Monthly Archives: November 2008

Signs of the Times: No More Second Harvests

Posted on 26 November 2008 | Leave a comment

“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.”—Leviticus 19:9-10

I walked the dogs through McCullough Park this morning. I like this route, which you know, because it goes along the river. What you may not know is that I also love it because of the train tracks: the path passes under a trestle and then crosses the same tracks on another street. Most people in Muncie deal with the trains, but I relish them because as I was growing up a train track ran next to our property. One of my favorite memories is standing at the railroad crossing in front of my house with my mother. I think my brother was in a stroller, but we were all walking to the library downtown. When I tell some people we used to walk from our house to the library, they gasp and choke about what a far walk it is. The walk seems much longer than it is. In reality it is about a mile and a half, which I suppose is far in a time when people thinking walking to the corner to buy a soda is a long walk. So much for that tangential thought. I can remember standing at that particular crossing many times. Each time we would wait for the caboose, so we could wave at the worker riding at the back of the train. Of course, this was when the engineers would actually wave at small children (or a maniacally waving 34 year old) as they stood with their arms above their heads screaming into the louder scream of the horn. My brother used to plug his ears with his fingers until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he would pull his fingers from his ears, squeeze his head between his upper arms to plug his ears, and wave his arms from his elbows to his hands over his head like a deranged sea creature. But he would laugh as the engineer always waved back. I guess this is all really unrelated to what I really want to write about, but maybe it isn’t because my life was so much simpler then. All of our lives were simpler then. I am not saying they were all peaches and cream or roses and chocolates, but there seemed to be a different spirit in the air. I could be wrong. This could be nostalgia clouding my perception.

This morning, as I came out from under the trestle, I noticed cars. There weren’t two or three, there were many. I noticed as I walked further along the path that were so many they were wrapped all the way around No Name Road to Highland. Possibly they went further than that, but I couldn’t see past the hill that goes up to the stop sign. I thought maybe the firemen, or some other fraternal order, was having a pancake breakfast in the meeting house by Martin Luther King Boulevard, but the lights weren’t on. As I got closer, I realized that everyone was sitting in their cars, or they were bundled up sitting on little stools. They seemed to be waiting in line. Mind you, I walked the dogs at about 730AM. In fact, the woman in what I realized to be the front of the line, was in a coat and a blanket with a couple of push carts, like movie directors always make bag-ladies push, even though real street people use every other kind of cart because they are more sturdy. The kind she had were the ones with two big wheels in the back, with the cart being shaped of stuff that looks like cheap farm fencing. They sell these carts in $5 souvenir shops for tourists to carry home their plunder. There she sat on her front-of-the-line throne, wrapped like a queen in her royal robe. I wondered what time she got there in order to be the first in this long line of cars. She was the only person I saw who sat out in the elements without a car to get warm in, and eventually, the car parked behind her invited her in for a sit.

I kept walking, and shortly bumped into a man who was dressed in sweat pants, Velcro tennis shoes, and a flannel button-up shirt over a sweatshirt for a coat. Beneath the hood of a sweatshirt, his baseball cap poked out. With the exception of my jeans, my Carhartt knock-off coat, and the fact that my shoes tie instead of Velcro, we were dressed quite similarly. I think his insulated flannel shirt was newer than my coat, but we looked like we both shop at reuse clothing stores and Rural King. He was smoking a cigarette, probably a Basic or some other generic brand, because it stunk like burning refuse, not like the sweet smelling burn of a Nat Sherman or even a Camel or Marlboro. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, or maybe bathed either. When he saw me and the dogs coming up the path, he walked toward us to my warning of the dogs’ ill behavior. When he burst into smile and said to me, “I can’t even walk one seven month old terrier. Here you are walking all three with no problem,” I knew he was a friend. His front teeth were missing, so he gummed his cigarette as he let all three dogs lick his face and sniff him. “They can smell my dogs!” he said. I was sure they could. After talking with him about dogs and the like for about ten minutes or so, I asked him what was going on. He didn’t hesitate, but I could tell he was a little—not embarrassed, that’s too strong of a word—humbled by my asking. He said, “Second Harvest is giving out food.” I smiled, “Oh, I wondered.” I asked what time they were to start giving it out. He told me nine o’clock. “Nine o’clock?” I asked, “Why is everyone here so early.” He said that in order to get the good stuff, people got there early. I wondered to myself if they ever ran out. He played with the dogs a bit more as we said our good-byes. “I have to get back in line, or I might lose my turn.”

On my way home, I made sure to look under the bridge on Elm Street to see if Tom was sleeping there in his thick blue sleeping bag with his stuff piled neatly around him. I was going to tell him about the food trucks. I couldn’t find him, so I assumed he either knew and got up early to go wait, or maybe he spent the night wandering around talking to people no one else can see. I hoped he found somewhere warm to sleep. I wondered if his family had come to pick him up this year, like they didn’t last year. I hoped that someone put him up in a hotel, like someone did this summer. I hope.

There are a few things I am thinking about all this:

  1. Do children still marvel at trains? Do children still marvel?
  2. Were we excited about small things because that was all we had? Would we have been as excited about a caboose if we had had cable?
  3. Will people be so courteous to each other on Black Friday as the people in line waiting for food were today? Will Black Friday be black?
  4. What does it say about our economy that people are willing to get in line before 730AM to wait for hours for a Food Pantry truck? What does it say that people waiting in line smoke and own pets?
  5. Why can’t we figure out a way to get dental care, health care, vision care for all people? For that matter, what about ensuring that children get adequate nutrition?
  6. Do food banks run out of food? How many extra cans of food do we all have in our cabinets? Stuff we have purchased that we will never really eat?
  7. Whatever happened to taking care of our neighbors? What ever happened to helping each other out? When was the last time I invited someone to dine with me?
  8. Would I ask Tom to come to Thanksgiving dinner? Would I let him bathe in my tub? Would I let him use my towels? Would I? Would you? Would your church?
  9. Do I leave my fields and my vineyards ripe for the gleaning? What does that look like in today’s culture?

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Posted in Gleaning, Grace, Imported from Blogger, Personal, Politics, Relationships, Religion

Wordle: My New Obsession

Posted on 24 November 2008 | Leave a comment

Apparently this website takes the text you enter, counts the repetitive words, and then arranges the passage of text into a visual representation of that text. Here is Allen Ginsburg’s “Supermarket in California” and Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses.” If you click on the image, it will take you to a larger version on Wordle. You should try your favorite stuff.

Here is my own creative nonfiction piece, “The Color of Shame.”

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Posted in Imported from Blogger, Just for Fun, Personal

The Angst of Shopping Plus Size

Posted on 21 November 2008 | 1 comment

Space, prices, styles, locations, dressing room size

Go to all the types of store (use online Coldwater Creek, or steal a car!) and pick a certain type of garment to locate in each. record the journey. record the actual measurements of dressing rooms, etc. record the salespeople’s reactions. etc. weave all of this into what each space does to discipline the body. You may have to ride your bike over T-giving Break.

What about teenage girls and plus-size clothing are there any options? Is this even part of my paper or is it just a random thought? What if I had a teenage daughter who was full figured? Where woudl I buy her clothes? In Muncie? On a limited budget? In style? How could I, as a parent, support my daughter’s self-image and self-esteem? What about teenage boys for that matter? Hot Topic/Torrid?

Does locating the Women’s department next to the Men’s clothing indicate a link of big women with masculine traits? What does it mean: men don’t shop frequently so they get pushed to the back of the store as well? Men’s department in close proximity to further discipline women, assuming that thinner women already have male partners, thereby they don’t need that further enticement to maintain smaller bodies to catch a man? Do they assume that smaller female customers need to be kept safe from larger sizes? What DOES THIS MEAN???

Have you ever noticed that when you go shopping for clothing to fit a fat body at a big box store like Target or Walmart or Meijer that you have to search forever to find the three racks that have clothing in women’s size, big and tall sizes, or whatever they call the clothes that will fit a fat body, which is defined as a body over size fourteen or sixteen. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the location of plus-size or women’s clothing (not Misses, which indicates a semantic elitism implying that only women who fit in the smaller sizes can be called misses, not ms. or miss). Initially, I will focus on the placement of plus size clothing in big box stores and department stores, but I will also discuss the placement of such clothing in “rural outfitter” stores, as well as the stores that only sell clothing for big women and those stores that mix their women’s (x) sizes in with their other sizes. To narrow my focus I will write specifically about Target (big-box), Rural King (farming outfitter), Macy’s (department store), Coldwater Creek (integrated display), and Lane Bryant (caters to big women).

I plan to emply a Foucauldian lens of discipline and punishment, as well as discussing some current interior design theories. In this paper, my own observations will come into play as a large part of my research, though I tend to look at cultural spaces as implements inplicit in discipline and punishment. My argument is that fat women’s bodies are disciplined within the shopping act itself, as the placement of women’s clothing is typically separate from clothing for smaller women. I am focusing on different types of stores in order to prove that specialty stores (rural, integrated-high end, and catering to big sizes) are actually increasing the acceptable body size in our culture. Stores like big-box stores and department stores are actually reinforcing cultural discipiline by virtue of locating Women’s clothing in inaccessible areas of the store, hiding the fat women away from other shoppers, and not providing adequate dressing rooms for larger people.

At the Target store in Muncie, IN, the “Women’s” section is at the back of the store tucked behind junior, Misses, and Maternity sections. Surprisingly it is located right next to the young men’s section. The four racks of women’s clothing that this Target store stocks are butted up against the dressing rooms. This may be for convenience, but more likely it is meant to hide away the fat customers, considering that the men’s larger sizes are butted up against the men’s dressing room as well. The room between the racks of clothing is the same as it is throughout the rest of the store, and the dressing rooms are small for anyone. There is one “handicap-accessible” fitting room that is of an adequate size, but using it requires bigger women to usurp any customer with a disability who happens to be in the fitting room at the same time. Or, if that fitting room is full when a big women goes in to try on clothes, she is relegated to changing in room that she may not be able to move around in with ease. Similarly, the prices of Target’s Women’s clothing is on average two dollars more per garment than the Misses clothing. A size sixteen in Misses may cost 14 dollars, but a size sixteen in the Women’s section of the same garment will cost 16 dollars. Target is unique because they do offer similarly styled clothing for all body types, unlike Walmart or Meijer whose plus-size or women’s sections offer muumuus in varying sizes, along with polyester pant suits, and last year’s sweaters.

In their defense the Macy’s that is located in the Muncie Mall, in Muncie, IN has a fairly large women’s section in their store. It is located in the back of the store with its own dressing rooms which are the same size as the other dressing rooms. Is this to keep bigger women separate from teh others? What about the shoe department being right next to the women’s section? Is this to facilitate easy shopping (implying decreased mobility for bigger women) or is this to cloister the big women at the back of the store, discipling them by shame? The racks appear to be jumbled together, and they are frequently located closer to each other than the other clothing racks throughout the store. This presents two problems: bigger women cannot shop with ease, it is implied that bigger women do not desire leisurely shopping room like smaller women. Also, it implies that bigger women do not care as much about their appearance, that they don’t look at clothes with as much admiration or as close of eye as smaller women. They simply pick something off the rack and wear it. The styles of the clothing are aimed toward older (or business) women: pant suits, dress suits, evening wear, casual/leisure wear, some jeans (always stretchy), polyester pants, silk shirts, sweaters with bold patterns or flashy prints. Basically, an elementary school teacher’s wet-dream. The clothing at Macy’s is, similar to Target, priced higher in the women’s section, but the prices may be several dollars higher, and the styles are nowhere near comparable to the other female clothing sections.

Muncie doesn’t even have a Coldwater Creek, probably due to economics because most people who could afford their clothing would go to Indianapolis to shop anyway, but it is on the front end of a clothing store trend. Both in their stores and in their online catalogue, nearly all of their clothing comes in larger sizes and smaller sizes. These are exactly the same clothing styles, but they are shared among all sizes. I could buy the exact same outfit in size 20 as my friend who wears an 8. We can shop in the same store, change int eh same dressing rooms that are of adequate size, perhaps due to the high-end nature of the store. (It seems as if the high-end stores have bigger dressing rooms. Is that because they assume people have more packages or do they seek provide comfort for their customers?) The racks of clothing are adequately spaced as well. The part that I am having a hard time with this store is that I am not sure how it compares to the other stores I am looking at because the clothing is so expensive. What does it say about class and size acceptance? What does it say about class and expected store ambiance? Is this part of the paper, or how can i read the space outside class? How can I read it just through a lens of discpiline of punish? What does it say about the different way our culture punishes fat- monetarily? Check on price differences.

The farming outfitter, Rural King, located in Muncie, IN, organizes their clothing similarly to Coldwater Creek with all sizes mixed together. Rural King carries up to size 6X for men; however, finding larger sizes in women’s clothing is a bit more challenging. Because Rural King carries the expectation that some of their customers will be fat, their clothing racks are widely spaced and there is plenty of room to walk between them. The onyl two sections that do not have an abundance of room between the racks are the hunting clothing and the winter outer-wear. I assume this is because the clothing itself takes up more space and that there isn’t enough room to move the racks further apart to accomodate the extra girth of the insulation. The dressing rooms look like horse stalls in some areas aof the stores with enough room to move around in. However, in other sections of the store, the dressing rooms in use are the ones left in place by Target (Rural King is housed in teh old Target store). The larger sizes of clothes are priced higher, but the sizes are more varyign and the style are the same for all sizes—typical farm-wear. What Rural King implies in their clothing that other stores do not imply: men are expected to be big (up to 6x) and women are expected to be thinner…their sizes do go up to 20ish in most items. Other stores seem to have a better dispertion of men’s sizes throughout their racks, with an additional big and tall section, but the women’s larger sizes are contained within a plus-size specific section. However, at Rural King the expecation for largesse seems to be exaggerated with larger sizes being the expected norm: it is challenging to find a size medium or small at Rural King. In fact, the last time I went their with my brother (size L), we had a hard time finding clothing for him. What a change!

Finally, Lane Bryant. The one in the Muncie Mall is the most pathetic excuse for a Laney’s I have ever seen, so I will talk about it in special cause, and I will talk about other Lane Bryant’s such as the one at Circle Center Mall, which carries lingerie, outerwear, and other items not generally available in Muncie (again the class factor comes in becuase I think the assumption is that anyone who has money will go to Indy for shopping—Lane Bryant is expensive—or moreso than Target or Macy’s, etc…! Check this to make sure!) At any rate, Lane Bryant carries clothing from size 14 to 28 (still excluding women who wear larger than a size 28, which includes my best friend, so this concerns me). The challenge and the admirable quality about Lane Bryant is that they offer clothing that is in style. What I mean by this is that the clothing is hip, but sometimes it is cut for thin bodies, and looks better on a woman with less flesh. I am not a clothing hater, but some styles (usually the most popular ones) are cut for the “normal body.” So, while Lane Bryant carries in style clothing, they are not necessarily cut for fuller bodies, which is just weird. Okay, the racks are spaced similarly to other high-end clothing stores, although at the store in Muncie is sometimes jammed with merchandise. Not only does it look tacky, but it is not conducive to relaxed or leisurely shopping. Perhaps the most interesting part of the shopping experience at Lane Bryant is the fact that the dressing rooms open directly out into the store (CHECK COLDWATER TO SEE IF THEIRS OPEN OUT INTO STORE). While this enables less overall floor space for used for dressing rooms that are bigger than typical ones, it also puts the fat body on display. Because the only three-way mirror in the dressing room is located out in plain view of anyone shopping in the store. One of the other problems with this type of store (not just Lane Bryant, but all plus-size women’s stores) is that the store only carries bigger sizes, so unless all of your friends are big women, the shopping experience is fragmented, with the bigger woman shopping in her store, adn the smaller women shopping in their stores. The prices also, separate women by class. There is no inexpensive larger women’s store that I am aware of. I do not know of a Laney’s Outlet.

Lingerie: laney’s has it at certain locations, cacique, etc.

Lane Bryant:
Boutique just for you: you could be exactly like other women shopping in boutiques
marketing and politics: pin back everything: size of dress forms

true fat would change a lot things in the culture: fat women can do the same thing
not a new body size aesthetic
thinning trousers

go for it…

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Posted in Fat

A Good Thought

Posted on 14 November 2008 | Leave a comment

It is not only the freedom of the oppressed that is at stake…but also the liberation of the oppressor. —Allan Boesak, South African Minister

I started my day today in the best way possible: by having coffee with two incredible women.

I had a coffee. We talked about writing, the past, relationships, sexuality, boundaries, history, the now, grace, and redemption. We talked about how to answer this question through writing: how can an obviously broken person help to unbreak someone else? The more I think about it, the more I think that it takes brokenness to heal people. At the very least, I think the reason some unbroken people are so good at helping others to heal is because they remember what it feels like to be broken, even though they are no longer. They remember what it feels like to heal. I think this may be why you are such a good writing midwife: you haven’t forgotten what it felt like to be broken and then to be healed.

Then I had a caramel, white hot chocolate. We talked about writing, the past, relationships, sexuality, boundaries, history, the now, grace, and redemption. And we talked about how Jesus works in all of this. We talked about how to answer this question through living: how can we live each day in Christ? What does that look like when it happens? I think this why you are a woman I look toward for spiritual camaraderie: I can see Jesus in you.

When I got home, I had a beer and two pieces of banana bread with pumpkin butter, and I had a startlingly frank conversation with a friend. We tried to answer this question: can we write a series of letter back and forth to each other about friendship and spirituality? It may end up being awkward. She may be right. But I had to say it. I couldn’t keep it anymore. I had to let it go. I think this is why we are good for each other: we can be honest and still be friends.

I think the challenge is to be all of these at once: healed and mindful of brokenness, grace-filled and redemptive, honest and accepting. Is this what it means to love Jesus? Is this what it means to love each other?

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Memoirs and Story Time

Posted on 13 November 2008 | Leave a comment

The more I read my student’s memoirs, the more I realize that we all have stories to tell and that stories are what make the world go around. Their stories are equally joyful and tragic. I thought about all the writing that I have done, all the preaching I have done, all the teaching I have done, and I realized that it is all one big story. In all of my jobs, I am a storyteller. Whether it is a biblical story or an academic story or a personal story, I just keep telling them. And, conversely, I am just part of a story.

I hope one day I wake up to to learn that I have been living in a big hard-cover picture book whose pages are slowly being turned by the Mother/Father God, telling a story to [Their] children. I am in the story with the prodigal daughter. I can stand next to the woman who washed Jesus feet. I can watch as Saul holds the coats of the Jews as they stone Stephen, but then I can turn around and watch as he is beaten and imprisoned. I can glean with Ruth and Naomi. I am all the stories I have been told, because there is nothing new under the sun, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. I am only stepping into the middle of a story already unfolding around me. I come into the picture on page 1974, and I hope I bring grace and mercy and love and compassion. I hope I don’t bring anything but those good things. When I leave, the story won’t end. The story will only go on.

*side note*
Here is a cool website I stumbled upon on my own, not using Stumble Upon.

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