Heather Ryan's Open Salon Blog

Oregon, Ye Olde Tax Collector

Sun, 5 Jul 2009 01:07:21 -0400

Last year some of you may remember when I had to fight with the state of Oregon to receive my tax refund. It was almost October before I got it, and it was only after stepping into the Kafkaesque-world of the state revenue office that it happened. This year, it is no different. The same level denials, the same letters, the same demands for excruciating proof of childcare payments. Last year, I wasn't able to come up with all copies of duplicate checks, so I sent in what I had, resulting in a loss of about $300 to my original refund amount. This year, I'm fighting the system again, only I've decided to make it all public, to email all of my state legislators and senators, and to be very vocal about this.

And I will say that there is nothing quite like writing an angry letter to a government agency on the Fourth of July, right before running out to watch the fireworks down the block:

Oregon Department of Revenue
955 Center Street NE
Salem, OR 97301-2555

To Whom It May Concern:

I received your notice regarding my adjusted tax return on June 18, 2009. I am appealing this decision within the 30-day time frame as provided. I am including in this letter proof of payment of childcare, which includes photocopies of duplicate checks and copies of my bank statements. In the instances where I could not find copies of my duplicate checks, I have included itemized statements from the childcare provider and corresponding bank statements. In all cases, I have circled the checks on my bank statements in order to make referencing them easier.

While this should be sufficient to appeal the adjusted return successfully, there are some pressing issues I have with your organization. This is not the first year my return has been adjusted because of the Working Family Credit. Last year, I had to make many calls, send letters, and request a form from the Oregon Tax Court to appeal the decision before my refund was finally issued. My refund was flagged the year before as well, though the method of proof wasn’t quite as rigorous.

As a point of reference, I should note that I have always submitted ample information to receive my federal refund without issue. This is despite the fact that my federal refund is often larger than the one I receive from the state, and includes a similar credit, the Earned Income Credit. In addition, I’ve often used childcare administered through the University of Oregon or, in other words, my childcare has, for the most part, been signed and verified by a state employee. If your office has come to the point where a signed invoice from another state employee, from a major state organization, is not enough to establish the veracity of my claimed credits, then there is a serious problem within your office. No organization would be able to run effectively if such a burden of proof were required at every turn.

In addition, I’ve always used a licensed accountant, and every year, my accountant has said the same thing about my state refund: “they will flag it. It doesn’t matter how much proof you send in.” Last year my accountant said, “Everyone gets these flagged. And a lot of people just can’t get everything together to get their money.” This year, I asked every accountant in the office, and they all agreed that this was the case. One man went so far as to suggest, “they do it so they don’t have to pay all of them.”

This is particularly troubling because the Working Family Credit is designed for low to lower-middle income working families. In other words, these are people who struggle to make the rent, the electric bill, and cover quality childcare, despite the fact that they are working. These are families who are less likely to have the time or the resources to adequately answer a denial of their tax refund. I had to balance finding every bank statement, and every duplicate check, and then cross-referencing them, with being a single mother of three children, and all that entails—soccer games, homework, doctors’ appointments—while juggling a professional job where I sometimes have to work 60-hour weeks. I received my initial notice saying I needed to submit this information while in the middle of teaching 4 courses, an overload, at the University of Oregon. Incidentally, I am also a state of Oregon employee.

What’s appalling is that such systems, whether by intention or mere circumstance, make it more difficult for these families, my family included, to get the financial help we have a right to. The Working Family Credit is supposed to help Oregon families; it isn’t supposed to add a layer of worry and stress and time and effort to an already stretched-thin life. I generally dislike claims such as “they do it so they don’t have to pay,” but when I balance the incredible amount of evidence—the fact the federal government requires no such standard, that even a state agency’s signed invoice is not sufficient proof, and that everyone seems to know that these returns are flagged a priori—it tells me that there are serious reasons to believe that the Oregon Department of Revenue does not want to pay these refunds according to the tax law.

This all sounds incredibly dry until you realize that there are real people behind these refunds. Last year my refund was $5716. This year, it’s $2505. I make $27,000 a year. I have no room to let go of even a dollar.

As such, I am both appealing the decision to adjust my 2008 state tax return. I am also sending copies of this letter to my state legislators and senators, and will also publish it online. Especially now, especially in this fragile economy, this cannot continue. Oregon families can no longer allow it.

Sincerely,

*tm

Oh, Serendipity

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 17:07:24 -0400

I ran away, the first time, when I was 7. It wasn’t because my parents were mean, or because my mother had taken away a cherished toy or grounded me. The night before, my brother Chuck and I had watched a movie where the child protagonist ran away from an orphanage to make a life in the woods. I can’t remember the title now—it was some made-for-television, early 80s thing, all bad hair and violins—but I remember how we laid on our stomachs, faces propped in hands, and watched, rapt. The boy made a bow and arrows, hunted deer and pheasant, knew how to find mushrooms. He built a cozy shelter of animal skins and branches where, against a winter sky, smoke curled idly from a hole he had cut in the roof.

Early next morning, I organized the break. Chuck and I packed several items we deemed important—coats, winter boots, a few crackers, and my Holly Hobbie sewing machine—before heading out. We made it as far as the house across the street, where we played with the neighbors, Brandon and Angela, until my mother woke up and found us missing. We were spanked, hard, for running away. We’d been gone for at least an hour, and it was winter, there was snow on the ground, and my brother was only 5. There was my father’s belt, and a sentence to spend the day in our respective rooms. My mother, though, seemed more concerned to find out what had prompted us to try running away in the first place. “Don’t you love your father and me?” she asked. “Are you mad at us?”

I didn’t know then how to put into words my desire to leave the familiar behind. Or how, the night before, shoulder to shoulder with my brother, I imagined it was possible to be a child and still fashion a life of my own, through work, diligence, and an ascetic isolation. As the lights from the TV played images across our upturned faces, I could picture how long we’d have to walk to find some secret place. It was comforting. It was a narrative in which a kid became more powerful than adults.

It is five days until we set out across America, five days until we pack dishes and food and sleeping bags and a tent and bottles of water and ice and bandages and head north first to Montana. I’ve been planning this trip, in some way, for four years. Four years ago, I imagined piling the kids in the car and driving, just driving. We’d pass through towns where no one would know my marriage was falling apart, that in Eugene, Oregon my husband was living in an apartment that I never wanted him to move from. They wouldn’t know that I was contemplating dropping out of graduate school, because who could finish, really, with three kids, the oldest 7? They wouldn’t be able to tell that I had no money, that I was terrified I was fucking everything up. The road, the movement from place to place, the act of seeing, of witnessing to America, became a catharsis I longed for.

Longed for but could not complete, at least not then. As the years passed, I finished school, divorced, worked, constructed a life I’m happy with. Yet the desire, something deep and thirsty, was still there. I wanted to cross the continent, drive the blue and red highways, touch the Corn Palace in South Dakota, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, see Avery Island in Louisiana and the Buddhist temple there. The trip became bigger than a simple therapy, or an answer to a laundry list of worries I’d had, deficiencies I’d never been able to fix. I wanted to see the people who lived in places decidedly different than Eugene, Oregon (which is just about everywhere). I wanted to understand the country I’d called home my entire life. It began to feel like a duty, like a necessary part of my education, my kids’ education. I can sit in a lovely coffee house, drinking my organic, fair trade coffee laced with rice milk, and can comment on the idiocy of Californians for passing Proposition 8, or can shake my head at any array of red state “offenses,” the Sanford debacle, or the Fort Worth brutalization of gay men on the anniversary of Stonewall, but it feels somehow wrong, somehow incomplete, without knowing them, without trying to understand what it’s like to live as them, in those places.

This year, through several fortuitous coincidences, I was able to squirrel away enough money for the trip. Months ago I started planning the epic journey with New Slang Philosopher because we wanted to go together. We drew routes, lined our atlases with pencil marks and circles. But I knew after a month I couldn’t take the trip with her, or anyone but my own children. I had to go it alone, even if it was going to be harder. Even if it was going to be lonelier. Because I needed to see America for myself, and be the one showing the kids. It could never be a joint adventure, not really.

Today, I discovered that NBC and I think alike. That is, their show The Great American Road Trip premieres next week. Not on any day, but on July 7th, the day we embark on our own adventure. Initially, I was horrified. I’d been scooped! Out done! My idea had been stolen! It would ruin everything! But that anger conveniently ignored everyone who came before me (or NBC), like John Steinbeck and William Least Heat-Moon, or even Homer. There can be no helping the fact that when you talk about The Odyssey, you’re referring to every narrative that has capitalized on that theme since, even Road Trip, and vice versa. No one owns the idea of the road trip, least of all me (and when I’m feeling saucy, I like to say “least of all NBC.”).

So I looked at the show’s website to see what their conception of the meme was. Seven families, all of them so alike that their minor differences seem both staged and glaring, a neat trick. Each family has 2 children. Each family has 2 parents, though one family is the product of divorce and remarriage. They are mostly white (with two exceptions, of course), and they all appear at least solidly middle class. There are no gay parents (or, well, openly gay parents). There are no single parents. There is no family with more than 2 kids.

The families are also outfitted with giant RV’s, and then sent across the country to compete against each other in “comedic challenges.” Each week, a family will be eliminated, which will be decided based upon how well each family does on the challenges. The backdrop of said challenges will be, apparently, places like The Grand Canyon and The Washington Monument. America’s mutant power must be the ability to turn anything, even a literary concept thousands of years old, into a profitable reality television show.

But like all reality television, it’s a far cry from reality. It's not even within walking distance of reality. Taking a journey, an epic road trip, isn’t supposed to be about using iconic American symbols and images as a backdrop for, I dunno, raspberry jam wrestling. And it’s not something that can be scripted in such a manner, or made to conform to a clean, neat 42-minute weekly episode with a clear narrative arc, a protagonist and a plot and building tension.

And I felt, suddenly and quite happily, lightened. Our road trip’s beginning, the way it coincides so perfectly with NBC’s The Great American Road Trip is not a terrible coincidence, but serendipity, pure and simple. It means this is something people are interested in. And while we won’t be traipsing through Washington, trying to outdo other families for some opulent grand prize, we’ll be crossing into Wyoming, and listening to the blue grass at the Big Horn Mountain Festival. We’ll be at the Crazy Horse Memorial. We’ll be on Clear Lake in Minnesota, or at Coney Island, peering cautiously at the bearded woman. We’ll be on the shores of the Florida panhandle, marveling at the warm, crystalline water of the Gulf of Mexico, or dancing to Zydeco in New Orleans, or walking through Selma. We’ll be at the foot of the Great Salt Lake, the edge of the Grand Canyon. And we’ll snake through California, Los Angeles, until we get to that last stop, Susanville, California, the place I tried to run away from all those years ago. In essence, I’ll go home, and then I’ll go home. Which is something, I’m certain, no camera will ever manage to fully capture.

*tm

© Heather A. Ryan, 2009. May not use without permission from the author.

SFT: Single Female Traveler

Wed, 27 May 2009 20:05:04 -0400

The trip is in T-minus 41 days, and I’m panicking.

Immediately upon re-reading that sentence, I’m struck at how ineffectual it is at communicating the full magnitude of both “trip” and “panicking.” The trip, also currently known as “Road Trip to Insanity, 2009” is a 7-week, 10,318-mile (and counting) voyage through the United States. In my car. With all three of my kids. With most nights spent in a tent, as opposed to the nice HoJo in a nice suburb.

As if that weren’t enough, another single mother, New Slang Philosopher, will be coming in her vehicle and with her two kids (who are 7 and 4). This component is a bit like the vital piece of information given at the end of a reality-television show stunt. Like “you are going to climb this mountain with your bare hands, in under 3 hours. And…you’ll be followed by a pack of carnivorous goats!” Or something.

This may explain my current state of panic, which has manifested itself in several ways. One of those ways is me purchasing many camping items (water bottles and a newish tent and sleeping bag and a Swiss Army knife, as well as books on camp recipes and all manner of how to get by in the outdoors). And if it were just purchasing items, I’d not even raise an eyebrow, because who in America, I ask you doesn’t react to panic with purchasing sundries?* But for the past week, I’ve found myself laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking what the holy fuck did I just sign myself up for? I’m filled with worry. I worry about bears and mountain lions and black widows in the desert, though those are pretty easily mitigated and planned for. But I also worry about men in scary vans and drifters and teenagers starting massive bon fires, and I’m worried about New York City, which we’re spending a week in, and what happens if I lose a kid on the subway, or what if I get hopelessly lost in Chicago, and what about New Orleans and all the crime there, and, come to think of it, I’m really not that tough, though maybe I can kind of fake it, but what if something, some terrible thing, happens to us?

When I think of safety, of protecting us from those things that would do us harm, I think of how unusual it is to be a single female traveler. It’s sometimes frowned upon, and often begins stories that end with rapes or some grisly manner of death. Once, when I was 19 and headed to my boyfriend’s house across town, my father pulled me aside and in a serious tone told me how I needed to lock all the car doors before leaving. He told me that if anyone came up to the car, I should run every red light and either get to my boyfriend, or back home. In other words, I needed to get to a man.

I wasn’t about to drive through South Central L.A. In fact, it was simply downtown Bakersfield at night, a place where, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to walk through alone, but was certainly not dangerous to drive through. For months, though, when I took the car to my boyfriend’s house, I locked every door, carefully checked my mirrors for predators, as though one was waiting for me, behind the old movie theater that still showed classics on Thursday nights, or in the A&W parking lot.

My dad’s fear was eventually funny, a point I reminded him of whenever I did something particularly “daring,” like the time I drove to Valencia (which my dad said was “driving to Los Angeles” and implied there might be some gang bangers hiding in those lovely suburban homes or that Six Flags Magic Mountain). I’ve long known that to take a long trip, as a woman and as a mother, is something I’ve needed to do, that I’m entirely capable of. I also believe wholeheartedly in not making decisions based solely on the lowest common denominator factor, or, in this case, based upon the fact that the world harbors some ends I’d rather none of us meet. But as I’ve planned this trip, as NSP and I have discussed routes and excursions, I’ve come to realize that I’ve breathed in society’s, and my dad’s, beliefs that women are easy targets, and weak, and it is therefore unsafe for women to travel alone. And by alone I mean “without a man.” At the same time, I know that if I’m smart and relatively careful, the kids and I will be fine. I know, too, that there’s no way to counter every “threat,” and it’s hard to know where to draw a definitive line between being reactionary and being smart.

But I’m still afraid. I walk some invisible, curious and barely logical line, where I worry for our safety while, at the same time, roll my eyes whenever anyone tells me how I might stay safe on our trip. Double this when a man tells me, in that authoritative way, how I need mace or pepper spray, or how I should lie to everyone that I meet that I have a husband. I think of feminism and culturalization and the myth of feminine frailty, and I think about how much stronger so many men are, physically, than I am, and I’m stuck.

While I’m trying to deal with these fears I harbor—some, perhaps, more legit than others—I’m, also dealing with the fact that, holy Christ, the kids and I are going to be together for 7 weeks straight. 7 weeks. 7 weeks, a good portion of which will be spent confined in a tent or a Subaru. And, despite the fact they seem unrelated, I’ve come to see both fears as tied together. If I’m a good mother, I think, the kids and I won’t fight. We’ll have a wonderful time, and the summer will be highlighted by trips to The Met and Gettysburg, and to eat BBQ** in Kansas City. But if I’m a good mother, how can I also be an adequate protector? The two seem completely opposed to one another, set on the opposite ends of a spectrum. I’ve navigated it before, navigate it in some way every day, but never to this extent. I’m stuck between the demands of two gender roles, and having to fulfill those, and knowing I can’t, and knowing that I won’t, that I truly don’t want to. In some ways, this trip is about my life as a single mother, the choices I’ve made, the things I’ve let go, the costs it has had on all of us.

Which might explain the nightmare I had last night. In it, I’ve managed to navigate us through the US, past winos and abandoned houses, through labyrinthine subway systems, along roads dotted with maple and highways lined with beach and seaweed. But, at the last moment, I cannot find the final exit, the one that leads down the familiar road, the one hemmed in blackberry brambles, the one that leads home. I want to read this not as a cautionary tale, but rather as emblematic of some great change that will come as the result of such a journey. I’m well aware of the literary device of "the journey," I remember Odysseus and Huckleberry and all of them, really. And I know that the whole concept is of the device is that the people traveling change. That's the idea. I'd be disappointed if we didn't. But I’m also, at this point, afraid of what might happen, of how the four of us, our fierce and fragile family, might be forever altered.

And yet, I’m already packing our bags.

*tm

*Okay, so Ralph Nadar doesn’t. But besides him, who, I ask? Who?

**Thing One and Thing Two may decide not to eat BBQ, but I’ve tried to convince the herbivores that they must at least try beef in the beef state.

The Tooth Fairy

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:04:55 -0400

Terrible Mother: Thing Three lost a tooth today.

Friend Omega*: Yeah?

Terrible Mother: Yeah. So she was all excited about the Tooth Fairy.

Friend Omega: Oh God. Tell me you don't do the Tooth Fairy thing.

Terrible Mother: Of course I do. Why?

Friend Omega: You tell her that some mutant fairy breaks into her room and steals her body parts? It's awful.

Terrible Mother: Body parts? It's just a tooth!

Friend Omega: What, does she hang out at the leper colony after hours?

Terrible Mother: Do they even still have leper colonies? Who has leper colonies any more?

Friend Omega: It's disgusting, TM. I mean, where did this story even come from?

Terrible Mother: When Thing One was little, she asked me what the Tooth Fairy did with the teeth. And I was a little caught off guard, so I made something up.

Friend Omega: What did you say?

Terrible Mother: I said she built her house with them.

Friend Omega: THAT'S HORRIBLE!

Terrible Mother: What was I supposed to say? I made up more about it. How she used the canines for fence posts.

Friend Omega: This is awful. Some fairy thing is going to break into my house and steal my body parts.

(pause)

And how do you even assign monetary value to the tooth? Do you set a market price with other parents? Do you have to check with Billy's dad to see if he gets a dollar a molar?

Terrible Mother: My kids all get a dollar a tooth.

Friend Omega: A dollar a tooth! That's insane!

Terrible Mother: Inflation, Omega. Inflation.

Friend Omega: If my parents had given me a dollar a tooth, I'd have knocked out all my teeth!

Terrible Mother: That's because you have to over-do everything.

Friend Omega: A dollar a tooth! I might just do it right now to see what happens!

*tm

*One of the first and only friends of the Terrible Mother cast to name himself. And one of my oldest, dearest friends.

The Flash Effect

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:04:01 -0400

Sunday, New Slang Philosopher came over for Easter. She was one of the many guests, which included her two kids, another family we know, her soon-to-be-ex-husband*, Squeaky Clean Poet, and Planet Politico**. We had an egg hunt and potluck, replete with tangerine-glazed ham, vegetarian lasagna, and a delicious asparagus/strawberry salad***, potatoes and rolls and dessert items. It was a wonderful time, and we hung out in my kitchen filled with miss-matched and broken chairs, and played music, and the kids shelled their eggs in the front room and made a giant mess.

I love parties.

At some point, as I was telling Thing Three how it was unacceptable that she had told her younger guests that there was no Easter Bunny, I noticed New Slang Philosopher was taking my picture. And taking it with her beautiful—and large, and intimidating—camera. I tried to keep my face stern, but it was impossible knowing that she was about to capture my image. I kept breaking into a grin, or outright laughing.

I realized that this is something I’ll have to get used to. NSP is a photographer, and she’ll be documenting our epic road trip this summer with many photographs. I tried to imagine my way into the kind of lazy boredom I’ll have with the camera at the end of the summer, and I couldn’t quite muster it, yet. I still wanted to smile for the lens, and I was painfully aware of its presence.

Which is, in some way, how the initial planning is going.

Right now everything is flat, devoid of life, an atlas marked by pencil and pen, and nothing I can do can force it to become real any faster than it already is. I try to imagine eastern Montana, but it is just lines on a page, neat letters in small font. I want both to understand where we will go and to be surprised by the places and people we come across.

The general plan is to travel to Seattle and Vashon Island first, then head due east. We cannot decide if we’ll stop in Pennsylvania, or if we’ll make it all the way to New York (though I’m quite hoping we’ll make it to NYC). We’re stopping in Chicago, certainly, since NSP has family there. After we make it east, we’ll head south along the coast, hit the Carolinas, and the Florida Panhandle. Then we’ll head back west, through the southern states, New Orleans, and then up through Missouri. We’ll stop in Utah and Colorado, before snaking through California, and finally home.

Last night, at the kitchen table, someone mentioned The Miracle of America in Montana—an immense and eclectic museum in Montana, and someone else brought up The Garden of Eden, one the “8 Wonders of Kansas Art.” We’re going to The Great Salt Lake, too, and the Guggenheim, and The Everglades. But we also want to see these kinds of places, which are quietly iconic, a flash image of America and its people. Lots of these kinds of places, though, aren’t stops, we’d know about. So, I’m asking you, Fan Base, for your help and knowledge. Where she would stop on our trip? What kinds of places would you suggest? Both the famous stops and the quirky, eccentric ones, are important on this trip, but we won’t find the latter without your help.

*tm

*New Slang Philosopher is one of the few people I’ve seen who has been able to keep her divorce, and her relationship with her husband, decent and kind and amicable. And I admire the hell out of both of them for that.

**A new cast member! Who is über-smart about politics! And is a OS regular. Know who?

***Spinach, roasted asparagus, strawberries, balsamic vinaigrette, and chevre.