March 28, 2015

  • Travels Through AmericanGeriatricLand

    This was originally published on the blog of the brilliant visionary nursing home reformer, Dr Bill Thomas. www.edenalt.org / travels-through-americangeriatricland.

    Responses convinced me that what I was had to say had an audien've returned to write once again, this time of the past six years in der current

    Travels Through AmericanGeriatricLand

    I’ve made my way through seven nursing homes, six hospitals and twiveo long term acute care hospitals in a large metropolitan area over the past six years. Recurrent cellulitis in my lymphedema-afflicted legs took up the first three. Hypercapnia consequent to untreated sleep apnea felled me three years ago, leaving me with a tracheostomy, on a ventilator with a feeding tube. My life shrank to four walls and machines, even more narrow than before when I got to go home between infections.

    Highlights of this six year passage? I’ve been on the floor of one facility with no vital signs, an escapade I don’t remember. I do remember trying to talk to the doctor on call that evening, getting chewed out for not going through the nurse who didn’t think anything was wrong and being told “f— you” and hung up on as I urged him to listen to me.

    In another facility, a physical therapist came to tell me that for the past five days I could not move my legs on the bed when she asked, nor could I answer simple questions.  In a moment of clarity, I called 911 from a nurse’s cell phone as the facility’s phones were out of order. My CO2 level was 104 and the ER staff thought I had dementia.

    Still another 911 escape landed me in isolation with acinetobacter baumannii flourishing in my lungs.  I remember trying to laugh when the suction machine moved from the crash cart to my bedside – “so you can feel secure, dear” – fell into pieces as the EMT tried to use it to clear my lungs but not much else.

    Then there was the place where a CNA liked to dig her fingers into the back of my infected legs and tell me there were people there who didn’t like me. Her friend was written up for leaving me sitting on my bed with an oxygen saturation of 77, where a friend caught me just as I pitched forward on my way to the floor.

    Seventeen doctors told me I would have a tracheostomy the rest of my life. Fighting my sixth multiple drug resistant infection, in desperation, I went outside the nursing home doctor circuit to a pulmonologist at Rush Medical School. The trach tube went into the trash can two months ago. All’s well and I’ll move to assisted living next month. I am 72.

    Early on in this pilgrimage through AmericanGeriatricLand, I swore to myself that I would make peace with the losses it entailed, of privacy, of dignity, of control, of parts of my body and pieces of my life, by advocating not just for myself but for others when there was need. I’ve done that and will continue to do it. It has become part of who I am. That is another story.

    Last fall I discovered the Eden Alternative, the Green House and Dr. Bill Thomas, bringing new and exciting ideas into my somewhat intellectually barren life. These resonated intensely with my own experience and broadened the concept of the possible far beyond what I could imagine based on my personal sample of nursing homes. Excited, wanting more, I cruised through Thomas’s videos, deciding that his presentation to the Sanford Center for Aging was the most provocative, frame by frame, of all of his YouTube posts.

    Here were new ideas.  Newly articulated problems. Fresh ways to identify, conceptualize, problem solve things that were a part of my everyday life in the nursing home in AmericanGeriatricLand.

    The compelling documentary Alive Inside, on Dan Cohen’s work with restoring memory in dementia patients using personalized music selections on an iPod, appeared on Netflix and YouTube at the turn of the year. This added another riveting story to my repertoire of things to think about while I sit on my bed day after day in a corner under a window

    My room looks out on a long hall filled with dementia patients and staff who have no specialized training.  Every day I watch the prequel to Alive Inside.  Now I imagine how lives could be transformed with the intervention developed by Cohen.

    One evening when the nurse had a meltdown, quitting later that night, and the CNA was reduced to shouting “SIT DOWNNNN!!!” I went out and sat between the two most vocal patients, who tried every three minutes to climb out of their wheelchairs and fall

    We started talking. By then I had discovered Thomas’s work and it informed me as I felt my way. We spoke about loneliness, of dying here, alone, forgotten. About hearts torn with yearning for a real home; these two with almost no one in their lives who isn’t paid to be there. About never going outside and missing the fragrance of flowers and the smell of rain. And for much of that time they were neither yelling nor climbing out of ill-fitting wheelchairs. A new nurse came on, it was late. They were wheeled to their rooms.

    After fifteen months in this facility I think they will be relieved to see me go, the elderly agitator, the aging provocateur.  Seeing how the visually impaired patients had little to occupy their time, I had a volunteer program ready to take off – prefaced with a short workshop at Lighthouse for the Blind for the volunteers. That was allowed to die on the vine. So was a proposed inservice for staff working with visually impaired patients. Cohen’s program?  The iPods will get stolen….

    Find a couple of techie volunteers with laptops to help patients Skype family and friends too far away to visit, perhaps never to be seen again otherwise? Connection, a critical element often in short supply In a traditional nursing home. Nope, brilliant idea though.

    Sitting on the side of my bed on the dementia floor or walking around with my tablet, I now beguile everyone I can into watching some of Emily’s Netflix and YouTube List – ten minutes of Alive Inside, the Eden Alternative Featurette, the Green House Nursing Home Alternative and selections from Thomas’s presentation at the Sanford Center for Aging.

    I often mention medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare (contains inspection reports for every nursing home in the US)  and information on the www.edX.org class on the Harvard happiness project. And I’ll always hand out the ombudsman’s phone number. Those who are short of time may get a handwritten list …

    No one is exempt – CNA’s, CNA’s in training and their teachers, Monday night volunteers with their dogs, patients, patients’ relatives, friends. It’s hard to unring a bell and a vision of good alternatives never hurts…

    Two nights ago a bright young woman just finishing her LPN course work was watching Dr. Thomas’s Sanford presentation with me. We began to discuss his reconceptualization of elderhood and what elders have to give back.

    She said to me, “I like stopping by to see you. You always make me think and ask questions, tell me things I don’t know. And I always have to look at least one thing up on Google after I leave. I love coming to your room.” I stopped, looked at her, realizing in that moment we had been elder and youth from the time she walked in. While discussing Thomas’s rethinking of aging we were, in fact, living it. Having been shut away from the world for so long and having struggled mightily to hold on to a sense of self stretching beyond the confines of dreary beige walls, that realization was a gift to tuck in my pocket as I prepare to leave and return, older and somewhat wiser, to the wider world.

    PS. Don’t get me started on the message the food service I’ve encountered gives to elders. Just picture 4 fried fish nuggets, 12 tater tots, 14 long beans pretending to be a salad, 1/8 cup barbecue sauce and “juice” made from powder to drink. It is certainly not about eating to live well. No, I live in a three story food desert – just try to find fresh fruits or veggies on my tray.  I call it food porn.

    Comment -

    Barbara Smullen

    March 4, 2015 11:01 pm

    Oh, my God…is this tragic story for real ? I know it is terrible out there in many (nor Eden) homes, but this is incredible…it is no more than a miracle that this incredible woman is still alive, and has enough love of life and energy to step out as an advocate….we need to look at violations of laws in facilities such as she has experienced and, miraculously, survived…

    Reply

    Emily Hodges

    March 5, 2015 5:11 am

    Yes, Barbara . Every word is true. There are many experiences – some difficult, some quite dangerous – I have not written about. When people at edenalt.org asked if I would like to write something the only answer possible was “yes.” It gave me a way to reach beyond the confines of these three floors and four walls out into a bigger universe. I’ve a post graduate education from Berkeley, speak six languages and was a US diplomat . And this is what happened to me. How can I not raise my voice

    Reply

    Jennifer Corbett

    March 8, 2015 11:48 am

    Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ve worked as a travel occupational therapist for nearly 10 years now, and have witnessed similar inhumane living conditions and suffering all over the country. Some places try harder than others, but none of them would I wish upon my family, or any elder for that matter. I’ve tried initiating various programs at nursing homes, such as gardening, music, yoga, but end up burnt out when I do not receive any support from management. The nursing home owners that cry poverty when asked to increase staffing, redecorate, remodel, and provide access to the outdoors, should be fined for not providing adequate living conditions. I would always be amazed when the Department of Health would come for their annual inspection, and the skilled nursing facility would pass, when the residents would be living in conditions that prisoners would cause riots over. (I wish someone would make a documentary demonstrating how prisoners have more rights than our elders!) It would be a great service to the residents, if those nursing homes were shut down, and the residents absorbed into higher quality homes. I felt so angry one day, I wrote a few pages of a novel loosely based on roommates I came to love, plotting their “great escape”. Unfortunately, writing is not one of my talents, so the novel still rests at 5 pages. Anyway, again thank you so much for sharing your story and keep writing and inspiring. I plan on printing your story out and sharing it and enlightening as many as I can. I’m hopeful that your suffering will not be in vain!

    Reply

    Emily Hodges

    March 8, 2015 8:10 pm

    Thank you Jennifer, for your kindness and compassion to others. Here is another chapter to the story. I rolled out of bed onto the floor two nights ago, sitting on the bed waiting for help to lie down, when I some how rolled out of bed and hit the floor, snapping the top of the bone at the shoulder. The humerus was badly fractured, snapped through. I was sent back to the nursing home wearing a sling with a wide band around it to stabilize my arm with orders to see an orthopedist on Monday or Tuesday. I was given a prescription for heavy pain medications to take back with me. I finally got the script. It’s been very painful. The heavy pain meds have left me sleeping sitting up in the bed without my bi-pap machine that keeps me from having sleep apnea. My nurse has tried to contact the nursing home doctor every hour for the last several hours to get an order for daytime use of the bi-pap so I don’t have another episode of rising CO2 which is what got me the trach the first time and lying on the floor almost dead twice. He’s not calling back. If I fall asleep, they are not putting me on the bi-pap and because I am on heavy duty pain meds, I am at higher risk of not breathing and the CO2 rising. I am now waiting for someone from the nursing home to call back to order the use of the bi-pap. I try not to fall asleep in the day time, but I also need the pain meds, which puts me at higher risk of CO2 as well as falling out of bed again

    I truly appreciate your concern and I’m getting tired of being the one who spots the problem when it should have been a nurse to realize I needed the bi-pap anytime I fall asleep.

    I will try to keep writing somehow, though I’m not sure when or how. I’m having someone else type this for me now as I dictate because of the pain in my shoulder and an arthritic hand. That makes it difficult to type on a tablet with no table to stabilize it.

    Regards,

    Emily

    Reply

    Jennifer Corbet

    March 8, 2015 10:22 pm

    Hang in there Emily, rest and write when you’re feeling better. So sorry you are going through this. Maybe listen to some relaxing music to get your mind off of things and keep stress levels down so that you can heal. And while your arm is healing, maybe have someone help you to use voice control on your tablet instead of typing. That’s what my father does, having had his first introduction to computers at close to 70 years old. Works great for him. He even texts me now. Hope that doctor gets in touch soon, or better yet, request a change in physicians! Maybe when you get your strength back you can start a blog. I’d definitely be following you and rooting for you! Feel better and make sure you’re wiggling those fingers to keep the swelling down and to maintain functional use of your hand while your shoulder is immobilized. Hope to hear some good news soon!

    Reply

    Anne Johnson

    March 10, 2015 11:11 pm

     

    Emily, I’ve been there on and off for the last year by phone. I get so mad sometimes listening to what they say to you while I’m on the phone. A good deal of the time it’s like “Why should I worry? As long as I don’t see her get bedsores on my watch, it doesn’t matter because they’re all here to die.” That’s the attitude that gets to me. That and simple ignorance from people who weren’t listening in class. I still remember you told me about the CNA who thought that, having dropped the cannula from your trach on the floor, to clean it all she needed to do was wash it off in sterilized water and that would sterilize the cannula. The difference between “clean” and “sterile” does not seem to have made it into school–even “Aide” school. People continue to amaze me with what they can ignore or forget. “unsurpassed” does not mean better than anything else, it means supposedly nothing is any better than this.

    I’m getting off subject. My mother died in a nursing home and some of what goes on is really mismanagement under cover of keeping expenses down and making sure they get it right. Patients wait for 1-2 days after being prescribed to get medication because they can’t keep it in stock and it takes a while. Patients tell the nurse or doctor which things they can’t take (my mother told them Levaquin would not clear up her UTI and the doctor, who comes in maybe once a week, went ahead and prescribed a second course of the same stuff). “Real” doctors learn to listen to the patients; sometimes people do know what they need.

    Nursing homes apparently don’t have a need for emergency medications. The fact that Saturday you were told to see an orthopedist on Monday or Tuesday and sat around for five days.

     

     

June 21, 2013

  • A Hole In My Throat

    Posting with my phone from the tracheostomy floor of a hospital in the burbs.  A housekeeper found me on the floor not breathing some 3+ weeks ago. I don't remember any of this... unable to intimate the hole in the throat was the alternative. Asthma and pneumonia appear to be the triggers.  I'm in a second hospital now focusing on physical therapy and slowly letting the respiratory issues clarify.  I can talk now with the help of a valve over the hole.  Yesterday I had real meals instead of being fed through a stomach tube.  Ive been sort of circling the drain health-wise for the past three years.  This has dropped me in the hands of three terrific doctors, allies in helping me get back that old mojo.

    innstead of caving in, giving up

     

     

    Giving up was never my style.

     

     

    Hugs

     

     

    Pearlbamboo

     

     

     

     

May 5, 2010

  • In Memorium - My Mother The Architect

    While writing elsewhere on Crystal Bowersox, I found that a part of her original work sends me looking for songs and poems about abusive mothers - not a particularly hot topic in the world of songwriters, but a powerful one.  Bowersox, on American Idol, has at least four original songs dealing with abuse, three directed towards "mother" with no way to know just how autobiographical they are until she is ready to speak about them.

    What I do know is that they are powerful, exquisitely written, played and sung, and treat a theme almost never dealt with in song. "Farmer's Daughter" is the best known of the three. "Mama" and "Flowers for Mother" are the other two.

    It is testimony to the strength of her writing that I cannot listen to these songs without bring drawn in, without relating them to my own life.  These songs and other things, including urging by a number of people, friends and strangers, to write down my story, have me thinking about my life, its modest successes and huge failures, the lives of my children...  Then someone reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago, autobiographical, totally....

    I will be recording most of my poems next month, at the behest of and with the help of a composer/singer friend who heard me reading one while i was in the hospital and said she found herself moved by the voice, and the words and the music in the rhythms I set up.  She too suffered at the hands of her mother and wants to do this one first in the studio...

    In Memorium: Mother as Architect

    "The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor
    is the mind of the oppressed." *

    You knew.
    You knew that
    If you took my mind,
    When I was very young,
    Still suckling,
    Twisting it
    Till I was
    The old grey wrung out dishrag
    That rested on your sink,
    Bereft of beauty.
    Breaking desires
    Fragile as stems
    Of grandmother's crystal,
    Thrown against the wall,
    Until I had none.
    Wearing outdoor boots
    To crush that place
    We cannot locate
    Where living and synapses
    Collide, creating
    Who I am, or am not,
    Who I can ever,
    Who I can never be...

    You knew you could shape
    The groundwork.

    Craft it crooked to the east
    So that I would understand
    East winds will not bring peace,
    But pierce me
    In their storms.
    Break it off on the west side,
    So I'd fall
    When I walked there,
    And while falling,
    Drop and break
    What I tried to hold
    In safety,
    Like my children
    Or my heart.

    Slant it down towards north,
    So I could slide more freely
    Into hell,
    Knowing there was no other
    Safe and clear direction.
    South?
    I could never find the south
    With its sun and flowering trees
    I'd  heard about.
    I had no compass.
    Oh, you did it well.

    Still, I try to redesign,
    Remake, refine,
    The foundation
    Every day.
    With the sharp edges
    Of my heart,
    I try to excavate,
    Make flat
    Make smooth,
    Make safe
    An unvarnished little place
    Where I can live
    Till morning.

    pearlbamboo

    *Steven Biko

    © 2005

April 27, 2010

  • A Generation - Chester Helms, Jim Dickinson, Janis and Emily

    I have been following the tremendously gifted Crystal Bowersox on American Idol, a neat trick since I haven't owned a TV for 15 years (youtube, I watch on youtube which has no commercials....)  I am struck over and over by the difference between then and now, by what Janis Joplin, to whom I am linked by a common friend, and I, our generation of women, struggled with and against and the relative lack of those issues in Bowersox's musical journey.

    I'm going to write more about this later, but am repeating a piece from 2004 that is apropos to my historian's wish that we not forget lest we loose some of the gains we fought so hard for and in reply to the young woman doctor I saw in the hospital who just didn't or wouldn't understand why I preferred Ms. to Miss, and kept calling me Mrs, even tho I pointed out five days in a row (Morning, Mrs Hodges) that Mrs Hodges was my dead mother, hoping for success through shock value..

    "Listening to Dixie Fried, Atlantic records producer Jerry Wexler stood up and faced the speakers, spreading his arms.  "If Bob Dylan made this record," he said, "they'd call him the risen Christ."

    ***********************

    I thumbed an old copy of the Chicago Reader while waiting for something to cook.  Bored, I looked at an article about a musician I didn't know.  Waiting like a small exploding star on the third page was the name Jim Dickinson.  I knew someone of that name long ago, forty-four years ago it was, at Baylor where I went to study music because they gave me the biggest scholarship of all the places I applied and that would get me away from Ft.Worth and my psychotic mother.  There are so many things from that time I don't remember, but I did remember that name.  Once in a while I would wonder what happened to him, if he got the theater he wanted.  But I never followed through, never looked.  Sometimes following through takes me to places I didn't know I didn't want to go to.

    The article described him as "famed Memphis producer and musician..."  The boyman I remember too faintly was in theater, but the city was right and he taught me much about blues singers.   It might be the same Jim.  Intrigued, I hit Google and sure enough, this "famed Memphis person" went to Baylor the same time as I did, and studied theater.

    A little more research turned up his website and reviews of his music.  A bit more confirmed it was the manchild I remembered.  He's had an amazing and wonderful life, overflowing with creativity and places to use it, surrounded by family, his boys musicians, Luther and Cody Dickinson of the Northern Mississippi Allstars, taking his gift and carrying it on.

    It's easier to add a link then try to write things out so here's the best I found.

    http://www.popculturepress.com/jimdickinson.html

    I'm not sure how he felt about me, wasn't sure then either.  I met him during a homecoming game, to which I had worn a black pencil skirted suit with a big fluffy fox collar, black suede 3 inch heels and carried a carved ivory cigarette holder (Baylor, 1961, no sweater set, or crysanthemum corsage or plaid skirt or bobbysox).  We hit it off and became a number on campus, probably, he wrote later, the most notorious couple on campus, not hard at Baylor, until he returned to Memphis a year and a half or so later.  He came to see me after an orchestra rehearsal and I remember clearly the first thing he said, can see him standing there, talking, asking "Do you know how powerful and beautiful you look up there on stage with your violin?"  I didn't.  And I remember the last thing he told me, why he was going back to Memphis, said with a reason and words that took a piece out of my heart, even though I was not in love with him, at least not that I knew, left me feeling diminished for years, although I don't believe that was his purpose or intent, just his truth of the day.

    In between, he blew out the edges of what I knew to be possible.  In telling me of things he knew and things he'd done he tore down the boundaries of my two-mile square Ft. Worth girl's world, where the only things I could imagine were those from books or from pictures in Life magazine.  He was a boy, he could go places, do things that a girl could never do, at least not in those times.  So he knew ways to slake the thirst of the curious, knew things outside books, of the world, deep in music, connected to parts of the soul.   I was hungry to know.

    I don't remember many details - the occasional conversation in which he is a presence, not visible, his voice and accent unremembered, though I hear memory's echo in the soft accent in which he sings his songs, but his words clear, spoken in my head as though he is standing or sitting behind me, close to my ear, so that I can hear but not see.   He told me about the circus, about Blind Lemon and Leadbelly, new sounds for my classical musician's mind, about trips to find singers who knew singers, to find old songs.  He read my poetry, understood,  got it published.   He offered validation I had denied myself, that had been denied me, perhaps the first outside the music room or classroom.  I remember the place, my room in a former slave quarters where I fed a group of palmetto bugs that lived on the closet shelf so that the next tenant would have company too.  He tells me it was called the Catacombs, I didn't remember.  But there must have been other places, now lost to me.

    He writes that he heard I was dead.  I never spoke again to anyone at Baylor after I left university in '62.  I suppose to them I was dead.  Maybe to myself I was dead too. He writes that I gave him moments of inspiration throughout his life and that thank you would never be enough for that.  He tells me that I helped him through some of the most difficult parts of his life.  I think he remembers more than I do, or maybe understood what was closed off to me then, and so is invisible to me still.

    The difference in how our lives turned out is stark.  My best friend from high school, the legendary San Francisco rock promoter Chet Helms, to me forever Chester, of long conversations about being a Baptist, about whether or not to be defiant and dance, about Sarte and Jesus on dying summer evenings on my front porch amid fireflies and june bugs in 1959, would tell me years later that in those conversations I set him free and that without them he could have never done what he did nor be who he came to be.  Somehow it seems fitting that at the time he was was hanging around with Janis Joplin, another hurting talented Texas girl, Chester's wordd, I was hanging around with Jim Dickinson.  Symmetry of sorts.  Now that's broken.  Only three of us are still alive.

    Both Chester's and Jim's names now appear prefaced with adjectives like "the fabled," "the famous."  Ah, can't forget "the legendary."   Both are good men.   Both are men.

    My life was different.  Talented, brilliant, gifted, genius, so smart it was frightening to see, like a little vacuum cleaner trying to suck up every piece of knowledge in the world  - those are words linked to my name.  My gifts were different from Chester's and Jim's, but just as big.

    But they were men.  Their world was big and had lots of air.  I had to fight for every breath I took, trying to hold on to my "bright girl" self, holding hard lest it, and therefore me, be sucked away, extinguished, much of myself expended in just holding on..

    On my way home in the plane from the National Science Fair, winner of the Girl's 1st Prize at 16, the fellow with the Boy's 1st Prize from the rich kids high school across town kept trying to get my hand under a blanket and inside his zipper for a hand job.  I can't remember being so taken down to size, so puzzled, so angry, hurt quite so effectively as in this little vignette preview of the workplace, unless it was after the rape when my mother called me a whore, never asking, never acknowledging the reality.  Or maybe it was when Jimmy Lewis kept calling in my junior year in high school, asking, "Do you put out?  I've heard you put out..."  He'd heard wrong, or maybe it was the rapist gossiping.

    "You must choose the college where you'll get the best husband."  "You don't want to be a doctor, girls can't be doctors."  "You're smart, you shouldn't let the boys know."  "Boys won't like you if you're smart.  You've got to hide it."  "No, you can't play the cello, it's not ladylike, holding it between your legs like that."  "If you're not careful with your grooming you'll never get a man."  "Keep your legs together and pull your skirt down."  "You can't cross your legs that way.  Cross them at the ankle."  "I'm sorry that you have to wear glasses.  You're already such a bookworm.  I wonder how you'll ever get a man." "You've got to learn to cook.  How are you going to feed your husband?"  "If you kiss boys, you're going to get pregnant."  "You are going to teach school like your momma did, aren't you?"  "What do you mean you don't want to learn to type.  You'll never get a job." "Why can't you be like your cousin.  She doesn't argue all the time."  "I don't understand why that decent smart white Christian boy comes to see the likes of you..."  "No, you can't take a mechanical drawing class instead of sewing.  Even if you already know how to sew, mechanical drawing is no place for a girl."  "You should go home and have more babies.  Graduate school is no place for a girl."  "Why are you in graduate school, anyway? Teaching university is no job for a girl."  "Your problem is that you don't accept that your only role in life is to care for a family, clean, cook, wash dishes, take care of your husband and children.  Until you accept that freely you will always be depressed.  Until you do, I can't help you."  "Unless you stay at home with your children, they will be ruined."  "Why do you want to play in a major orchestra?  Girls always sit at the back of the section.  They're never as good as the men."  "What is this garbage?  Were you studying?  What's the matter, you don't want to cook anymore?"  "What do you mean, you want to be a political officer.  Political officers work hard and girls don't do very well at it..."  "What do you mean, you got a summa cum laude degree as a single parent.  Being a single parent isn't Real Work, it really doesn't count..."   "You'd make a great personnel officer, you know, girls do well in that job."   "You shouldn't tell anyone in the State Department that you have an advanced degree.  We don't like that much and besides you're female."  "We don't want her to serve at the US Embassy in Islamabad.  She knows too many politicians, judges, bureaucrats, knows the language.  She'd be hard to control, she knows too much.  Besides she's female."  "What do you mean, you'd expect your husband to travel with you from diplomatic post to diplomatic post.  Are you crazy?  No real man would ever do that."

    From birth in 1942 to breakdown in 1984, it was a never ending litany, following me from family to school through marriages to university to Berkeley to the State Department.  It never stopped.   I had no support in the culture, none from my mother.  My father was dead.

    All these words ran around my head like a hamster wheel in perpetual motion.  Their sharp edges shredded the outside of my spirit, cutting through to the bone, drawing out the marrow like sugar juice from a piece of sugar cane, leaving the husk.  My soul was softer, in the end, not hard to tear. Jim remembers me a "strong and independent free spirit in a sea of zombie conformists."  The strong and independent part long ago knelt, wobbly, in submission at the feet of post traumatic stress disorder and major depression, of economic hardship, of finally being too tired to fight for that bright girl self, of breaking into fragments and living in one room for eight years where I felt safe and didn't have to fight anything but the night, afraid to come back into life again. *

    The free spirit, tattered around the edges and stubborn as all hell, remains.  I'd forgotten that.  Thanks for returning it through the mail, Jimmy D."

    pearlbamboo

    ©2004

    * I've written about this struggle here - http://pearlbamboo.xanga.com/249672074/item  in  "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Spends The Evening While Pearl Talks To Her Lover And Seeks To Return to Higher Ground."  A spoken word version is on Sound Click at this time, as "Night Has Names She Understands."  All the poetry is being re-recorded and will at some point in early summer be available on MySpace.  A special thanks to my beloved friend, Jade Maze, http://www.jademaze.com/  who heard me read a poem to a nurse in my hospital room in October 2009, heard the music in it, asked to hear another and then asked to record.  .(note added May 27, 2010)

March 31, 2010

  • Crystal Bowersox - One Woman, One Guitar and a World Class Gift

    Crystal Bowersox - singer, songwriter, guitarist, add a little harp, a little keyboard....

    While I was talking to my sweetie a couple days ago, he blurted out, "Let's just declare Crystal a National Treasure, let the others worry about this year's title.  Then ask BB King to come out of retirement, buy up her contract and watch over her for her first couple of years in the big time part of the industry, to watch her back...."  A man of strong opinions is Guitarman and terribly, terribly picky...

    I've been fortunate enough over the past few weeks to have opportunities to speak at some length with three fellows in Toledo, Ohio, two musicians, one owner of Papa's Tavern, who have known her since she was 12 or 13 (no one remembers for sure) and watched over her since then.  They have deep affection for her both as a human being and a musician that comes over the phone in the first few minutes of conversation with a stranger and have emerged as warm, supportive, intelligent and thoughtful men as we talked more.

    Crystal has written a song about the two musicians, Ron "Razz" Rasberry and Bobby May, called "Grey Haired Rock Star." I don't know how I would have reacted to the song if I had not met them. I had already spent time talking to both when I first heard it two days ago.  Brushing my own gray hair off my cheek to tuck it behind my ear, flooded with memories of a time when my own hopes and dreams were thicker on the ground, tears fall as I am drawn into the realism melded with tenderness in her song's embrace of these two men who believed in her and her gift from the beginning..

    Check out www.fansofcrystalbowersox.com.   Bobby May's bio is up already.  Razz Rasberry's should be up by tomorrow night.

March 21, 2010

  • Kevin Skinner - One Man One Guitar, Two Victories


    Kevin Skinner opens today in Las Vegas, the first step on the next stage of his journey out of rural western Kentucky and into the larger world. His victory in America's Got Talent brought him to the Las Vegas stage. Before that, there was another victory, a victory of the spirit.

    Skinner spent much of his adult life as a farm laborer, taking whatever jobs were available in economically depressed western Kentucky where tobacco and chicken farming provide jobs shorn of all glamor. Chicken catching is not, despite the images that the judges and audience at Skinner's audition might have conjured up, one man chasing a couple of chickens around the back yard.

    In a recent interview, Skinner said, "Catching chickens is harder than it sounds: It’s really hot, exhausting work. It’s 100 degrees outside and there’s 30,000 chickens in the barn also putting off body heat. You’re moving fast, your skin is rubbing raw. There’s six guys catching eight chickens at a time until you’re done. It separates the men from the boys real fast!”

    I would say it did that, "separated the men from the boys." Every day, there's another barn filled to capacity with chickens to be caught. Sometimes, one is on one's knees, scrambling after squawking chickens. Sometimes, claws and talons slice through protection on one's hands. Bandannas tied across the face don't really filter the air. Airborne contaminants settle in one's hair and clothing, leave traces on one's skin, calling on one's ability to endure, to keep on, one day, the next day and the next.

    Kevin Skinner caught chickens for nine years, day in and day out, mind-numbing, backbreaking labor in unpleasant conditions, in a job that can lead to permanent lung damage from gases and inhaling airborne material, severe skin problems and disabling injuries. He helped empty out chicken barn after chicken barn after chicken barn, sending the birds on their trip to your table and thereby putting food on his family's table until a back injury sustained on the job left him unable to work.

    If you grow up in and around Mayfield, Skinner's home turf, I'm told, there is a lot of pressure not to be different, to put away dreams for practicalities, to buckle down and get a day job, to get married and raise a family, so that if you can afford a guitar, it's likely to be a $300.00 model and it's probably going to be purchased on layaway. And, besides, " Nashville? Go to Nashville? Nashville's not real life!" He buckled down, yes, and got a job, one in which no one prospers and from which everyone comes home worn out.

    But, Skinner took his guitar to work with him at the chicken barns, playing it and singing on breaks and at lunch. "I’d always find myself passing the time by singing. I would concentrate on some lines of my own to write, and sometimes I’d sing cover tunes, like Hank Williams Jr.’s ‘The Blues Man.’” And, when there were no chickens he'd grab his guitar and play for the guys and practice.

    Singing and playing his guitar at work places Skinner, for that moment, at the heart of the American folk music tradItion where workers sang to ease the burden of shared harsh manual labor, whether in the cotton fields, or prison work gangs. The progression from folk music, played and sung on front porches and cotton fields, dances and barn raisings, to the stage and its further commercialization by the recording industry in the 1920's defines the development of what we call "country music." Skinner, playing on his front porch, by a bonfire in the back yard, for friends and family, at work, echoes if he doesn't exactly duplicate that old style of American folk musician. I can see the folk music scholar, Alan Lomax, roaming western Kentucky with his rather primitive recording equipment, ambling up to Kevin's front porch and asking to record him, circa 1935.

    Straddling the line between folk and commercial, Kevin sings in Las Vegas tonight. I think his ability to sing in commercial venues while tapping into the vibe of rural America's traditional folk musician is an important factor in his great appeal to audiences world-wide. Working hard during the day, refreshing his soul with music during breaks, Skinner would come home exhausted, only to sit on the porch or in the back yard near a campfire, playing and signing, alone or with friends, until time to sleep.

    Despite difficult conditions, he was able to keep his music close to his heart, a vital force in his life. This, to me, is his real victory, an unnoticed, unsung victory of the spirit, giving strength to his dream, this victory of the spirit helped propel him to another victory on the stage of American's got Talent.

    As I write this last sentence, Kevin Skinner has just begun his first performance in Las Vegas.


    copyright e hodges 2009

September 20, 2009

  • Kevin Skinner One Man One Guitar, Old and New DreamsAnd

    NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. - To Do So Will Really Mess With Your Karma.

    Kevin Skinner- One Man One Guitar Reawakens Dreams

    The values and kindnesses that Americans often associate with our small towns and rural areas are alive and well in Mayfield, Kentucky and the surrounding area. They have been present in the courtesy with which people have responded to my endless questions about a local boy, in offers of a place to stay were I ever to visit Mayfield, in suggestions of others to call, all of whom have been courteous and helpful.

    However, no matter how fine the people or how beautiful the countryside, western Kentucky is no simple paradise. In the words of a Mayfield resident, "You make a pact with yourself to stay here. There are few jobs and, unless you are a professional of some sort, you will always be poor. In exchange for giving up financial security, you get to stay near your kin and feel embraced by your community," And then she adds the final dollop of cream to the coffee, and as I listen to it float to the bottom of the mug, "You know, it's so small a town, it's like living in a teacup."

    In this rural area, I'm told, there are lots of young men, maybe women too, who play guitar, or bass or drums or sing and think of bigger places to play. They may make it to open mikes in Nashville, but no further and they are often discouraged, told to "get a real job," and do. There is something in Kevin Skinner that gave him the faith in himself and the faith that he deserved more than he was getting from chicken barns and gigs at Hill's Bar-b-que (scroll down to the forth picture to see Kevin playing at Hills Bar-b-que - http://mykevinskinner.com/gallery.html) that allowed him to file an application for America's Got Talent.. Despite the social pressures to conform, to not dream big dreams, he found the courage to break away from the pack.

    I won't speculate on what it was until I can talk to him about it.

    However, there is another story here. I'm told that seeing a Mayfield boy make good for the first time anyone remembers has been an inspiration, a reason for hope.

    Guys who dreamed of writing songs when they were young have searched out their old composition books, some brown with age, once again humming a tune and writing it down. Guitar players reach to the back of the closet, open their dusty instrument cases and pick up their guitars and strum, realizing they have to get new strings, even as their blistering fingers search for chords they only dimly remember.

    Kevin dared to go out into the larger world. The world he encountered had no choice but to focus not on his accent or former job, but on his openness, decency, humility and above all on his musical gift. Because of Kevin's dare, folks have hope, some for the first time ever, and are beginning to search once again for the dreams they had never dared dream or had stored away in a locked box under the bed.

    Postscript - The night Kevin won, I received a telephone call from a fellow from Kevin's area who had given up his music several years ago. "You know," he said, echoing what I had written in the first draft of this piece, "watching Kevin on his journey, traveling the world outside western Kentucky in search of his dream, that's given me new hope. I hadn't truly realized that when I stopped singing and writing songs, I gave up, not just music, but a part of my true soul. Kevin showed me that. I've just written the first song I've written in five years..."

    It's bigger than just musicians, this creation of hope, awakening of dreams. As Sharon Osborne pointed out in her interview after the finals, "Kevin is Everyman." His journey to the fulfillment of his dreams beckons us all.

    lily

August 18, 2009

  • Kevin Skinner Was A Chicken Catcher Not A Chicken Farmer

    >The two terms are regularly confused all over the internet.
    A chicken farmer is a property owner, no matter how small the plot of land.  A chicken catcher works for the farmer, is a farm laborer, not an owner. And therein lies a tale.

    Chicken farming is an important occupation in west Kentucky, with consequences for water in the water table, run-offs, air and water contamination.   As I remarked below, gases present in the chicken barns can cause nausea, vomiting, dizziness and lung complications (at high densities). muscular and skeletal injuries are not uncommon. But it's really much worse than that.

    For those who stay behind on the land and in the small towns of America, there is often not a lot to choose from for employment. Chicken catching is one job available in Skinner's area.  Although we Americans tend to idealize small town and rural life, I think we might have a more realistic view if we have a window into some of the choices men and women in these areas have for making a living.
    So, below you will find a personal account of "chicken catching" by Dawn, who runs www.mykevinskinner.com. (the original is at www.mykevinskinner.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15).
    I read it first with even greater respect for Skinner as a young man, working to feed his family and then with emotions so mixed I'm still sorting them out.  I cannot begin to imagine what it would mean to this man to win this competion, or do a Susan Boyle and come out second with a great record contract.
    His next appearance will be in the first week of September.  Gather together all your friends with cell phones and email addys and Vote Vote Vote. .
    Catching Chickens
    By Dawn
    Yes, unfortunately, I have caught chickens before. It is the nastiest most horrible job EVER!

    It has been several years since I had to do this job, alot has changed, but it still remains quite vivid in my memories.

    Here's kinda how it all worked when I caught.........

    A truck would come thru my small town and pick up the 10-16 people ready to work. We would be taken out to the farm that was to be "caught out" that night. Most chicken houses had between 60,000 and 80,000 chickens packed into it like sardines. When we arrived at the house there would be 2 or 3 empty chicken hauling trucks waiting to be loaded, the trucks packed high with chicken cages. There were "catchers" and "carriers" The carriers stayed on the sides of the truck waiting to be handed 8 full grown birds at a time and then they would put those birds into the cages on the trucks. The catchers went into the houses and starting grabbing chickens. You caught 4 birds in each hand, each by one leg. When both hands were full you ran the birds outside and hoisted them up into the waiting hands of the carriers. It usually took 3-5 hours to catch a house out. When it got down to the last, say, 100 birds, the owners turned the lights out to make those few easier to catch since chickens can't see in the dark.

    The odor of the houses was awful, loaded with ammonia. The swirling cloud of feather dust and chicken feces was almost unbearable. The only thing for protection from it was a cloth bandana tied around your nose and mouth, didn't help much tho and made it really hard to breath. As you caught you could just feel a layer of toxic matter caking into your hair, all over your face and burying into your clothing. The fact that is is impossible to stand up and catch these birds made it even worse, most of your time catching was spent on your knees chasing birds thru a layer of feces. By the time a house was caught out your knees would be so sore it was unbelievable, not to mention your hands would also be ripped to shreds by the claws and talons on the chickens. They didn't really enjoy being caught or held upside down so they fought hard to get free. Gloves helped a little but not too much.

    Chickens on their own are wonderful critters. Quite clean actually and fastidious about preening and staying healthy........grown with a gross amount of steroids in cramped quarters however, they are a horrid mess of grotesque forms, many with live maggots crawling all over their open sores. Makes me want some fried chicken.....LOL NOT!!!

    Anyway, as the catchers jump back into the truck to head back to town the pay was given out. At the time I caught, we were paid a whopping $15 each. Like I said, it's been awhile, and things have changed but I would not ever want to need to do this job again. Poverty makes you do things that you would prefer not to do and that's just "life" in a small town with very few job opportunities.

    I could go on, but why? No need. I'm sure you have the picture by now. Please do not confuse "catching chickens" with being a chicken farmer. There is NO comparison.

August 15, 2009

  • Response to Examiner Review

    http://www.examiner.com/x-12169-Americas-Got-Talent-Examiner~y2009m8d4-The-Top-40-in-review-36-Ke

     i just had to add my 2 cents...

    the writer of that article says  

    "It’s almost hard to believe that someone really could fit the southern stereotype that accurately.

    This is worth mentioning because, all things considered, his actual performance was not particularly exciting. It was good, but hardly seems befitting the start of a web sensation.
    In other words, people like Kevin Skinner for his personality before his talent. Skinner is the very definition of a simple modest country boy, something millions of Americans enjoy thinking of themselves as being.
    He is therefore also the literal definition of a spoiler contestant. He cannot compare to the big three, but with a big drop-off between the third and fourth most talented in the 40, he may already have one foot into the finale. Skinner’s success will only be impeded by the influence of Simon Cowell and America’s faith in the wild cards."



    One of the more interesting ways of seeing how Skinner's music affects people is to read deeply into the comments on the youtube videos. A closet sociologist, i've read almost all 12,000+ of them (and would love to preserve them as an historical document, but google currently has no way to do that....)

    Over and over, people write of their connection with the emotion in his voice, that he made them cry, that they dislike country music but would gladly purchase any music he records, country or not, for there is something there, unique to him (many comments report having listened to Garth Brooks, for instance, and finding his version of If Tomorrow Never Comes lacking in comparison). 

    Sure, we idealize small town/rural ways and people, and there is that element of appeal. 

    However, I think it is his ability to connect, his what I call in "Kevin Skinner, One Man, One Guitar..." the "high lonesome sound" that reaches into people, moving them, often to tears.


August 9, 2009

  • Kevin Skinner - One Man One Guitar

    I've made it through 66 years without watching much prime time TV and no day time TV, ever.  I thought I was home free until  Susan Boyle appeared.  Now, there's Kevin Skinner, singing and picking  his guitar (I've always loved a good guitar man), and I'm now working with the owner of a fan site, at www.mykevinskinner.com


    She asked me if I wanted to write a bio.  So I did.  Before I do a final edit and commit it to the google spider crawl, I would appreciate hearing anything any of you has to say..  Thanks.

    Meanwhile, this is now published on the website www.mykevinskinner.com. Come on over and show  your appreciation for this talented man.  It's a great fansite with the beginnings of a photograph section for  pictures not previously published.  


                                 Kevin Skinner - One Man, One Guitar

    Kekvin Skinner, a 35 year old singer, songwriter and guitar player, hails from Dublin Kentucky, a tiny settlement of some 200 people in western Kentucky, far away from the hills of Applachia. Dublin is some 10 miles away from Fancy Farm, Kentucky which was settled in the 1820's by Catholics from Maryland and has both kinship and religious ties with Fancy Farm, with its 600 residents. Mayfield, the county seat, with 10,300 people at the last census, is 12 miles away.   


    Skinner auditioned for America’s Got Talent on June 23, 2009, singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes” by Garth Brooks and Kent Blazy.  With his unadorned evocation of the elusive high lonesome sound (you know it when you hear it, think James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James"), he achieved almost instant fame, as new fans from around the world raced to Youtube to watch his audition video. 


    Carrying his sunburst Tacoma guitar, Skinner walked on stage and positioned himself in the middle of the big red X. The judges and the audience laughed when he answered questions in a heavy western Kentucky accent.  More raucous, jeering laughter erupted when he said he had worked as a chicken catcher, a difficult and tiring farm labor job that many thought amusing, although, in fact, the work exposes catchers to gases that cause nausea, dizziness, severe skin problems and long-term, disabling lung complications.  Piers Morgan, perhaps with Susan Boyle in mind, stopped those making fun at his expense with the request that he perform.


    Perched on a tall stool, alone, no backing tracks, only him and his guitar, America listening, Skinner began to pick and then to sing.  Hearing the bell-clear opening notes falling from the guitar, the restive audience was almost instantly quiet.  He sang from the tradition of old style country music, the man and his guitar, sitting on the back porch of an evening, intimate with each other, the voice riding along on the beautifully finger-picked no-flash guitar line, the "high lonesome" sound, pure and simple. 


    The studio audience was mesmerized, quiet, respectful, erupting in a standing ovation as the last notes faded into the background noise.  Seldom can a performer tame an audience to total quiet, especially almost instantly.  It is a rare gift, and one that I suspect brought Skinner to the attention of Nashville hardly before the song ended, although we won't know that until after the contest and any Las Vegas performance are finished.  


    Adding other instruments works for many singers.  It didn't work for Skinner on this song to his advantage. He seemed to be stretching his higher range with this arrangement although this might have been from evident tension. Perhaps a lower key would have worked better, where he didn't have to reach so much and which would show off his lovely lower register more. Whatever the case, with this arrangement, Skinner had to sing against his best qualities. Still, it had the elements of beauty, especially in the first verse before the backing track took over. 


    Skinner reaches deep inside himself for his music.  He isn’t afraid to face deep emotions, transform them into song.  He has a good voice, plays a good guitar, but it is this capacity to move himself into the depths of grief or love and sing it back to us that raises him above other singers.  He needs arrangements that enhance this ability, not completely cover it up.


    On both appearances, the audience laughed every time the judges or host found a way to say "chicken catcher," always imitating his drawl.  In his apparent sincerity and decency, in less than two minutes, singing his song, Skinner stripped away the "country bumpkin" image the judges and audience eagerly dropped on his shoulders when he first began to speak, showing us a man whose humanity, humiility and music simply blew the stereotype into oblivion. 


    Skinner claims his roots.  Several times in interviews during the lead-ins to his appearance on stage, he tells us that he's a “country boy,” coming from a place where things happen slower than in the city, where he hunts, fishes and goes truck mudding.  According to an early myspace page, he also hunts arrowheads and counts “all the great Apache and Cherokee chiefs’ among his heroes. 


    He lives only two and a half hours by car from Nashville, but drives there to gig and to play open  mikes.  Though Nashville is a big city compared to Dublin, his sister says, "Nashville didn't really seem to be a big city though, actually.  When we where there, we felt at home.  I believe it was because the whole city centered around music and we feel instantly akin." When asked in an interview about his experiences in Nashville, Skinner replied that after appearing on open mikes on weekends, he often had someone grabbing  him by the collar as he was leaving, asking if he could come back the following Thursday and Friday to be featured.  But, he said, he had a job, a family to support and just didn't have the time. 


    Small towns, traditionally the essence of the American heartland, like Dublin, Kentucky, Skinner's home, with its population of some 200 people, live more in our imagination than in reality.  They are disappearing, now holding only some 10 percent of the nation's population and many are in decline or just on hold, loosing young men to urban centers with more prospects of employment.  Mayfield is no different.  Some of its young men also leave in search of city jobs.  Those who stay face a difficult labor market.  


    Americans often idealize small town and country life and people, believing them to be the locus of much that is good and true about America.  There are good and bad people, lying ones and honest ones, mean-spirited and kind people everywhere.  But Skinner, in his non-city ways, his open face, shining smile,  his transparent honesty and heart, draw us in, remind us of the very best of what Americans have admired about the small town and rural folk who, greatly diminished in numbers since WWII, live on more and more in our collective memory rather than just off Main Street in tiny towns. 


    When Skinner appears on the TV or monitor, we are brough face to face with a man sincere and humble. We can remember for a moment the kindness and decency of the best of rural and small town life, a life that now belongs more to our grandparents than to our grandchildren.  


    Calling again on his country roots, hinting at the differences in time and landscape, at the passion, emotion and poetry he would evoke in his singing, Skinner told Nick Cannon, the show host, that there is time in the country to sit on the front porch of an evening, “gathering my thoughts” and “counting stars.”  Counting stars.  A man who feels life in all its pleasure and pain counts stars.  That was the first signal to me that we were about to hear from a very special man.


    An interview with a local TV station reveals more of Kevin’s heart.  At the preliminary screening auditions for America’s Got Talent, he sang a song of his own, “Her Stone,” written after the death of his beloved grandmother, Ethel Clapp, four years ago.  This was the time he really began to write, saying that the music and words just poured out of him, that he believed that the music “was the way to release the sadness I was feeling at the time.”


    Music is in his family's blood.  Kevin's sister, Jennifer, remembers evenings with Kevin and her other brothers, Michael and Rodney, listening to their father, Joe, take out  his guitar and play and sing Hank Williams, a musician whose work is at the center of the rich tradition of American country music.  It was Joe who got them into music, according to Jennifer.  


    It was Rodney, the second eldest brother, who taught Kevin to play the guitar and pioneered the first family band.  Jennifer, who sings, has performed at various times with Rodney and Kevin. Rodney continues to play both acoustic and electric guitar in what is now Kevin's band.  Skinner's eldest brother, Michael, has a master's degree in classical piano from Notre Dame and has served as music director of St Jerome's church in Fancy Farm.        


    Now, Kevin Skinner is a long, long way from the front porch of the modest house where he sat and picked his guitar and sang, wondering if that front porch would be the limit of his dreams.  Despite pressures to conform, to "get a day job," which he did, working as a laborer most of his adult life, taking whatever was available to support his children and wife, he didn't give up his dream.  There is something in Skinner that gave him the faith in himself and the faith that he deserved more than he was getting from chicken barns and gigs at Hill's Bar-be-que that allowed him to file an application for America's Got Talent.  Despite the social pressurees to conform, to not dream big dreams, he found the courage to break away from the pack. 

                         

    Now, over three million people have watched his audition performance and almost all of the more than 13,000 comments on his Youtube video of that audition contain words like “wow” and “amazing,” often saying that they have returned to listen over and over.  Caught in the deep emotion of Kevin’s singing, many write that they finish the song in tears.  Many wrote that they had never listened to country music, never liked country music, even hated country music, but were so taken by Skinner’s singing that they wanted to buy his CD’s, no questions asked, even if they were full of country songs.


    Skinner has been presented as a one-dimensional performer of country music by the producers of America's Got Talent.   He is not just a country artist, but plays and composes rock, under the name BentLemon. They have also failed to provide arrangements that showcase his guitar.  He plays very well, both acoustic and electric guitar.  Sometime down the line he may choose rock and country.  For now, his presentation as a country artist and his ability to bring in fans who have never listend to country before or profess not to even like country music, leaves Kevin Skinner uniquely placed to bring American country music to a new audience.   In his choice of the Blazy/Brooks song, Skinner plays something new to many of us, drawing on the finest of the older tradition of the country genre for his inspiration and style, taking his listeners back in time to hear the heart and soul of American country music, without today's overlay of  rock and roll. 

      

    Kevin Skinner musical style does not lend itself to being commercialized.  One hopes the producers and music directors of America's Got Talent grasp this and don't try further to prettify his music, try to make him another Britney Spears.  Even more fervently, one hopes that he will find a producer who understands his gift and will work with it, nourish it, help grow it.  He deserves nothing less and I wish him godspeed on his musical and life journey.  


    Lily 

    copyright August 2009