The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

June - The Liars (Part Five)

            Even though we technically didn't need to go to Food Not Bombs anymore, Jasmine and I went the next time they had their community feast. Before then, I had been working through some more of my own meditations, with Jasmine (and sometimes Hilda) joining me as I sat at our kitchen table with a fan rotating around us and a blank page in front of me. We were learning that when we wanted to know things for ourselves, we needed to find alternative ways of accessing information. The library could only take us so far, since people manipulated libraries. Even if I had wanted to read books about photography criticism in my undergrad, the school was only going to purchase so many and only by specific people. This type of omission was only the beginning, and I knew that it extended much farther than photography. The Professor's quip about philosophy as studying "dead white men" started to become concretized in my mind as I searched for the faces behind the authors who were remembered and those who were forgotten (but not quite lost).

            Lydia's birthing center and the alternative library held a wealth of resources where inside most town or university funded libraries simply didn't exist. In some kitchens where Food Not Bombs did their cooking, they held cookbooks and alternate resources that also didn't exist outside of this protective sphere. Hilda and Jasmine had been ravaging them and taking what pamphlets they could for weeks, which Jasmine began to share with me before she cut them up. I went through what was left of her zines and relied on Hilda and Jasmine to summarize any parts that I had missed orally until it comprehended. Most of this was about feminism and sexuality, but there were a few on Marxism; this flagged in my memory, and I immediately went to right away and tried to absorb. After Jasmine got her ultrasound one evening, we didn't go home right away, but hung out in the huge comfy chairs in the alternative library, and talked casually to the woman with thick-rimmed glasses. We checked some books out and brought them home, and added them to our ever-growing pile. This became a small project we brainstormed on together, even when Hilda was present, it was Jasmine and myself relaying ideas back and forth. In between getting the room ready for our daughter and making sure Gerard was okay, we spent our idle time trying not to think about our worries. The money that my dad had given us was not a lot, but it was a small fortune to us and meant that for the meantime, we could rest easy.

            His check and small note made me feel more secure about the future, too. My parents, while they were not rich like The Professor and The Prosecutor, they did have money. They were both thrifty, mostly because they had lived through poverty before I was born (and I suspected a little while he had his minor drinking problem). They knew what it was like to be constantly stressed about the number in the bank, being in overdraft, and paying heavy interest rates and they never wanted to go back to it. His gesture of giving us money was caring; though I did hate the fact that he only extended this curiosity when a baby was involved, and that he had not mentioned Gerard in his note. But those were incidental details, I knew they were. I began to realize that my father had his own language like my mother, only he spoke without anger when he approved, and showed money for kinship. On principle, I should have turned it down because he was still not quite behaving the way that I expected a father to behave, but I knew that was not helping anyone. We needed this money. I wasn't going to be like Socrates and condemn us to death (perhaps that was a little extreme) just because my father had omitted one sentence about Gerard. With the check, my father was saying that he wanted me to be in his life, and I took his money to accept his offer. I cashed it the next day and we got Jasmine some proper food (she had been eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches far too much), and then we paid some bills. I sent him a letter for thanks, and the deal was done. We felt better knowing he was there, and I felt better knowing that in the future, if things got bad again, he could possibly be there for more. He was not retiring anytime soon, and even when he did, he would still work. I knew that we were going to have a lot of support for this baby, and it wasn't just going to be my parents stepping in.