Bruce and I recently traveled back to my native state of California from Southwest Florida, where we moved at the end of March 2020, just as COVID started.
I wrote during our cross-country move and took pictures.
Our flight home from California was scheduled to leave Palm Springs at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, 20 September. Rising at 3:30, I checked my phone and e-mail, and saw a message from American Airlines: your flight has been cancelled.
We were forced to reschedule our flight to the next day and to leave from Ontario (ONT) not Palm Springs (PSP). I booked a room at the Embassy Suites near the airport.
“I haven’t been down here for a long time,” I told Bruce. By this, I meant the Pomona/Claremont/Ontario area. East of Los Angeles, but not East L.A.
That evening, I went to work out in the hotel’s indoor pool, a glassed-in structure more typical of Ontario, Canada than Southern California.
Both hotel and pool were right by Interstate 10, as is the airport, as is pretty much everything else between this satellite of LAX and Los Angeles. Even though it was indoors, I was choking, sneezing, and coughing (as I had been when we visited Disneyland in Anaheim a few days before).
How beautiful and pure the desert air in our temporary home in Desert Hot Springs.
How awful the air was elsewhere. Whatever is being pumped into the air in most of Southern California these days may not have obscured the mountains quite as much as when I was growing up, but it feels just as lung- and eye-burning as the 80s air that inspired the CHP officer who pulled me over one day to ask, “Have you been smoking marijuana?”
“No,” I said in a trembling voice. “It’s just very smoggy.” This guy was a normal young cop unlike CHP killer Craig Peyer. He just asked for my number and let me go on my way. I gave him the school’s main switchboard.
Last week, I was swimming back and forth in a hothouse-style glass enclosure in a place near where I’d attended college, listening to the freeway and airport noises, looking at the sycamores planted around the hotel. They struggled for light and life, and I for breath, and I remembered the last time I’d been out in that neck of the woods.
The day about ten years ago when I arrived for my interview as the director of the Laspa Center for Leadership at Scripps College in Claremont, where I received my undergraduate degrees in 1983.
On my way to this important job interview to direct a women’s leadership institute at my undergraduate school, a high-priced and prestigious women’s liberal arts college where not too long before, I’d served as the Alumna in Residence, I pulled off I-10 to use a gas station restroom.
When I returned to my Jeep, I heard a noise and looked up to see a massive bald eagle perched on a tall sycamore branch.
If you haven’t lived in an extensive concrete and asphalt environment of a place like urban Southern California, it’s difficult to comprehend the vastness of artificial human habitat. Nothing but concrete, glass, metal, blacktop, plastic, manicured grass, and exotic landscape plants or foreign trees.
For every thousand gum wrappers, crushed cans, and plastic bottles, you might see one squirrel, rat, or stray cat.
The eagle had a majestic snow-white head, shining dark feathers, and massive claws.
Thinking about this beautiful, rare bird boosted me as I entered the interview. After all, there’d been a wonderful appearance of a bald eagle in the pines at my niece Debbie’s wedding on Whidbey Island. Debbie is the founder and CEO of GoldieBlox Engineering Toys for Girls. I may or may not have had the opportunity to mention my mother Sterling Sturtevant or niece Debbie Sterling at this interview for “women’s leadership” at a women’s college.
Not that it would have mattered under any circumstances, because the website, school, and everything else show what the school really wanted: mediocrity, bullshit, political correctness, and non-leadership. No, I do not know who was hired and I don’t know whose name or “reputation” is on the low-quality, unleadership-like website I linked above.
The interview was reminiscent of full-time college instructor interviews I’ve been through. At it, a non-alumna trustee, the wealthy wife of a Silicon Valley executive, saw the logo on a binder illustrating my not-as-yet failed publishing company, Chameleon, and asked, “What is that? A worm?”
A rich person given a position of responsibility asked if my publishing company’s logo of a Chameleon was a “worm”.
Bitch, what are you? Someone who married a rich guy and can afford fake hair, fake boobs, fake teeth, unlimited cosmetic surgery and the world’s most expensive jewelry, vehicles, home, and clothing? Yacht owner? Does your husband own a hypercar? Is he a big man in unicorn IPOs? I bet he’s heavy into AI now. [I need to make up a name for her … Scroogina!]
I was so shocked by this woman’s attitude and statement that I didn’t immediately respond with the telling-off she deserved.
It wasn’t just me that this school had done this to, and her behavior was anything but an isolated instance of misspeaking on the part of an individual in “leadership” at this organization whose only qualification was proximity to wealth.
This was the second round of interviews for the Leadership Institute position. In the first round, a fellow alumna, my friend Tamara Smiley Hamilton, had been humiliated by a circus-like atmosphere in which candidates were asked to face a round-robin of hostile questions from students steeped in bullshit politically-correct dialogue and cultural abuse. Tamara, an outstanding public speaker and executive coach, had lived through the first Watts Uprising and was one of the early diverse students admitted to Scripps based on her academic achievements.
An accomplished, elegant, highly-intelligent Black American woman treated lower than dirt by a rich woman full of assumptions and self-importance based in nothing. What about me?
The brightest-testing student from my large Southern California school district for a decade before and after, straight-As, artistically, athletically, creatively, and intellectually gifted, pretty enough to attract the heir to Conoco-Phillips …
Not a worm, bitch. I could have your husband if I so chose.
Both Tamara and I could have done a decent job in this position and assisted young women to discover their own leadership paths: all of which would have and should have been unique. I would have encouraged physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental health and acted to reduce fear and improve confidence and agency.
Just like a worm. I don’t remember the woman’s name, thank God. It was a one-sentence slap in the face just as the lengthy and hostile round-robin of angry and offensive student questions hurt Tamara.
What had we done to deserve this? All we did was apply for a job in a field in which we had experience at the school where we’d been educated.
Tamara never gave up her loyalty or care for the school.
The death of a young Resident Advisor following sexual predation made me choose, not without extensive thought, to disown this school. Not being treated so poorly in a job interview for a position for which I was qualified.
Yes, the eagle I’d seen that long-ago day was sending a message, one that took almost a decade to be understood:
“I am a strong, beautiful creature trapped in a hostile hellscape filled with hidden enemies, little sustenance, and inchoate evil, yet still I thrive.”
Our society, world, and culture has moved so far from the touchstones of what humanity has understood as a good life that it’s almost impossible to separate who we are as humans from the barrage of messaging that tells us how we should live.
Bruce and I watched a biography of classic film actor Burt Lancaster the other night and it helped me to form the thoughts I’ve been considering for a long time.
I never considered myself to be a strong person, yet here I am.
I never considered myself to be a disciplined person, yet here I am.
I never considered myself to be a good person, but I’m beginning to make choices toward better ethics and morality.
I realized that these things were best-done one day and one thing at a time. Include one thing today, and then tomorrow, and don’t add anything new until you know you won’t give up what you’ve built on before.
Burt Lancaster never participated as a member of Hollywood’s leadership group, despite his wealth, fame, and ability to make and star in good, commercially-successful and critically-acclaimed films. He did endeavor to read a book every day, he obviously took good care of his physical and mental health, and as he read, he listened to classical music. One friend, co-star, and co-worker after another spoke about how he didn’t have the inflated ego of so many of his peers. His focus was on his work, being better as an actor, and being better as a person.
I’ve had several turning points and realizations in my life, and this eagle and the understanding I’ve finally come to, which Burt Lancaster seems to have had from the start, is just one of them.
One day at Saddleback, one of my students burst out in class, “Professor Casil, you’re so humble.”
That was because I’d taught myself to say “I don’t know, let’s look it up” to any type of writing-related question instead of blurting out an answer, even if I really did know.
Those of us who are anywhere in the good or neutral areas of the D&D alignment chart are easily deceived by our world’s hostile, life-degrading conditions: social, physical, emotional, spiritual, mental.
So, here’s the thing about that rich, blonde, slim, worthless bitch who called me a “worm.”
Her lack of care and preparation for the job interview promoting leadership for women at a women’s college disappointed me at the time and now, disgusts me.
I’d put her down in the category of “chaotic evil,” as I don’t think she had even a small clue that she might not have been doing a good thing. I didn’t get the sense that she had a criminal mentality like the sex pests who take tenured positions at schools like Scripps in full knowledge they’ll be protected thanks to institutional imperatives to self-protect against short-term crises such as Resident Advisors being preyed upon and committing suicide.
But I did get the sense she was the type of person who’d shoplift little items for a thrill, and that her whole life revolved around thinking she was smarter, richer, prettier, and better than others. Maybe not really, since most, if not all, bullies operate from poor self-esteem, not the opposite.
God is indeed good: He made eagles.
And he made all of us, and gave us eyes to see the eagle. He gave us hearts to feel and bodies to live in and use to perceive and sense the world, and minds to think, remember, hope, and dream.
This is a new world: we are already in it.
The eagle told me what he thought, and I relate to its necessity.
Brothers and sisters don’t fly here
The land is too hard and gray
They seek the open ravines
The mountain land
The small creatures hiding under pine needles
Or in the rocks
They hate the big bugs that spew choking smoke
They will not eat the human discard
Neither will I
I fly over the long gray lines
I see how they separate land
I watch their homes
And in the shorn grass beside the largest ones
Beside the bright blue ponds and streams
I find my small furred prey
I cry in joy
to taste the sweet, fat flesh of a Pomeranian
I cry in joy
to hear the despairing shrieks
Of those who think
They can own any living thing
When they learn what has taken them
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