Hey humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 3 81, and I had a conversation with Amy Pylon.
Amy is a true force. She's an activist and has fought for women, kids,
public safety, and a woman's right to financial freedom.
She's been a long haul trucker, beat cancer and lives with scoliosis.
We discuss a lot of the groups that she was a part of,
activist groups from her youth.
Almost all of the groups we discussed in this episode are still going strong,
and I've put information about them, uh,
in the links page on hey human podcast.com so you can dig in a little bit and
learn more. We discuss runaways.
We talk a lot about the work she did with runaways,
and I got this information. So if you're in trouble or need help,
you can text the word safe, s a f e,
and your current location to 6 9 8, 6, 6,
and you'll get a text back with the address of the nearest Safe Place,
site and contact number for your local youth shelter or whatever's
near to you or nearest to you.
This is a United States number,
so I don't know what every other country has in terms of
protecting their youth and runaways and that sort of situation,
but I know that those groups are out there. So if you need help,
please seek help. If you know somebody that needs help,
please help them seek help. A trigger warning. On this episode,
we talk about sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Amy's lived a fascinating life,
and this is a really good episode in my humble opinion. Very interesting.
She's really an intriguing human.
Check out, Hey, human podcast.com for links,
and to learn more about my guests and the show, as I mentioned,
check out Susan ruth.com to learn more about me and my other artistic endeavors,
follow Susan Ruth. And hey, human podcast on social media.
If you're into music,
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You find music these days, or it's pretty much everywhere.
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human podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. It's really helpful.
Please take a couple minutes to rate and review. Uh,
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Be well, be kind, be love, and take care of each other.
Here we go. Amy Pollen, welcome to Hey, human.
Thank you.
It's nice to see you.
You too dear.
I've known you a very long time as you're one of my mother's besties.
Yes. I'm amazed. Let's see, when did I meet your mother?
I think shortly after we moved here in 97.
Yeah, a good long time. Feels.
Like a million years ago. It's a.
Good friend to have dear.
A long, a long-term one.
Yes.
. Yeah, for sure. Tell me where you grew up.
I grew up, uh, in Renton, Washington.
Not far from here. Uh, what is that? Considered a,
a sub suburb of Seattle. Yeah.
Did you have a big family growing up? Little family?
No, small. My mom, dad, and my brother and I,
one uncle on my mother's side.
He and my aunt were like grandparents.
They were 20 some years older than my mother.
And then my dad had a tribe of siblings, but I didn't know them.
They were all in New York.
Did you have a close family growing up? Were were all of you pretty tight?
Yeah. Until I became a teenager, we were, we were. Okay. .
Teenage years are tough.
Yeah, they are.
You have a very interesting story. You've been a lot of things,
but I know that at the beginning, at least I think,
I know you were an activist.
Yes. Been an activist probably since the early sixties
when I worked on the Kennedy campaign while I was in school. Yeah.
Well, let's talk a little bit about that. What drew you into that?
Was it something that was talked about a lot in your family or was that
something.
No, no. My family was pretty Republican, . Um,
I've always felt
the heaviness of people being treated unfairly,
and that's irritated me since I was really young and I don't
know why I focused there, but I always have. Um,
and most of my activism has been because people were being
treated unfairly.
What was it like to work on the Kennedy campaign?
Well, that was simple. I mean, not small town stuff, envelopes, you know,
you never met anybody. Well, I met Governor Rosaline.
That was a big deal Then.
It wasn't political in the sense of being like a political training.
I think real politics probably was
later on when I got involved in the McGovern campaign and went
as far as a county representative, not just a district,
but county and, um, and that I,
I learned about politics or at least the Democratic party and
how things were done with it.
And what'd you think of that, of what you learned.
? Oh, I thought it was wonderful.
I thought it was just amazing that people could change things.
Yeah. That you could get a group together and do something.
And so that's pretty much how I led my life up until, um,
the eighties was gathering groups of people together and, um,
being pretty much a community activist without the title. Yeah. .
And you were involved in women's rights From an early age.
When I got my divorce and I was living out in the woods,
built a house out in the woods on Hood Canal,
I moved into Tacoma because a group of women wanted me to help
them, uh, set up a battered women's shelter.
And there wasn't one yet on the West Coast. And so we did that.
Eight of us did that, which is pretty amazing. When I look back on it, I mean,
eight of us sent out the mailers to the doctors and the everybody,
and got the information we needed and basically took over the second floor of
the y set up a women,
a battered women's shelter and ran it through the human rights division in
Tacoma.
They hooked me up with some women who were starting to starting to try and start
the battered women's shelter. And in that group of,
I think there were 10 or 12 of us to start, there were eight of us finally.
I was the only one that had been battered.
So my experience was necessary or at least
very well received. And, um,
we were amazed by
all the stuff that was going on,
but the fact that we weren't connected to any of it.
And so I went to a conference.
What, what do you mean by all this stuff going on?
Women were doing things all over everywhere,
but nobody was connected to anybody else.
And so once the shelter got going in an attempt
to network,
I went to a conference in Arcadia,
California to just network some of us.
So that for me, it was,
I had battered women in their children occasionally living in my basement
because the shelter wasn't safe. And there,
through that network,
I could move them to another place and then they could move them.
You know, we didn't have to know where, thank goodness,
but we could underground railroad them out of the area and give them
some safety. I met a woman there named Raven Freed Woman,
and that instigated my name change . So I went to court,
I had to get a lawyer, I had to go to court to change my name,
and the judge said I had to have the letters from my children,
which was, you know, ridiculous. But I brought them in.
Both of them wrote letters, Matthew, with me holding a hammer, yelling, .
Alright. Uh, they said they were gonna keep calling me mom.
It didn't matter. , of course it didn't, you know, ,
I'm still mom to both of them and the judge. Mm-hmm. .
I finally told him that I,
I just didn't want my father's name and I didn't
want my ex's name.
So the only names appropriate for me would be one I chose myself. Mm-hmm.
. I think what, what jittered them was,
I changed my first name too, which people don't usually do, but hey,
so that, but I got my name changed.
As a battered woman yourself. Uh mm-hmm. ,
did you have trouble getting away or did,
did you need services like the kind that you and that you eventually created?
When I tried to get away,
I was being chased one night from my work,
and I encountered a police person
and that person said to me, I can't help you until the bullet leaves the gun.
And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
I have got to go and hide. Which I did, I hid. And, uh,
it was not
until that relationship was at the point where he finally took interest in
somebody else. I was in danger all the time and I knew it.
And that's a hell of a way to live. Yeah. So,
um,
then I was hired by another group to do a runaway shelter for kids.
So we did that. But the battered women's shelter was, it was a big deal.
It was scary at times.
It was a lot of networking with Oregon and California
facilities so that we could move women away if we needed
to. And, uh, yeah, I mean,
it wasn't always pleasant because men would find out where we were and be very
threatening and nasty and Yeah. But we were young, you know,
thought you could live forever. .
Did you have personally, did you have confrontations with.
Oh yeah. Some guy took a chain to me once,
thought he was gonna beat me with a chain,
and another one threatened me with a knife. I, how dare I take their woman away?
You . I didn't buddy.
She took herself away for damn good reason. Thank you.
In that experience,
I met some really wonderful people in Tacoma that were part of a group called
the Shelter Half and very political and helped the, um,
pu Puyallup tribe take over a medical facility. I mean, we just had fun.
We thought we were, you know, great, uh,
friends of mine that went to California got pretty deep into the
George Jackson brigade, which was scary stuff. And
one weekend we were out in McClary and we were doing
rifle practice and I said, what the hell am I doing? I have two kids,
I can't do this. And a young man and woman I was with,
she said, don't worry, somebody will always take care of your kids. And I said,
but I want that somebody to be me. And so I left,
I became disengaged at that point. Things had gotten too creepy.
Can you talk about what that brigade was?
The George Jackson Brigade,
that was a group of women from the shelter half in Tacoma who went to California
and were helping George Jackson and ended up killing somebody in a
courtroom that had nothing to do with me,
but it was frightening to be connected in a way that I knew who did what to whom
it was time not to be connected. F b I came to me because of a, uh,
an address book that had been found in a safe house.
And my name happened to be in that book with a lot of other people
and all, all that the call I got at one in the morning said,
da da da so-and-so's address book has been found.
If there's anything you don't want people to know, take care of it now.
So somewhere out on Hood Canal,
there's an address book in a Can in the ground .
I thought, oh, okay, well I don't want anybody to know anything. So .
I'm curious why the government or why the F b I wouldn't want safe houses
around. Was it because they were getting more aggressive?
This wasn't an F B I safe house. This was one of our safe houses.
Oh no, I know, I know.
But I'm curious why a safe house in theory is
a good thing. Why would the F B I be involved?
They were trying to gather up women that they could
take to court and make us talk.
So what I was told was, when you talk,
you don't know who you know or what time you were with whom or who
you might connect to, to what.
So if you're called into this grand jury, don't say anything,
which is great, except if you don't say anything, you go to jail ,
but you only go to jail for until they dis the grand jury. So I guess.
What,
I'm just confused as to what it was about this particular group that had the F B
I snooping around. It.
Was the, it was the George Jackson Women in California. Okay.
Was that connection? Yeah. Got it.
So they never called me to grand jury,
but the threat was there and my parents were interviewed
and I just thought, I, this is not what I signed up for.
I signed up to help people. So,
and I didn't sign up, like sign up on a line. Having.
Those experiences at such a young age,
what did that teach you about the world at large?
Well, I married early and I was battered in that relationship,
so I knew why I was there. Um,
the other women were all different ages and from all different walks of life.
So.
What was the emotional toll of having to be a support system for
so many people? I mean, that must've taken a toll,
especially given you likely had P T S D from your own.
Experiences. Yeah, I think,
I think what started to take a toll on me was just that it seemed
like every other month or week or whenever there's a problem,
an insurmountable problem. What.
Did you find was the number one reason kids were running away?
Uh, kind of an even split,
I think from between just a lot of family discourse
going on and a lot of puberty stuff going on,
you know, the normal stuff. And, um,
the other half sexual abuse,
sexual abuse is so much more prevalent than people realize or wanna admit.
I have yet to meet a woman my age who wasn't abused.
I'd love to, but I haven't. Um, and I, and I assume same.
Same with my generation. I've yet to.
Yeah, I assume it's still there.
Yeah, I would say probably seven out of 10, probably T.
Grace Atkinson came out to Tacoma to, uh,
talk to a group of us at the time that she and other women were trying to put
together MS. Magazine. And at that time they said that,
and I so believe this,
that the socialization of American women is sexual abuse.
And it happens before the age of 18 by someone,
family member leader,
religious person, whatever.
Coach.
A person in a position of trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So,
but unfortunately it's still going on, you know,
and I think that's that whole rape bullshit. It's like,
don't look at who's doing this. How come a 10 year old is pregnant?
You know, just stop her from getting an abortion.
I don't see those guys that are voting for that lining up at the adoption
agency, taking care of these kids.
That is a big issue for sure. And I think the thing that frustrates me with,
look, I'm all for people to end pedophilia. It's important, however,
start with your own backyard is my thing.
Yeah, please. Mm-hmm.
.
Yes, because one in three of us are abused.
That's what.
And those, that's those who have reported. So it's probably higher. Yeah.
And that's.
Probably higher. The worst thing was not being believed.
You're not believed. You know, I,
I got sick of yelling about my father and I just left.
I was working and taking care of myself at 15 to help with them. Well,
you could do that then. You, it's almost impossible to do that now.
Why do you think your mom wouldn't believe you?
She was terrified to be alone.
Her mother died when she was four.
She was absolutely terrified to be alone.
She stayed with him until he passed away when he was 82.
I forgave him in my fifties.
I wanted my mother in my life. So.
Did he ever acknowledge what he had done?
Yes. Yeah.
'cause I remember my mother absolutely beating on his chest and saying,
you denied me, my daughter. I mean, you know, by then what are you gonna do?
I'm in my fifties . But yeah.
Yeah. Wow. That's very powerful.
Being able to forgive
is so good because it was for me, it wasn't for him. I could care less,
you know, to be very honest. But, uh,
being able to forgive him took that off of me. That heavy duty,
hatred, anger, whatever. I mean,
it probably was why I was so good at organizing and being angry.
in my younger years, thank goodness I put it in a good place.
Not a bad place,
but that anger has to go somewhere and usually women destroy
themselves with it.
Did you have complicated feelings when he died?
No, not at all. I knew my mother was well taken care of.
I was fine.
You were responsible or certainly had a big hand in
getting women the right to have credit cards?
Oh yeah. , I sued, actually. I sued,
uh, the phone company and I sued the electric company
in the place I lived in, uh,
which was Kitsap County at that time in western
Washington.
The Office of Human Relations in Tacoma,
which was the biggest metropolitan area near me.
I was upset because, uh,
I had recently divorced,
but the whole time I'd been married and before I had always paid bills on
time. I, you know, worked at Boeing, I did my thing, paid my taxes.
And they told me because my husband wasn't there anymore,
that even though everything had been in our, both our names,
that I had to start over if I wanted credit. And I said,
that's just not fair all these years. And suddenly I have no credit.
Give me a break. I was really pissed. And what.
Happened when you went up against the credit card companies?
Oh, they were not happy at all.
But they had to deal with the city of Tacoma, not me.
They were accused of being, um, discriminatory,
which they were. So it changed everything for women in the state.
But, you know, I,
I wasn't really aware of that as much as I was aware of it changed it for me.
I got credit and I felt I deserved it,
but it did change it in the state. Um,
other companies slowly came online and, you know,
there's no reason when you divorce that you shouldn't have credit for what you
did. , we bump up against these walls all the time.
I'm still bumping against walls. I can't believe it this many years later.
They keep building the walls taller.
Taller and tougher. Yeah.
At the time that all of that was happening,
I was working to stop the nuclear plants from
being built on an earthquake fault in my state.
And uh, and because of the way I was raised,
I thought that they were gonna bankrupt public power.
I thought that's what that whole thing was about.
And they had overruns to the point where it kind of looked like that might
happen. And so I was really pleased when we stopped them.
The whole whoops. Project got stopped.
I don't believe in any kind of power that you don't know what the hell to do
with the waste. And, and that was my whole thing. You know,
it might be great power, but the waste is awful.
So .
Well all these decades later, they still don't know what to do to do with the,
they don't.
Know what to do with the waste. Yeah. You dunno.
And unfortunately it goes to the wrong people a lot of time as well.
And you have to make the waste in order to make nuclear bombs.
You can't have them without the waste. So duh .
Yeah. From there I just, you know,
helped organize Gray Panthers and uh, uh, what's.
The Gray Panthers?
It was a,
a people being very progressive in their seventies and eighties like I
am now in Tacoma.
Just a group of older people that wanted to do stuff.
Do the Gray Panthers still exist?
I don't know if they do in Tacoma anymore. In fact,
I don't know if the organization still exists. It might. Um,
I did that until my Vista volunteering ended and
when Reagan came into office, everything stopped. I mean,
basically they got rid of all the social work that was being done that was good,
that was being supported.
And I lost the entire staff at the runaway shelter
in a week.
And I couldn't run the shelter without a male and female counselor on
staff at all times. So we shut down, you know.
All those programs across the board just really did take
its toll on this country.
It has for 40 years. Yeah. You know, the whole,
everything changed. Everything was trickled down, which is bullshit.
Everything changed.
And so many wonderful programs just were
decimated ended period. Like mine, like the runaway shelter is just gone.
And I said, to heck with this.
And went to my parents who just retired and said, I have to do something.
No, I have to support my kids. What am I gonna do?
And I ended up driving a truck.
I was fortunate I could get a good truck and a good trailer
and haul frozen or fresh up and down I five.
And I just wanted to do something that didn't mean I had to make people.
Well, you know, , I could not listen to problems for a while.
And I think I needed that.
I needed that kind of a healthy break just to see the real world out there.
And you know,
I only got threatened I think once or twice while I was trucking. So,
uh, there weren't many women out there when I started in the early eighties.
So things are different. Nicely different now.
But if I hadn't gotten ill, I'd probably still be doing it. I mean,
it's really tough on your body
because you know, you're bouncing all the time.
You're and I jumping in and out of a trailer and moving
35 pound boxes, et cetera.
But it was fun to get around just everyday people, you know.
Um, most of what I did was food.
You feel good about hauling food?
I didn't have to haul chemicals or do you know, I had a refrigerated trailer,
so the best use of that is food.
So mostly I took frozen down to LA called people
in LA love french fries. They absolutely love french fries.
And people that then from coming back from LA I'd go through the San
Fernando Valley and pick up fresh. So it was like frozen down,
fresh back, back and forth.
Mostly once I did a tour all around the country that was
. I went from Sandpoint,
Idaho to Fall River Massachusetts to Delaware to
Arkansas, back to California and back up.
And I told the dispatcher I never leave I five again.
back east, the roads were so horrible.
I'd get outta my rig at night and have to tighten everything up. I mean,
it was just awful. I don't know how people truck back there.
And then truckers from back there would come out here and we'd have to talk 'em
off the mountains 'cause they didn't have equipment to drive on our mountains,
you know, . Anyway, it was very,
very interesting and mostly okay. I mean,
once in Denver, a bunch of guys were gonna get nasty with me.
And when I, I got on the CB and said, you know, okay,
I just won't go in and get a meal in a shower. I'm not up for a fight.
And then I heard some heavy,
probably black voices say, Hey,
we've been through this before and we don't need to go through this again
now with women. So everything got calmed down somehow.
And I went in and got a meal in a shower. I mean,
I never wanted much more than that. I, one time, one time in Modesto,
I go in and I pay the women woman $400 for my fuel
and ask if I can have a towel and the key to the shower. And she said,
you're not a trucker and . I said,
why the hell do you think I put that $400 worth of fuel ?
Did you experience a whole lot of sexism along the way or even more?
Probably more than I care to admit. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, what you gonna do?
Yeah. You just keep trucking along.
Why were they mad?
That I would think they'd be excited to have women in the ranks.
Most
most women that were excited were women in cars.
Not women in the ranks. There weren't any women in the ranks.
And anytime you're a woman in the ranks, that's mostly men or all men.
There are, there are a few that get threatened.
It's like somehow you're gonna take something away from them.
Never figured out what the hell it was. You know? I mean, they're mad.
I'm not driving a truck like theirs. I'm not hauling what they're hauling,
but they're mad at me. I know those egos are just.
It's weird how fragile they are. Yeah. Yeah.
.
How old were you when you were doing the trucking?
Let me see. I started in
80, 79, 80.
So I'm trying to figure out, let's see,
in 74 I would've been 34.
So in mid to late thirties
I was 40 when I got cancer and quit driving.
And what kind of cancer did you get?
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Yeah.
That kind of flattened me for a bit.
Did you have cancer in your family or were you the first one to get cancer?
I was the first,
and my dad got cancer in his seventies. But lung cancer,
he smoked for years and years and years. So,
and then he refused to wear a mask when he did all the woodworking that he did.
So he, you know, sawdust got him more than I think smoke.
Mm-hmm.
, but.
But you beat, you beat the cancer, correct?
Yeah, I'm here.
Well, I don't, I, I mean I know that, that, that one is pretty beatable, right?
Of all the cancers.
It, at the time I got it, it was not beatable. It was like, bye-bye.
And um,
and I don't know how I beat it because I walked away. I didn't do chemo,
I didn't do radiation,
I didn't do any of the stuff they wanted me to do because I was convinced it
would kill me, which it probably would've as weak as I was,
I'd lost a lot of weight. And, um,
I had a wonderful group of strong women friends from all the work I'd done in
the community before and they just kind of nursed me back
to health. And then when I got ill again,
when I married John, after I married John,
I got as ill almost and realized that I think their
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma might have been part of severe
hepatitis C because I've had hepatitis c I
did have it since my son was born in 1970.
I had three transfusions when he was born.
And they discovered the hepatitis C after John and I were married.
And we were married in 68.
And they said it was so advanced that they, I couldn't do any, um,
treatment for it. It was just too advanced. And so I said,
Hmm. And fought and got the treatment and got rid of it.
I mean, you know, people just make up their mind and, oh,
you're not the right fit for this hole. So.
Three transfusions during a pregnancy? Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, I, he was born place previa
and uh, I was lucky we lived right over here,
in Bellevue, like minutes from the hospital.
And my neighbor when I said, I think my water broke, but it's red.
She said, get here immediately, you know,
so Right to the hospital and yeah, it's pretty tricky.
So they told me, please don't do that again. So I haven't . Yeah.
Yeah. . I didn't know you could cure Hep C.
Uh, yes you can. Yes you can.
And now much easier than when I did it.
I mean now I think it's eight weeks of a pill.
When I did a year's worth of interferon followed by another year's worth of
interferon with ribavirin.
It was three injections a week and it was like giving myself the worst
frigging flu I've ever had three times a week, you know.
So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, ah, Sunday I almost felt human.
And Monday I had to do it again. So . Yeah. Not fun.
When did your scoliosis start?
When I was born, I mean.
My dad, my dad started showing up in his fifties, I think.
Yeah, I was in my seventies when they took me off hormone replacement.
It was,
I was doing h R t hormone replacement therapy for several years and then
some doctor somewhere said, oh my God, you'll get heart disease if you do that.
So all the women were taken off hormone replacement therapy.
And within a year my mother and I both started shrinking and
I've lost eight inches, so it's pretty severe.
'cause it's all in my torso, you know, . So my legs didn't get shorter,
just my midsection.
How do you deal with that day to day?
Um, I take
25 milligrams of methadone twice a day. And I
eat, well. I walk a mile a day. I mean,
I really do the best I can to keep this body ticking
because I'd like to keep it for a while, .
And I think John wants me to be around for a while,
so we try to take good care of me. But I am, you know,
I am so blessed to have this person as my partner in life
because he took over all the cooking when I couldn't stand anymore.
And, um, he's just amazing. I mean,
just absolutely amazing. So, uh, I'm pretty blessed.
Yeah.
How did you two meet? And I know he is much younger than you are, right?
Oh, yeah. He's 12 years younger than me.
Way to go. Lady.
. Yeah, I'm a cougar. I guess.
I tried to get him interested in my daughter, but his interest was with me. I,
my friend,
I had a friend in Tacoma when I was doing my act,
community activism stuff. And when I got sick,
when I got cancer and got so ill, Liz,
who I'd had a business with called alternative, uh,
non-traditional employment for women. She called me one day and said,
if you can get to the east side, I think I've got a job for you.
And I was just starting to be able to feel well enough that I might
get a job. And so I called my friend Sally and Issa quo,
and her daughter had just graduated. She said, sure,
come you can stay in Lisa Marie's room. And I said, it's a,
it's a nighttime job, swing shift,
so I won't see you and Jacques except on the weekends,
so I won't be so much a pain in the butt. And she said, no problem. I mean,
Sally and I have been friends since my daughter was two years old and she's 58
now, so long time longer than your mom, .
So I went to stay with Sally and drove to Redmond every day
to this small electronics firm where I was supposed to be doing silk
screening, but they didn't have a good enough, um,
air system. And I got really ill from it.
Like I'd come home and just be jittery.
So they said, okay, let's put you in final assembly.
So they put me there and that worked fine. And um,
the person that I worked with for a while worked for was John.
And so we hit it off. I thought he was a young, wonderful young man,
just darling would be how I would've talked about him.
And that darling young man.
And I got married not much longer after that. ,
we've been married 37 years this summer.
I'm dying to know how you tried to set him up with your daughter.
And then his response to that.
I kept showing him pictures of Nina and he just wasn't interested. .
Hilarious.
So, um, so I'm glad he wasn't. Hey, .
How long did it take for you to come around?
Not long.
Not long at all because we were barely two months into knowing
each other when we got married. I mean,
it was insane and it shouldn't have lasted, but it has.
Lovely.
Yeah.
What's it like getting methadone? How was it hard for them to, to,
was it hard to get them to prescribe that for you?
Jesus, it's like pulling teeth, you know? They,
they just are so afraid you're gonna be addicted. Well, excuse me,
I am addicted to not eat, hurting, you know,
that's a problem I have.
I don't like hurting and my spine is
very twisted. So
now when they say anything about the pain medication,
I don't take that much really.
It's a very limited amount compared to what a lot of people take.
And I just say, look at my spine. If you, you know,
would you like to live with that?
And rapidly they back off. So,
you know, they know that it hurts. I mean, come on,
a spine that's supposed to be this tall is now about this tall.
Eight inches is a lot of heights to lose.
Mm-hmm. .
And everything has to readjust in there.
So it's not just the spine,
it's the lungs and the kidneys and the liver and whatever.
But we're trucking along fairly good. So.
Yeah.
.
Given everything that you worked toward and fought for
over the years, how do you feel about the climate now for women?
I think
in some ways we're much better off because
we've connected with one another.
I think there's a level where we do not accept the nastiness.
They, they used to put upon us towards each other. You know,
you couldn't trust a woman, you couldn't. That pretty much,
we have managed at least outta high school to deal with.
And I think they really,
I think men are afraid of us and I don't understand why
I've never,
I don't have the feelings they have and I guess it's testosterone.
That's the only thing I can.
We can create life that's pretty terrifying. We can.
Create life.
They really want to regulate our ability to create life
and our ability to not create life. Um,
all of this is just, what the hell are they trying to do?
It's, it's frightening.
Only in the fact that they could get away with all this shit and that
young girls are gonna be affected.
I'm no longer concerned about abortion. I can't get pregnant.
But young women can.
And the fact that you have to be so frightened about what can happen to you,
because most of the time when women wanna get pregnant,
that's even become really difficult. But they can.
But when they don't wanna be pregnant,
it's usually because they didn't choose to get pregnant.
And the fact that any kind of a remedy for that is being taken away
just really irks me.
Statistically in places where there is access to
excellent women's healthcare, which abortion falls into that, of course.
Abortion rates.
Abortion rates. Abortion rates go way down.
Yeah, yeah. When you have a choice, when you have birth control,
when you have whatever you need mm-hmm. .
Yeah.
But usually in those areas,
I think when the politics tend to favor and support
women, the relationships they have end up being healthier.
Do you and John talk at all about the future?
Especially as you're so much older than him and,
and have some painful issues going on? Does that ever come up?
Oh, of course. I mean, we just found this cool thing the other day
that we don't have to be cremated and we don't have to be filled with chemicals.
I found this place called Recompose that turns me
into, um, compost for the forest.
I interviewed Anna from that company.
I love it. Yeah, me.
Too.
John and I just kind of went, of course.
That's what I wanna do too. Yeah, it's great.
So we were thrilled to find that out.
Yeah,
it's an excellent company and I don't think people realize that cremation is
very hard on the environment.
Exactly. Worse than embalming.
And I don't want all those chemicals from the embalming going into the ground
either. So what, they're gonna put you in a steel box or a let Nah,
that was perfect. What a perfect solution. And.
You become a tree or something.
Yeah, we're gonna follow up on that. Definitely. Yeah. And uh,
both of us know that, so we're fine, you know? Yeah.
One of us will take care of the other of us. However that happens.
You live with knowing the end is there. It's, you know,
you just do what you need to do and enjoy every day. I mean,
we try to find joy in every day.
Whether it's a new British mystery or John makes
a different kind of cookie for us, whatever. It's something,
something wonderful in each day.
I think that is a such a great point because people think that small things
can't elicit great joy. And I think that they do indeed.
They are what bring great joy.
Amy, thank you so much for your time today. Oh.
You're so welcome.
Thank you for listening everybody. Bye.
Bye. On.
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