IN MY SHOES: I Was So Much Younger Then, I'm Older Than That Now
By lemonfemale
I tell people the town I grew up in – Essex. MD - would be on the rim of the crater if someone nuked Washington, DC. I am the middle child of blue collar parents, way too smart to be pigeonholed as “a girl.” I used one year of a four year National Merit scholarship to Macalester College, then left to get married because that’s when I found my husband.
We struck out on our own, moving to AK shortly thereafter. We took the Alcan (Alaska-Canada Highway) - in winter. Sixty below is a whole new level of winter. Our fuel filter froze over while we were driving! If you touched the car door handle lightly with bare hands, your fingers would sting; if you grabbed it bare handed - which I knew better than to do - you got frozen to it. When we reached Anchorage, it felt like a heat wave - it was above zero degrees. We birthed and raised six children - who are now parents themselves. I qualified for a stint as a rape crisis volunteer the hard way: One sexual assault, one rape on - believe it, or not - the precise date of my first wedding anniversary. These days I work as a sales clerk in a convenience store.
My shift used to be called “the graveyard” but is now referred to “closing,” which does not have the same street cred. Yeah, I’ve had a gun stuck in my face a time or two – actually, seven. One robber was so drunk, I had to tell him what to tell me to do. Then there was the robbery I missed by seconds. The guy apparently came into the store while I was in the back, did not see a clerk (that would be me, or would have been if I had been at the counter), got cold feet and left. The security tape shows me emerging from the back room almost on his heels.
I may be a rarity, but I have come to like people by working retail sales. When a co-worker asked me to come in and relieve her because her father was ill, seven customers had offered to take her to see him, or to go check on him themselves, by the time I could get to the store. One customer who lived nearby gave me his home phone number with instructions to call him if something made me nervous.
I pride myself on being something of a provocateur. I once received the ACLU’s Citizen Activist of the Year for (blush) trying to ban the Bible. Not that I wanted the Good Book banned, but the Anchorage School Board had banned a book of Native American myths and legends, so I challenged the Bible on exactly the same grounds to protest their disrespect for what is still a living faith. I was once asked to appear on a local TV show featuring five of the most prolific writers of Letters to the Editor published in the Anchorage Daily News. And my kids called it “picket board” instead of “poster board,” because in our household that’s what we used it for.
I have walked picket for Right to Life; in front of a Kris Kristofferson concert to protest his anti-Desert Storm statements; counter-picketed an anti-war demonstration; held signs for gay rights, against Obamacare; counter-picketed a pro-abortion march (and stole half their press coverage, tee hee); carried an ‘In Memoriam’ to Flight 93 hero Mark Bingham in a gay pride parade; and once held up a sign in the Assembly chambers (where it is actually illegal to do so). In April 1992, I had space at a Women’s Conference to promote gay rights. When the participants later went out to march for abortion, I went to a pro-life sit-in and got arrested.
Going to protest rallies was quality time together for my family. I still have a picket sign carried by one daughter at the age of three, when Right to Life kids picketed City Hall to protest being barred from the City Children’s Parade; my youngest son was a late-bloomer - he did not walk picket until he was 18 (at the anti-anti-war rally); and my three daughters and I counter-picketed “NATO genocide in Kosovo.”
As you can see, politically I am all over the map. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead by is one of the books that changed my life. I read the first page sitting in my friend’s car age 15, chivvied her into lending it to me and then read everything Rand had ever written that I could find. Rand made sense and she honored reason, though she mistakenly declared that “Life begins at birth. Any other belief is mystical nonsense.”
I was once a '60s liberal and still speak the language. I define the Castle Doctrine (“no legal duty to retreat from anywhere you have a right to be”) with this Abbie Hoffman quote: “The ground you are standing on is liberated territory. Defend it!” But it seems to me that the flower children grew up and became our parents. The same people who cringed when Hoffman and his American flag shirt was blacked out during a TV interview are now telling me I cannot comment on politics within 60 days of an election. When he was a city assemblyman in Anchorage, Sen. Mark Begich, a liberal, pushed a curfew for kids 18-years-old or younger, or less. I took a photo of my oldest son to a debate on the proposal - just out of basic training, in his Army uniform and still 17. Liberals want to tell us what light bulbs to use, want us to pay more for soda while also banning bottled water, and will make us pay a steep fine if we don’t want to buy health insurance. On the other hand, they do give us the freedom to kill our unborn children.
So I shook the dust off my shoes and took my worldview elsewhere. I registered as a Republican to work in Ronald Reagan’s campaign. So now I can walk in gay pride parades carrying a sign declaring: “Another pro-life Republican celebrating diversity.”
Editorial Note: lemonfemale is one of the writers that The Stiletto has invited to contribute to The Stiletto Blog. The Stiletto will be introducing other writers to as they come on board. If you have a conservative/libertarian slant on the events of the day and would like to share your thoughts with the readers of this blog, please contact The Stiletto at: the stiletto@thestiletto.info.
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