are workers, after all. But I think this year may mark another, more refreshing turning point, one where the discussions around our working lives, and the pratcical need for a life beyond work, begins to become more public, louder, and more insistent. It doesn't mean service workers will unionize, and new laws may not be the answer (certainbly, that's not the whole answer); the change we need is cultural, social... not just political, and not just economic. 

And I could go on... but I really have to get on with my day - I have to work this evening.

The Swing Of Things

The suitcase officially went back into the basement today, so I guess the vacation excuse is officially over. We got back home late Tuesday night (memo to self: Miami remains the worst reentry point into the US of anywhere), and Wednesday was mostly about resting up and feeling settled back home. Yesterday was my first morning back at work, which was fine, but as usual, the early rising and energy reqired at work makes the afternoon and evening after a bit of a wash.

That, and I'm finding it hard to get back into the swing of things, especially writing. Blogging lately, for me, has been an off and on enterprise at best, and, admittedly, more off than on. Writing about politics isn't simply frustrating at this point; mostly it feels simply pointless. Watching TV news and discussion programs - which I do a whole lot less lately - is frustrating and, I hate to admit, depressing. The waste of time and energy spent on useless topics ("our first story tonight: something not very controversial that happened on the Republican primary trail, amongst candidates you don't care about, pretty much all of whom will never be President.") really just floors me.

I'm left trying to fashion a blog out of movie reviews, the occasional pithy observation, and some witty asides about television programs I've seen, and no, I don't think that's much of a life, either. At the same time, I have no interest in simply stopping. As much as I like the idea that someone reads what I write, enojys it, gets something out of it... I write mostly because it fulfills something for me. And still, as I do it, literally as I type this, I feel more purposeful than I have... well, since I scribbled a few words about my vacation from a hotel room in St. Kitts.

There are two other obvious complications: I just got an iPhone for my birthday - mostly because my iPod died and I've come to the conclusion that the BlackBerry Curve, while nice, is technically flawed - and I have to admit, the remarkable number of things it can do (listening to online radio of disco remixes whilst reading the AP newswire, for example) means not even having to use my laptop for most anything. Second, on the job front, I am up for a fairly significant promotion and, when I am realistic, getting that promotion changes my priorities. I'm actually ambivalent, on a quiet personal level, about moving up, because I don't really know if I can sustain writing, even at this reduced level, over the long term while in management. On the better days, I resolve to try. On the worse dys, I just curl into a ball and avoid everyone and most everything.

(None of the last few sentences belong in a blog post that could potentially be read by your boss... but oh well.)

I suppose my point is that "real life" - off of the interwebs - has become the life I'm actually spending more time leading. Interesting things are happening; interacting with real people in real time is emotionally fulfilling; pounding the keys about personal and political frustrations isn't much fun (and frankly, has never entirely been my style). There's no real conclusion here, no absolute "that's it, I'm done", no resolution that I'll try harder to blog more. It might happen... and probably, however well intentioned, it won't anytime soon. Life goes on, I'm back in the swing of things, the journey continues... and that, really, is what matters, isn't it?

Island Time

Long ago - before I started working for Starbucks and my income dropped to 25% of what it had been - I liked to take my Spring vacations in the Caribbean. Back then I had a plan (a life's goal, if you will) of seeing every Caribbean island at least once. And I was doing pretty well with it, too. In the months before I quit my old job, I had even made plans to make my next vacation a trip to Nevis, which seemed somewhat remote and less accessible.

But then I quit my job (and just to be fair, I'm not trying to blame Starbucks for my financial predicament; I made the leap out of corporate life knowing that it would be less money and challenging. Not quite that challenging, but still), and vacation plans became, literally, a luxury I couldn't aford. For several years I took almost no vaccations involving considerable travel (Maine, Canada, that sort of thing), and indeed, almost no vacations at all. 

Then I moved back home, and between her financial support (I can't pretend it's not there) and my own mildly improved fortunes, vacations to further off places resumed. There was our lovely trip to Tucson and Sedona in Arizona. We took several cruises (qhich is a quick way to up one's island total, I found).

And this year, I managed to convince her to join my island hopping quest directly.

And oddly enough, here we are, on St. Kitts.

St. Kitts and Nevis are one nation, St. Kitts lying slightly north and east of Nevis, the islands separated by a two mile strait (a moment where the Atalntic meets the Caribbean). Yesterday, spur of the moment, we took a ferry from Bassaterre, the capital, over to Charlestown, the capital of Nevis. Two islands, one vacation.

We have shopped and explored and eaten wonderful food and laid in the sun. Well, technically I have laid in the sun while mom sits in the shade or under an umbrella, rrading a book (the latest Sara Paretsky, on her way to capturing my newest Elizabeth George). My face is red and a little sore, but otherwise, it is a typical tanning adventure. Already in just a few hours over a couple of days, I am several shades darker.

St. Kitts is marvelous, less developed than some of the islands (Nassau, Aruba), not too expensive, with some nice opportunities to eat well, pick up a few duty free items (a watch, some perfume, and my boss's cigarettes), and generally relax. Nevis, as I suspected, is somewhat less developed, but even more pleasantly low key and easy going. And we even managed to shoehorn in some history, seeing the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton (which, for this graduate of Hamilton College, was a treat).

It's the change of pace that I notice the most, not surprising for your average impatient New Yorker... but somehow the cheerfulness and friendliness of most Kittians makes the slow pace tolerable. Our dinner the first night (at a local legendary beachside "shack") took 45 minutes to arrive, what with the crowds on hand for the bonfire and the fire eater (he was quite remarkable). Somehow the wait was just fine. And the food was worth the wait.

Being here, on island time, made getting to writing this post an effort; I have had it in my head for tow days, but life, and wandering, intervened. We only have a couple more days to enjoy, but this trip is already one of the standout vacation choices I've ever had.  Now it's off to my morning run and another great cup of coffee at the local coffee place, a cup every bit as satisfying as the ones I get at work.

I promise to poat pictures too.

Oh, and, Happy Easter. :)

Friday Field Trip: Bittersweet, Hot Chocolate, And The Home Fires

My Friday Field Trip Report is about coming home last night after a short (4 day) jaunt to Maine, a new family tradition you might recall us starting last year. Like last year, everything kind of fell into place at the last minute, reuniting the same group for a second go round of food, festivities, and family time. And again, a good, warm time was had by all.

I said last year... families are weird. This year wasn't so much about how different we were, but, for me anyway, how similar. This year we found more time to spend together as cousins - me, my cousin Christine, and cousin (if not exectly blood related) Jamila. It's complicated... but only on paper.

In person, we make quite a team - we managed a half day road trip to Brunswick to help Christine renew her international Driver's License (she's off again to Mozambique next Monday), shop for shoes, and do a quick tour of Old Navy. Christine and I played hosts of What Not To Wear with Jamila, suggesting new outfits - which was fun, but also depressed me, because I can't stand the show's hosts and the way they try to make their makeover recipients feel bad about themselves.

LIke much of this past year, the trip to Maine was ultimately sort of bittersweet, more good than bad, but something of a mixed bag, at least for me. Which is not to say I didn't love the company of family; to a person, it was wonderful to see them and reconnect (and typical of our stays in Maine, Mom and I actually see less of each other there than at home, even staying in adjoining rooms).

The bittersweet was more about places and memories - thinking of my father's side of the family and how estranged we are, for instance. And the increasing sense that so many bad memories I have lately are associated with Boston - from leaving my old jobs, to having to move, to the collapse of one of my close friendships. Driving home, we listened to a local NPR discussion program about problems with the "T" subway system in Boston, which reminded me how frustrating the commute was, for no comprehensible reason. And it's winter. And it's dark. And it's cold. My family isn't weird. But I am.

(There's also the part about the dreadful decision - which was entirely me - to stop and spend a night at a Motel 6 on the way up. Inexpensive to the point of being depressing.)

But in the end, the pluses outweighed the minuses. Mom and I stopped at a little German market that her sister recommended, stocking up on yet more German and Swedish specialty foods, always enjoyable, and we even tried their little cafe, which had delicious foods and an especially magnificent hot chocolate. We also stopped, as always, in Freeport, where we both found some bargains at the outlet stores. And we made it home in plenty of time for me to restart my viewing of The Vampire Diaries, cause I'm a teenage girl - with TV plans - at heart.

The best, and brightest moments, in Maine, were those quiet ones spent close to the fire, talking with family about times past and present, our hopes for the future, our views of the world at hand. My Uncle makes a mean fire, with all the seriousness and dedication required, as he does most things (and, my Aunt reports, he now approaches vacuuming and ironing with this same precision and seriousness, leaving her free to go out and about). That, plus his encyclopedic knowledge and love of jazz makes for some pretty comforting evenings of warm conversation to a relaxed beat. Keep the home fires burning... and maybe some of that bittersweet will get smoked out. Or something. Now it's back home, and soon it's back to work. And, right now... that's okay.

And So This Is Christmas... And What Have You Done?

Christmas has been, like much this year, a little weird, but also somehow just right. I've felt quite "spirited", full of Chistmas cheer and joy, pretty much since Thanksgiving (and even a little before that, once we decorated the store). And yet, here we are, two days out... and we don't have a tree, and a lot of other work has yet to be done.

I'm pretty sure, without looking, that I mention my love of Christmas each year; it's a family tradition, it's my Swedish heritage, and it's the optimistic kid inside of me, all rolled up. Working in retail - which has been a pretty consistent thread of my adult working life - can really grind the Christmas spirit right out of you. Us salesgirls are a hardened lot. Yet somehow, as if on cue, I hear carols and see decorations, a little switch inside me gets switched on.

And it helps to remember what's really important about Christmas and the season. In our way, the people I know who are serious about a life in retail, kind of share this notion: Christmas is so not about the things and the shopping and the decorations in October. If you can't get beyond that, if Christmas doesn't live somewhere besides the mall... I think one is bound to be disappointed, at some point in life.

One of my customers has been on pins and needles, waiting to see if her County government job would be saved from massive budget cuts, and that her county subsidized living arrangement wouldn't also go away. Yesterday, we got the final good news: her job is secure, at least for now, and she took the big step of finding a new home and is now just settling in. It is, as they say, a Christmas miracle.

I'm afraid I'm something of a traditionalist when it comes to the calendar year; I see the year ending and the new year coming and somehow, this time of year is all endings and beginnings, sum-ups and fresh starts. It's kind of obvious, kind of cliche... yet that's the pattern I see, over and over. I get to December, and my mind just starts to take stock. And plan for the next start.

As I've said, in some ways this has been a very weird, very hard year - emotionally and economically tough, full of strange endings and fresh uncertainties. This year has also been a real test of just how thoroughly I can keep up with my self-assigned task of writing continually and consistently. But here I am, at the end of the year, and I find myself focused on what remains: the good that exists, the joys that highlght my daily routines, the love I have and can freely share. As much as I don't love Lennon's Christmas carol (and this year, I realized, for the first time... it's not Yoko's fault), I find myself, for once, appreciating his song and it's simple opening. So this is Christmas... I hope you had fun.

I did, and I will.

Here In The Real World

So... the last few days were spent mostly offline, out in the "real world." I'm more conscious, these days, of making the choice to step away from the onine sorld in favor of life lived in real time in real space. Working, doing things with friends and family, sleeping (a lot of sleeping)... these are my days.

It's not that I want to write less - I'm behind on movie reviews, for one thing - but the challenge of finding a balance doesn't get easier, and the sense that writing, at times, makes me put the rest of life, the real life, on hold hasn't had its usual appeal. Add to that the dismal state of blogs, especially politically motivated blogs, and the even more depressing state of politics in general... and the appeal of spending time with two very nice nephews just grows and grows.

The thing about life lived in real time, I find, is the way things are more immediate, more practical, more... well, real. Raking leaves, doing laundry, making a pie, serving coffee and cleaning my store... these things keep me grounded, my head focused on things that, in the end, probably matter most. The things we can actually do, the ways our lives can actual touch others, the problems that seem most immediate, most manageable, most solvable. 

So, here I sit while the plumbers install a new faucet in our kitchen - life is full of practical problems, these days - trying to get a little caught up. It's too cold, winter is upon us, I hate the early dying of the light, day after day. This has been, in so many ways, a strange year, full of unexpected twists and turns... only to wind up, here, with more of a sense that I am, in fact, doing okay, right where I need to be, focused (at least some of the time) on things that matter. If things keep eing this interesting, I could even learn to like this real world. At least some of the time.

But The Ending Kind Of Restores Your Faith In Humanity (#Snowtober!)

I'm sure karma had something to do with it, because I said, for two days, that this winter strom would turn out to be a dud.

After finishing my post yesterday, I got up from my table to get dressed for work. My mom said "big flakes!" and it was the first moment that I realized that the snow was stickiong and far more dramatic than I first thought.

Still, I set off for work; I know how to drive in snow, and where we were, things looked passable. And surely, plowing and salting were underway.

I knew I was in trouble when, one town over, I started to skid just trying to get up a minor incline. Major hills were in fact easier than mild grades. I called my boss to say the roads were looking bad, but we agreed I should still be on my way.

Then I turned onto Route 133, one of about 3 options I had to get from where I live to where I work. It's something of a country road, two lanes, rolling hills, but I figured since it was a major connecting point for the county, it must be  getting attention.

But it wasn't. It was pretty clear, right away, that we were in for trouble. Cars were packed onto the road, lots of spinning out, and trees, as predicted, were collapsing under the weight of the laready heavy snow.

I made it about half way towards work on this road when traffic just stopped. Using what judgement I could, I decided it was best to turn around and make it back to the side road I knew connected back to a mjor artery. I figured from there I had options to either try and get to work or head home.

And about 100 feet after turning around, I slid off the road into a ditch.

After the initial panic, I was surprisingly calm and sanguine about it. I mean, once you accept the reality of your situation, there's not much to do: here you are, and you're stuck. Unless someone pulls you out, you're not going anywhere.

And I wasn't going anywhere.

Four hours later, the magnitude of the disaster was apparent. Between listening to the news, and taking to drivers as they passed - slowly - it was clear that, across Westchester, this was really bad. Roads were unpassable. Trees down everywhere, Power outages all over.

And now, it was getting dark.

Something about the darkness simply froze my soul. I'd seen to many movies, heard too many stories. What if a tree fell? What fi power lines came down around me? It was clearly hours before help would come, if ever. And the fuel truck, which had slid off the road before me, just feet in front of me, had been pulled out. Now I was alone. The 4 other cars that had come off the road near me were all abandoned. No houses were really that close.

It was at that moment that a red truck pulled up, and yet another nice lady asked me if I was okay and if help was on the way. I said, more earfully than before, that I didn't know quite what to do. At which point she leaned over, and her husband leapt out from the driver side, grabbed a shovel, and dug out my tires. Then he got in front of me, and pushed the car as I tried to back out.

At first, we made a little progress, but the wheels started spinning. Then he dug around again, went back to the front, and pushed again. This time the car awkwardly lurched onto the road. I was free. Before I could even finish my heartfelt thanks, they were gone.

Driving back on 133 was an almost entirely unfamiliar landscape. Cars were abandoned everywhere, trees had fallen. I passed the remains of a burned out shell of a car, what I can only assume  resulted from a power line fall. Further on, a mail truck was jacknoifed going down a hill. I barely got around it.

I pulled into a gas station, called my mom, called my boss, and had a hot dog for dinner. I'd been trapped for four hours. And really, I was one of the lucky ones, getting dug out and able top ride to safety. I debated staying at the gas station. Eventually, abdout 45 minutes later, I decided to attempt the ride home the rest of the way. More downed trees, but the roads from here were in better shape.

In my own town, the power was completely out. Fire had broken out, burning down a local restaurant my mom and I had eaten at multiple times. They were barely letting cars through, but my house was on the near side of the fire trucks. I got home, hugged my mom, and sat in the dark. The wonderful, blessed, candle-lit dark of home.

Thirteen months ago, a tree fell on my car, and I survived. Yesterday, I spent four hours in a ditch in a blinding snowstorm. There's no punch line to this. No feeling of invincibility. Between those evnts I feel like a lot of clarity has fallen into my life - what matters, what doesn't, what it takes to survive and carry on. 

That and I've learned that we can survive best when we are there to help one another. I'm grateful to the kindness and decency of strangers. I always joke with my mother, at the end of especially sentimental films and TV shows, that they "kind of restoore your faith in humanity." This morning, my faith is thoroughly restored. And now, it's probably back to work.

Hard Times

My instinctive sense for how bad the economy is has been telling me, for some time, that things are getting worse. I don't really have numbers to back it up - there I go again, asserting things without facts - it's just a hunch, a feeling, a sense of the winds blowing and the times changing. I was saying this, just yesterday, to my friend Jennifer, about how I thought the economy could get much worse, and she said "oh God, don't even say it." Because, really, we both kind of sense it to be true.

These are hard times. And it's not surprising, I suppose, that the hardness of these times is driving a fresh wedge into our society, our politics, our personal connections. The things that bind people together - friendships, social connections, shared experiences - are falling away. If you're not facing enormous personal hardship, if you're not sure that the weekly paycheck will even pay to feed you, if you have even the smallest of luxuries to fall back on... how can we expect others to understand the things we're going through?

Reading through even a few of the postings of the "We Are the 99%" Tumblr, I think it's impossible not to be moved. The group blogging experience has yielded up, I suspect, it's ultimate moment: a true sense of just how much pain and suffering is out there, how little we can do to fix it, and how hard it will be to get out of this. Emotionally, it's incredibly wrenching. Politically, I think it's a problem we may never figure out, entirely, how to solve.

It's hard to accept hardship we cannot fix or change. I have a friend at work whose mother recently suffered terrible injuries in a fall, and a few days later her father suffered a series of strokes. It's hardship that I think must be almost unbearable. I can't fix it, I can't take away her pain... all I can do is try and be supportive, and sympathetic. And what I can do feels, naturally, like very little. There's a more distant, objectifying piece I could write about the struggles we are having to see rehab as part of healthcare, when rehab and longer term care are two of the biggest issues in health reform; there's a comment to be made on how my friend, with a coffee shop salary and modest health insurance, can hope to cover what will likely be enormous bills... and on some level, all of that is entirely beside the point.

These are hard times. All of us, really, are bound to be tested, pushed to our limits. Anger and frustration will separate us, make strangers of friends, enemies where shared goals once stood. Not everyone will understand what others see, or share an emotional connection, a sense of passion and purpose for the same goals. These are difficult, upsetting times. And on some level, I'd love to share the anger, the frustration, the sense of upset. It's just not who I am. It's just not how I see. It's just not what I feel.

As hard as these times are, I feel compelled to do what I've always done: love the people I care about most, hope the best for them, do what I can as best I know how, and try my best to take care of myself, so I can be there for others. I'm not angry, or frustrated, or sad, even by the passions that have played out across my life and this blog in the past week. I can't hang onto the negatives, and I can't let anger and fear and the rest rule me. I get it. These are hard times. And they will take people on journeys to new experiences, different places. They will separate and divide us from the familiar and allow us to find something else we may have been meant to be. 

Godspeed, my friends. May we all survive these hardest of times.

The Help: Southern Comfort

Among the many stories and experiences in my family about race issues and Northern vs. Southern living, my Mom's experience as a college student doing an internship in North Carolina is probably one of the most vivid. By this time, after all, my mom had lived for several years in Boston where she had friends of different races, and had dated black men, including the man she would marry (and with him, have me). 

So it was a shock when she and a black woman friend were in North Carolina, and left the grounds of the (integrated) VA Hospital where they were interning. Her friend had to go to the back of the bus. Both of them had to be careful when my mom went to socialize with her friend and her friend's family. Eventually, it became easier to just not leave the grounds of the hospital.

This experience of segregation and its effects is of course one of the darker and more painful aspects of American history, a stain from which we as a nation can never entirely recover. At best, we have tried to relegate segregation to the past, and to create a present where segregation by law, at least, has no place in our society. But the question of how to look at this complicated history lingers.

The Help, a film based on a bestselling novel, attempts to explore this ground, examining the complexities of life between white women and their black maids in deeply segregated Jackson, Mississippi, in the mid sixties. The book was an "Oprah's Book Club" selection, which should give a good indication of what's both interesting and exasperating about the whole exercise. Well meaning, deeply earnest, The Help is ultimately a feel-good piece of sentimental claptrap that distorts our historical realities and tries to put a warm, upbeat gloss on topics that simply don't merit the treatment.

Mostly, The Help is a story meant to make Northerners feel better, as usual, for prevailing in the cause of civil rights. The main character, Skeeter Phelan, is a young white woman fresh out of college (Ole Miss), who wants to pursue her dreams of being a writer. After being shunted onto a "Helen Helper" column of the local paper in Jackson, she decides to also pursue collecting the stories and experiences of black maids in the community.

It's worth pointing out that, from start to finish, all of what transpires in The Help is fictional. There was no book of this sort produced at the time, and some of the depictions of segregation issues are overstated (and others, curiously, are understated, as well). Though much of these distortions don't mean much, they are, still, distortions, and it's disconcerting to have a film so earnestly purport to depict the experience of segregation, while, in fact, cutting a fake experience entirely out of fictional cloth.

Ultimately, when the book is published(!), truths are revealed and some of the ugliest aspects of mistreatment of the maids comes to light. But little of life in Jackson actually changes as a result. The movie hedges one of the final confrontations in the book (between Aibilene, our lead maid, and Hilly, the bitch leader of the white wives), to give the black heroine more of a sense of control over her destiny, but really, either way, there's an unreality hanging over the whole business that by the end simply grates.

Which is not to say that the film is cold or unmoving; as I said, this is sentimental hogwash meant to push various emotional buttons, and most of these are done smoothly and efficiently. Watching the black women stand up for themselves is empowering. Their suffering - economic, social, personal - is often heartbreaking. The aspects of casual racism are unpleasant and difficult to take, at times. Writer/Director Tate Taylor has produced a smart adaptation that smooths out some of the book's less convincing moments (while still failing to ring historically true), and much of the film's lack of historicity is build on Kathryn Stockett's dubious foundations constructed for the novel.

The film also features a top flight cast, most of whom lift sketchy stereotypes into fully realized characters. That's not surprising from veterans like Mary Steenburgen (as New York editor "MIss Stein" - no, seriously), or Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, or an ever luminous Cicely Tyson. The younger white women - Emma Stone as Skeeter, Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly, as well as Jessica Chastain as social outcast Celia - fare less well, mostly because their roles are largely thankless. The real grit and determination belongs to Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis as the principle maids, particularly Davis as Aibilene. Already clearly one of the great actresses of her generation, Davis has nothing to prove, and this is a great, tailor made role for her talents.

One of the film's larger structural problems is that men are simply all but nonexistent in this film - a hallmark of "Oprah's Book Club" projects generally. Several critics have pointed out that there's no image of an intact black family to be seen, but even the white families presented are generally grim, dismal exercises in feckless, often cruel ciphers with the husbands.  But the larger point is that segregation was not merely a problem where white women and black women struggled with boss/servant relations; it was a societal construct that touched every social interaction, between all genders and all races (which, by the way, is a good moment to point out that The Help seems as averse to miscegenation as Hollywood generally is. No race mixing here). The film's narrow focus is, in the end, a cheat on having to examine - or deal with - the larger issues, and especially, the role of many whites, in not just accepting a system of such distinct inequality, but constructing it and enforcing it, often violently. That's of a piece with presenting blacks as noble, suffering victims, of superior morals and grace. And all of that, really, is a pleasant notion of southern segregation that northerners like best. See those awful southern whites, and those noble suffering blacks? Whose fault is that?

For my money - quite literally - the film that really digs into the complexities of enforced segregation and the way it perverted relationships between white homemakers and their black servants was The Long Walk Home, in which Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg played boss and servant during the Montgomery bus boycotts (it's surely one of Whoopi's best, most subtle performances onscreen). The Help, by comparison, is much closer to History Comix than a serious attempt to unravel the tensions and painful dilemmas caused by segregation, focused, as it is, way too closely on the question of one woman raising another woman's kids. That issue, after all, is a class problem and a feminist thought provoker that's hard to solve, well beyond issues of race. The Help would be remarkable if it even tried to unravel an issue that fraught. But mostly, the film is happy to hand you a hankie, pat you on the back for being enlightened, and tell us all that segregation was bad. As if that was, you know, a question. Don't you feel better now?

Til The Clouds Roll By

In the end, as I think about it, the thing about a hurricane is not what you can anticipate, but what you can't: what makes a hurricane disastrous are things you either couldn't figure out in advance, or knew about, but couldn't prevent.

If you can figure out, for instance, that a hurricane hitting New York City and its coastal surroundings would be an enormous human disaster, you can move a lot of people out of the way. You can't move a lot of houses out of the way, but depending on how bad the storm is, that might not matter.

People will, no doubt, debate a lot of silliness about whether all the evacuations were necessary, whether public transportation should have been halted, if it all seems, in retrospect, like overkill. Have at it, I suppose. It seems to me, though, that, what will remain, after all the shouting dies down, is the reality that we dealt pretty well with things we could anticipate. 

The problem with Hurricane Irene, are things we couldn't.

it seems obvious, now, that a 500-mile wide tropical storm is still a big mess after it hits the coast... but no one, really, quite predicted what a disaster the storm would be once it traveled north of the New York coast. This is a storm that, most likely, will be recalled - as these storms are - most by the places that were most devastated worst. Upstate New York, Vermont, a great deal of Connecticut... Irene is probably destined to be their memory, more than for those of us who waited, with varying anxiety, for a deluge that didn't quite deliver. 

It could have been worse, it could have strengthened the way some forecasts predicted... but this doesn't have to be a story of What Might Have Been. The good thing, the amazing thing is that, for what it actually was, people took it seriously. And some serious people showed their seriousness. 

As much as Michael Bloomberg gets a terrible reputation for his imperiousness and  his occasional high-handedness (none more than his own faith that he, alone, is best suited to be Mayor), he does have a Chief Executive knack for making a plan. His decisions to evacuate low lying areas, to shut down the nation's largest public transportation system, were big choices and he owned them and clearly, they worked. Similarly, Chris Christie bluntly laid out a plan to evacuate New Jersey's shore points and said so in a clear, forthright way: take this seriously. Don't wait for the storm, don't be an idiot, and don't waste the time of people whose job it is to respond to disasters. Bev Perdue in North Carolina came off similarly forceful, practical, and determined.

It's easy to say "non one wanted to be the next Katrina", but it's more than that; the question, ultimately, is whether one thinks its alarmist or simply prudent to prepare for the worst. All over the East coast were officials who hedged that choice, who lagged on forcing evacuations, who seemed to follow the lead of others, rather than take it. On Long Island, the sense of just how bad things might get seemed to unravel in a fog. Connecticut officials seemed very concerned, but not quite ahead of the possibilities.

Sure, as Sunday unfolded, it was easy to feel kind of had; yes, it rained wherer we were for just about 24 straight hours... but we had no real flooding, no downed trees on our street, no power outage of any kind. The search for batteries and flashlights, the sight of a grocery stores cleaned out of bread and bottled water (how... prison), it all felt a little absurd. Sunday afternoon, we went out for a newspaper. 

But one reality of Irene, I think, is how oddly capricious the results were: just blocks from places which had little more tha a long rainstorm were places full of downed trees, flooding, massive power outages. My little Westchester town came through mostly intact. The town where my Starbucks is saw massive flooding. The towns next to it are littered with tree debris. It was still hard, this afternoon, to find a passable road from that town to my hometown. Our commuter rail - the one that everyone questioned stopping - is probably going to need a week to resume full, normal service. Had trains tried to run through the storm, I guarantee you the mess would be longer to recover from, and worse.

So New York City came through less scathed; and the Jersey shore dodged some of the worst of ocean surges and less rain. Even Long Island took less direct damage than anyone expected. Even so, what probably matters most is preparation. And seriousness.

And what can be anticipated.

For me, what really pushed me to prepare for this storm was my Mother's memory of the Hurricane of 1938, called the Long Island Express, the one storm from history where a hurricane traveled up the East Coast, never hitting land until it crossed Long Island and slammed into the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts. My mom's childhood hometown in New Jersey took a glancing blow, one she never forgot. About six months ago, she found this PBS special about the hurricane. The stories in it have stuck with me ever since.

Yesterday, by the end of the day, the clouds rolled on. The winds whipped by, and even the tail end of the hurricane, the tropical storm, pretty much blew away without incident here at home. Much as we anticipated. It wasn't that bad. This time. And maybe, if we keep taking them seriously, and we prepare for the worst, we can at least know how to meet the disasters we can anticipate.