About Me — Rebecca Larson
“Farther along we’ll know all about it. Farther along we’ll understand why.”*
One of the first pieces of “writing” I ever did, aside from corporate emails and college essays, was a little rant about this relatively new phenomenon of using “ask” as a noun, as in “What exactly is the ask here?” As the daughter of linguist, I know that language changes, but this nounifying of what rightfully is a verb got me all riled up, so I wrote about it.
In 2016, I retired from my corporate job of 25 years, where people routinely used “ask” as a noun, in addition to other corporate buzz phrases like “low hanging fruit”, “on the same page” and “pushing the envelope”. I got to the point where I could no longer tolerate these offenses to my linguistic preferences, so in May of that year I left the “askers” in the dust.
As a retirement gift to myself, I made plans to go to London to see an exhibit of an artist that I had previously never heard of named Hilma af Klint, a Swedish abstract expressionist. She would be considered the first and foremost abstract expressionist except for the fact that she was not a man, so men like Kandinsky got to claim that title. But instead of going to London to see Hilma af Klint I tripped while hiking on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota and had to cancel the trip so I could have surgery on my badly broken arm.
While my arm was healing I thought about volunteering to help elect Hillary Clinton because I was having twinges in my belly telling me that Trump could actually win. The thinking on my part never translated into action, and we know how that story ended.
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And then, to make it worse, I was diagnosed with The Unreachable Itch, which is an actual medical condition with a Latin name, but does not require further explanation right now.
My arm healed, the itch was temporarily scratched, and I decided to walk a pilgrimage in Spain — El Camino de Santiago de Compestela, or “the Camino”. My walking companion was a man who was not my husband, but who is gay, so that became an adequate rationale to use when people questioned why I was on a pilgrimage with a man who was not my husband, as they did. In 2016 I felt the need to explain the situation rather than just explain that it was no one’s business (which is what I would say now, because progress).
Oh, if I had only done some work for Hillary, maybe in 2016 Trump would not have been elected president. Along with millions of stunned Americans, I had to grapple with the fact that the worst person on the planet was now leading our country, and we had to decide what, if anything, were we going to do about it. It is no coincidence that during this period I was also grappling with the fact that the people who surrounded me with Jesus and the Bible when I was growing up were the same ones who elected Donald Trump and wow, what happened, and how did I and we not see that coming?
I started on a journey of becoming an activist, a word that had not been in my vocabulary. The word evangelist was part of my vocabulary, however, having grown up as an evangelical, and isn’t an activist really just an evangelist but without the Jesus part? Becoming an activist was relatively easy for me because in my corporate life I had learned how to be an “organizer”, and I had learned how to make an “ask”, so all I did was ask other scared shitless and outraged people (actually it was just women, because even then I knew that women would be the ones to show up, mostly) to come to a meeting so we could figure out what to do now. My first meeting as an activist that winter night in late 2016 ended with me walking out to my car, tripping on a pipe sticking out of the sidewalk, falling flat on my face, breaking my arm for the second time in one year, but fortunately not losing a tooth.
And while I didn’t know it at the time, this was the first unofficial meeting of a club I call mainly in my head, The “Bloodless” Coup — the good & mad (but not violent), the menopausal (aka bloodless), the sisters in the resistance, the women who often feel invisible as they age, but who show up for protests, rallies, postcard parties, door-knocking, legislative committee meetings, using their nurturing, organizing, and bossy skills to smash the patriarchy bit by bit, and work bit by bit to save us from ourselves. And always there is a hefty helping of Minnesota hotdish and joy in the mix.
My pilgrimage started that year — with stories about the patriarchy and feminism, broken arms and healthcare, marriage and friendships, travel, learning things I should have known but didn’t, all while living in a country that really needed to live up to that “more perfect union” thing (and still does, obviously).
And 2016 was the year that I began to write about all of this.
*This is a line from my favorite hymn, “Farther Along”.
