The Feminist Grandma

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Camping at Cumberland

 

 

 

 

 

 

In May, Joe and I went camping at Cumberland Island, a barrier island just north of the Florida border. Although there is some private property on the island, 18,700 acres have been set aside for the rest of us. No cars allowed, just people and bicycles, and lots of wild horses.

The world has so many beautiful places; this is one of them. A boardwalk traverses wide dunes to a long, empty beach. Salt spray discourages the live oaks from growing high, and their limbs twist to reach the sunlight. Underneath are palmettos, each frond with its population of tiny green frogs with large voices.

images: National Park Service

 

Only 300 visitors are allowed on the island at a time, so campsites and ferry tickets must be reserved many months in advance. There were few campers at Seacamp in midweek, and the beach near the campground was almost empty; back-country campers go to beaches farther north on the island.  Loud groups of school children arrived for daytime field trips, but we didn’t see or hear much of them. They were usually leaving as we went to the beach in the late afternoon.

The entrance to our campsite curved through the trees and underbrush so it was hidden from the trail. No water spigot, but there was a fire ring, a picnic table, and a high cage for all our food and sweet-smelling toiletries.  We hung our trash bag from the cage temporarily, thinking no scavengers would visit while we were in camp, but one well-fed raccoon came in boldly and chewed a hole in the bag  and another jumped on the table to get to our toothpaste and soap.

On the first morning I rose at five-thirty and boiled water for my coffee. I set out my big insulated mug and turned away to fill the cone and filter with coffee, then put them on top of the mug and poured the water through. The fifteen-minute walk to the beach through the twisted live oaks, the sky just beginning to brighten, brought memories of Amanda. We took her camping at Cumberland Island when she was seven, and as she and I walked to the beach at dawn, and saw the brilliant colors through the trees, she began singing ‘Mister Golden Sun, please shine down on me.’ click

 

 

I walked across the broad empty beach past rippling tide pools to the edge of the water, and watched the sky change. The sun was soon up, but it was another twenty minutes or so before a thin gleam outlined the dark clouds on the horizon. I drank the delicious, strong coffee. In my loudest tenor I sang what I remembered of a song from my youth – ‘Sun arise, she bring in the morning…’ by a now-disgraced Australian singer. It’s an old song, a chant and a rejoicing. click (the comments following the video debate the propriety of enjoying art by bad guys) 

I was purely happy, alone on the beach for half an hour, watching daybreak. Just a moment before the sun rose above the clouds, I heard someone walking up behind. I turned, and it was Joe. He hadn’t had his coffee, so I offered him my last swig. He took it gratefully, and then spat. “There’s something in it.”  It was an inch-long caterpillar, boiled. It had fallen into the mug as I put coffee in the cone. I had been drinking caterpillar soup.

 

Dawn post-caterpillar: still cheerful

 

We walked back to our camp along the boardwalk through the twisty oaks, past the bathhouse, down the trail. I tried not to think about the caterpillar. We met a woman and told her about it. “It touched my lips,” Joe said with horror. She answered without hesitating. “You kissed a caterpillar.” I was so impressed. When I encountered her again the next day, at the bathhouse with her husband, I praised her wonderful attitude toward life. “She finds something good to say about everything.” her husband said.  He didn’t seem to appreciate this, but it put a cheerful song in my head. click

Florida beaches are too hot from morning to late afternoon, so after breakfast we walked along the River Trail through the woods. Surprisingly, mosquitoes don’t seem to be very active yet; they only troubled us for about half an hour at dawn and dusk. It was a beautiful day for walking, with a soft, steady breeze.

The trail took us to Dungeness dock, and the broad pasture where wild horses graze. When we were there with Amanda, she saw a stallion’s imposing penis, and I explained, though I feared it could make sex scarier than it already is. Now it was the height of mating and foaling season, and the first thing we saw was a grazing bay mare with a white foal suckling beneath her, a bay stallion grazing a little distance away.

 

I was tired from the walk, though it was under a mile, and sat on a bench watching a dozen horses grazing, rolling in the grass, trotting around, while Joe took pictures. I was reading the park brochure when Joe called, “Look up.” I searched the sky for birds, but then heard hooves, and looked across to see the stallion galloping straight towards me, followed by the mare and foal. He hadn’t read the brochure about staying 3 bus-lengths away from people. I sat frozen, nothing to be done, but fortunately he turned about eight yards from me, and the family circled the field.

Feral horses grazing at the ruins  image: National Park Service

We walked on to the ruins of Dungeness, a mansion built by Andrew Carnegie. Joe headed to Raccoon Key, where he saw thousands of crabs swarming on the sand. I walked the mile back to the camp, exhausted and blue because my stamina is gone. As always, a song came to me, and cheered me up a bit, and I could sing freely on the empty trail.

I love camping.  I like the way daily activities become a slow ritual; showers, toilets, and potable water  were a ten-minute walk through the woods.  I like being outside in the dark under the stars. I like playing cribbage by lantern light.

I tried sleeping in the tent, but the ground, even with the Thermarest mattress, was too unyielding for my left bad hip and my right bad shoulder, and wouldn’t make room for my butt. So I slept outside in the string hammock, and I was blissful, looking up into the sky and stars until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.  The frogs sang all night and the birds began before dawn. 

It was wonderful, but this may have been my last tent-camping trip. I have less energy than I used to, and I need to sleep well at night. I can still spend parts of the night in the hammock in our backyard. I can still sit outside at dawn and dusk. And I can still remember, and sing the songs that cheer me.  click

 

 

Laura Hershey: On the Life and Work of an American Master

 

Book review: Laura Hershey: on the Life and Work of an American Master, edited by Meg Day and Niki Herd. Pleiades Press, 2019

(cover image not yet available, this is the photo on the cover)
.

Three presses (Pleiades Press, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel) have collaborated to produce the Unsung Masters Series of books about the life and work of unjustly forgotten authors, presenting their writing, and biographical and critical essays about their lives. Laura Hershey was a poet and fierce disability rights activist who died in 2010 at 48. I had never heard of her. One of her themes in these selected poems is the invisibility of disabled people, how others choose not to see them, not to know of their lives.

We define some disabilities as “normal.” I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was ten, but nobody considers me “disabled” or different. In part disability resides in the individual; in part it is created or defined by society and custom.  Why was my 1960’s house built in such a way that my friend in a power chair cannot reach the bathroom? Why are there raised curbs and thresholds everywhere? Why don't movies all have closed captioning, and live theaters show dialog on a screen?

 

Yummy! (but inaccessible). image by lisa fotio from pexels.com

 

Those of us who are not now disabled are likely to age into various degrees of disability. Despite the losses – loved ones gone, activities I can no longer do – I love getting old because my thoughts are much more interesting than before. But I don’t like the pain: I’m always hurting somewhere. In his 90’s, with relatively minor disabilities, my father told me that when he was in his 70’s he thought he wouldn’t want to live like that, but he found that he still looked forward to each day.

I have read a few books* focused in part on disability. They make me think about things I never considered, see the world through a different lens. I hope I understand the limits of my own understanding.

Laura Hershey was physically disabled – she retained vision, hearing, speech, sensuality, and intellectual ability, but was unable to move most of her body. She needed a personal assistant to position herself, to feed, bathe, and dress her. She wrote on a computer, using voice recognition.

She wrote poetically or plainly, or even in doggerel. The subjects vary: poetry, sex, Robin Stephens, her lover for over twenty years, her own body. Most of the poems selected in this book are about disability, addressing two audiences - activists, and ableists. But the collection also includes a few lyrical love poems from a long relationship. Her disability poetry outrages me, and it makes me laugh and cheer.

Hershey and Stephens devoted their lives to fighting for the rights of disabled people, especially the right to live outside institutions and receive the services that would make that possible. Before a demonstration against institutionalization she wrote nine stanzas of simple doggerel.

 

Special Vans

The city’s renting special vans
the daily paper reads
The cops are getting ready
For special people with special needs

…

They put up special barricades
To try to keep us out
Still we’re in their face
Still we chant and shout

What’s so special really
about needing your own home?
If I need pride and dignity
is that special, just my own?

Are these really special needs
unique to only me?
Or is it just the common wish,
to be alive and free?

 

 

 

An arresting picture - Washington DC 2017. Image: adapt.org

 

Hershey confronted the notion of independence, a concept so glorified in our country that many refuse to see that we are all interdependent. They ignore the assistance that we all need, but only some receive - from families, community, government. In an interview she said, “I do need a lot of help. But I consider myself independent...That doesn’t mean I’m totally self-sufficient. That means I have control over the choices I make, what I do with my life.”

In the poem In the Way she recognizes how people in wheelchairs can use their disability as a weapon in the fight. It’s thrilling, as though we are watching the birth of a movement. She had been apologetic when her bulky chair took up too much space, got in the way. And then she realized

                    If I alone can be so much
                    and so often in the way
                    if I can create such worry among waitpersons
                    such consternation in concert halls
                    such alarm in the aisles of grocery stores
                    just imagine the aggravation a dozen
                    or two dozen
                    or three hundred
                    people using wheelchairs can cause people
                    who would rather not see our needs
                    or hear our demands
                    or acknowledge our rights!

                    Just imagine!

 

 

image: Action for Access

 

She and Stephens are both in wheelchairs and both leaders in the fight. In A Day, Hershey wishes for a day together free of the struggle, and dreams of a victorious future.

A day, Robin,
Just one single day out of the future
we hope we are building
…
A morning waking slowly – taking our time
to get into our chairs and get the motors going
– not urgently,
with no demonstrations to prepare for,
because justice demonstrates itself these days;
no meetings,
which have mostly been replaced
by simple understanding;
not even a conference to attend,
because issues like caregiver abuse
and work disincentives
were settled long ago.
I’d give us
a quiet afternoon among trees, Robin,
…
Or we’d take poles to a mountain river.
Fish surface as rain begins to fall. Huddled together
in the rain, we draw out enough rainbow
to satisfy two
stomachs and two clear minds.

 

image by emre can from pexels

 

 

Is there a ‘me’ apart from my body? Age, illness and disability may cause us to think more about that puzzle. In Monster Body Hershey plays with language to figure it out.

My back’s shell-sharp curve, my thin wrist bone,
limbs that do not twitch beyond the digits;
right lung so different from left - the leader, thrust
forward, fuller-breathed,
pushing against ribs; while its more delicate mate
shrinks,adjusts inside a smaller collapsing cage...
Monster mine, monster body,
one I would not trade.
Not for gold, not for leading roles,
not for promise of perfection, the protection it affords.
...

but the pronoun ‘my’ distorts the relationship; the
   spaces
imply a separation that does not exist.
'Have' stands too distant.
MonsterBodyMine, instead -
this makes am true....
MonsterBodyMine.
With my body, in my body, as my body,
by my body I journey.
It is my medium for learning, for love.
It is my lens, my light.
MonsterBodyMine

 

I myself have been only an intermittent activist, a little writing, a little marching, a lot of teaching and preaching, mostly to the choir. I’m proud of what I’ve done, but most of it has been working to boost one person up over the wall rather than tear down the walls, to make systems a little fairer, rather than attacking their rotten roots.

I've learned that calling disabled people courageous, inspirational, is as offensive as unwanted pity. But I am always moved by the courage of those who fight for civil rights. They fight against the odds, persistently, for an imagined future which is long in coming if it comes at all. They are the outsiders, the unseen, and they pound relentlessly on the doors of power. These are my heroes, and I call them courageous.

 

image: nat endowment for the arts  from pexels.com

 

*BOOKS I RECOMMEND (links are to my reviews)

Good Kings, Bad Kings, by Susan Nussbaum (novel) click

Too Late to Die Young, by Harriet Johnson (memoir)

A Certain Loneliness, by Sandra Gail Lambert (memoir)click

Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin (memoir)

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Gift from Doris

My sister-in-law, Doris, is perhaps the most literate person I know. When someone at her retirement community invited her to join a “Great Books” reading club, she took a look at the list and realized she had read them all, except for Gibbon and War and Peace, so she declined. Recently, dismayed by the state of the nation, she is focusing on non-fiction, the denser the better (though I think she’s still taking a pass on Gibbon). 

Perhaps we should read about declining empires  image:penguinrandomhouse.com

 

She may also be the hardest-working person I know. At 81, Doris runs an editorial service, translating from German and French, editing manuscripts and helping authors find publishers. Self-employed, she is a demanding and relentless boss. On a recent visit she told me defiantly that a journal editor would “just have to wait” for her translation of an article on dementia. He had sent it to her with no warning just before she came to Florida for a week’s vacation, and she couldn’t get to it until she returned home. It wouldn’t be back on his desk until ten days after he had sent it.

I love going for walks with Doris.  She can name every wildflower and tree. When she is deprived of walks by dreadful weather (they’ve had a very rough winter), she suffers greatly from being cooped up inside. Her only exercise then is yoga, Zumba, and fiercely competitive games of ping pong in the basement of her building. At the New Years Eve party, she choreographed and danced La Bamba with two other women, while her husband (my brother Don, age 91) sang. After a long phone chat with Doris I sometimes have to lie down to recover from vicarious exhaustion.

 

image: josh sorenson at pexels.com

 

It was Doris who introduced me last year to the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day. click It is now my daily treat. Almost all the words are new to me, and whenever I find one that delights me, I add it to a steadily growing list. Unfortunately, I can never use the words in conversation; no one would understand me (except, perhaps, Doris). Therefore, Gentle Readers, I am sharing some of them with you.  Though I have shortened the definitions, if you don’t enjoy dictionaries you may want to stop here.

Some words I love for their meaning: Quob [To throb, palpitate] - such a sexy word. Cwtch (rhymes with butch) [a cupboard or cubbyhole, cuddle or hug].

Some I love for their sound: Pisculent [Full of fish]. Puckeroo [Useless, broken]. Quagswagging [The action of shaking to and fro].

 

pisculent   image: alesha loben on pexels.com

 

I love a few words because I never knew we needed them, and they make me laugh. Demonachize [To remove or drive monks permanently from (a place). Zedonk [The hybrid offspring of a zebra and a donkey]. And my favorite, Hippanthropy [The delusional belief that one is a horse]. Obviously, we need a new word, Zedonkthropy. 

 

Gainesville (GA) Times – baby zedonk at Chestatee Wildlife Preserve

in Dahlonega, GA

 

One word we clearly need is resistentialism [The theory that inanimate objects are hostile to humans], though I don’t know why they call it a theory. How do you think I got all these bruises?

Many words on my list would help me in Scrabble if I could ever remember them, but alas, I suffer from obliviscence [The state of having forgotten, forgetfulness].

I love the words that are useful in Florida summers. Summerful [Full of summer; summer-like, summery]; oam [Steam, vapor, condensation; warm steamy air, heat haze]; mafted [oppressed or stifled, especially by the heat].

image: Anderson W Rangel on Unsplash

 

There are many words I could use if I cared to write an essay about the President. When, disheartened and without much knowledge of history, I fear that we are in a time worse than any that has come before, I now have many venerable words that apply to The Rump, and am oddly cheered to think that parlous times are nothing new:

Ampullosity [Swollen or pretentious inanity; turgidity of language, bombast]; Boation [Bellowing, roaring; a loud bellowing noise]; Jactance [Boasting; vainglorious speaking]; Ondful [Malicious; spiteful, envious]; Homophily [The tendency of people to be drawn to or seek out those they perceive to be most like themselves]; Realia [Real things or actual facts, especially as distinct from theories about or reactions to them]; Imaginarian [A person concerned with imaginary things]; Jeel [Trouble; mischief; damage. Frequently in ‘to do jeel.’]; Jabroni [A stupid, objectionable, or ridiculous man; a loser, a knuckle-head]; Badmash [A scoundrel, a rogue; a miscreant; a hooligan, a ruffian]; Wanwit [A fool].

 

 image: History in HD on Unsplash

 

My only objection to the OED Word of the Day is that it so often turns my thoughts to The Rump. But it has also revealed to me that I am a verbarian [A person who is interested in words]. Writing this was great fun, my version of sport. (I think I am now officially old.) So thank you, dear Doris. You are indeed a walkative [Inclined to walk; characterized by walking] verbarian, and a beloved sister-in-law.

 

A walk at Paynes Prairie   - Joe, Liz, Don, Doris

 

 

They Could Live with Themselves

Book Review: They Could Live with Themselves by Jodi Paloni. 2016. Press 53. Winston-Salem, NC.

 

These eleven short stories give us a year in the life of Stark Run, a fictional Vermont town. Common themes and recurring characters link the stories together, as the lives of the characters are linked in the intimacy of this very small town.

Sometimes the intimacy is a comfort; sometimes it is stifling. Indeed, in the first story we meet Molly, who wants to run away from her finally almost-empty nest, who wonders “is it too late to exchange one kind of life for something altogether new?” In the last story, Molly’s son Sky, a year out of high school, wrenches himself out of the life he loves in Stark Run and runs away to pursue his art in Philadelphia, first wandering through the village before dawn, taking pictures.

 

image by simon robben from pexels.com

Wren, the owner of the general store, is “surprised at the kind of drama that play[s] itself out in this quiet town.” This book has no explosions, brutal fights, murderous villains, no bleak dystopia resisted by sexy heroes. Instead, Paloni makes us care deeply about her characters because they seem real in their virtues, flaws, and yearnings. She knows them so well she might almost be Wren. “Over the years she’d served up hot coffee and listened to a host of woes.” 

 

image pixabay.com

Paloni creates suspense, sometimes with sexual tension, sometimes with a situation more heart-breaking or ominous. What kind of trouble will the three high school girls cause for Jack? Will Charlotte’s mother come home from rehab for her twelfth birthday? Charlotte is sure she will; we’re sure she won’t. Who is the stranger who pounds on the door of Wren’s store late at night, insisting she let him in?

The characters are ordinary heroes. Meredith, who makes assemblages in wire and clay, came home two years ago to nurse her dying mother, and persists in her art though she now teaches full-time at the high school. After almost fifty years as a brilliant English teacher, Maeve stands up to the ignorant, treacherous principal she despises, to make her own decision about her future. Wren drives hours through a blizzard to help a man and his dying wife, both strangers.

image: lisa fotios from pexels

Paloni treats the big themes: death and loss, family love, sex, identity. Meredith mourns for her mother as the anniversary of her death approaches. One story begins with a girl witnessing her little brother’s drowning. The accident is related so abruptly and casually that it hardly feels like a death, and the story is really about the girl longing for her mother, who is lost in grief. Molly’s husband Jack is bereft when she goes away for a ten-week retreat; “[s]he was as gone as a person can get outside of death, as far as he was concerned.” Claudia misses her divorced father, who no longer visits.

In such a small town, adults and youth are not isolated from each other. It takes a village, and the adults look out for the kids as best they can. Sometimes they judge them harshly, sometimes they are tolerant, recalling their own youth. The young are rapt with sexual desire, whether it’s 14-year-old Rory yearning after an older girl, or Sky engrossed in his girlfriend Emily, loving every inch of her, yet tearing himself away to become his most important self.

We see marriages from both sides. While Molly is exhausted by years of marriage and raising five children, and eventually goes on a long retreat, Jack doesn’t know what to do without her. He’d retired and thought they’d spend more time together, and now she’s left. “…Molly had said that her journey had nothing to do with him, which was supposed to make him feel better. It made him feel worse. When did she start saying things like her journey? And how could her journey have nothing to do with him? They were in this life together.”

Addison’s wife Ruby leaves him suddenly after twenty years of trying to change him. She returns roaring in on a motorcycle, dressed in leathers, hoping to resume their life together. But he has become comfortable with himself, has even begun to find a more suitable partner, and realizes that the central question is “Who is it that you want to be?”

image: leo cardelli from pexels

We see the characters working out the answer to that central question; the title of the collection is apt. Some can live with themselves in the town which formed them, and some have to leave to follow the dream they first dreamed there. Leaving is hard, because their ties to Stark Run are strong. Staying is not always easy either, as they must find their true selves in a place which has already created a space for them, a space with a particular shape which may no longer fit.

These stories are beautifully-written. Paloni’s writing is clear and lyrical, and her observations, whether of scenes, experiences, or feelings, are entirely accurate. I love good writing, and can’t read far in a book when the writing is clumsy or clichéd. But more than her style, I admire Paloni’s gift of creating engaging characters, each a fully-realized individual. She has given us a whole living town in deeply satisfying stories.

BUY THE BOOK

 

Happiness

Since September last year I’ve repeatedly told you that my novel will be published in September this year. “Why does it take a year?” people ask. I thought you might like to know what happens in between signing the contract and the glorious day when the book is born. I’ll tell you the highlights so far. The funny thing is, it’s almost all highlights.

My first joy was joining the Authors Guild. Since nobody agrees on the difference between ‘writer’ and ‘author,’ I’ve got my own: an author is a published writer. My late sister Luli Gray was a member of the Guild, and I would read her monthly newsletters and long for the day when I could join. Until a couple of years ago, only published authors or those with a book contract were eligible. For thirty years or so I’ve been on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass, admiring them.

 

So as soon as I received the proposed contract I joined the Guild, and the first thing I did was ask for their free legal advice. I was astonished by the speed and thoroughness of their legal team. They explained the effect of all the provisions and proposed several changes. For $135 annual membership fee I received what I estimate was about ten hours of expert legal advice.

But wait...there’s more! The Authors Guild has an online members forum, and it was there I began to connect with other authors. I received helpful advice about publicity and working with book clubs. Beyond that, I felt I had found the people who understand what it means to be a writer, who are dealing with the same thrills and disappointments as I.

Of course, there's a fair amount of whining, and an occasional thread filled with severely beaten dead horses. (Writers in the procrastination phase of task achievement like to get caught up in online debates.) But I began to make friends and exchange emails with a few who seemed to share my interests. I’ve bought books by three of them, and reviewed two.

 
The Authors Guild Community Forum

 

The long years of trying in vain to be published were often discouraging, but there can be advantages in waiting so long. First, there’s the absolute bliss when the time finally comes. Next, as an old woman, I’ve accumulated a lot of fuel for my imagination. And I admit it: I think I’m wiser than young-uns. (I’m sure they believe they’re wiser than I).

I'm wiser but they're cuter

Finally, because I spent most of my adult life earning a good living and a good retirement account, I don’t have to worry about making money. Writing, always a life of penury for most, is becoming even less profitable.  According to  research by the Codex Group for the Authors Guild., authors' median incomes have dropped 42% since 2009.

Along with that, it’s harder and harder to get one’s book noticed. The internet, streaming media, and goddamsmartphones occupy many minds, while the growth of self-publishing floods the market with books. So authors who can afford it hire publicists, and I can afford it. I gave myself a generous budget to do everything I can to promote this book.

I followed recommendations from writer-friends and people I met on the Author s Guild, and interviewed five publicists. The process was painful for me - I felt everything was riding on the decision, and it cost so much! But finally I settled on a firm that Authors Guild friends had praised in detail, and that firm in turn recommended a website developer.

Publicist

Designer

Now I had a team of three: publisher/editor, publicist, and website designer. To my non-surprise, it was all women. I’ve fallen in love with them all in the course of long phone calls and many emails.

Joan Leggitt at Twisted Road Publications - I knew I had found the editor of my dreams long before she decided to publish my book. When I first submitted it, she told me that magic is fine, but it has to be an integral part of the book. I rewrote the whole thing. My sardonic coffee shop owner became a powerful mystic and visionary; I added more magic and related it to my main characters. I submitted the book again, this time successfully. Then, as we worked together, she suggested one more major change, in the relationship between the twin sisters. I was dubious, but said I’d give it a try. Now I saw that the twins had been cartoon characters. With the revisions, they came to life. I was, and am, awed by Joan’s gifted eye.

Three more edits followed, by Joan and two others, calling for clarifications  or pointing out inconsistencies. I had to master the review function in Word, tracking, rejecting, accepting changes. The work was extremely tedious, and brought me to curses and tears, but I was impressed by the editors’ ability to spot tiny important problems. (The last editor presumed to tell me what my characters were thinking and were likely to do, and sometimes wrote new material. I did NOT appreciate that, but she did point out the mysterious disappearance of a biscuit.)

 

one of many comments

Writing is such a solitary pursuit; like God, we make something from nothing, and we do it alone. Now I had a publisher, who cared about my book as much as I did, and thought about it in the middle of the night.

I had to write a brief bio, dedication, and acknowledgments. The acknowledgments are complicated - I keep acquiring more people to thank - but the dedication was easy - thirty years ago when I finished what I thought was the final draft, I wrote my dedication. I would think of it wistfully from time to time. Now I can’t wait for the day when my dedicatee opens the book and sees that page.

At the same time that I worked on edits, I was responding to requests from Monkey C. Media. I had to think about new things, and answer long questionnaires. Appearance: How about these colors - what about this font? Strategy: What benefit will readers get from it? What action do you want them to take? Write 15 questions and answers for the press kit. Write the About page. We need professional photographs.

More fun, and another woman who is becoming a friend.  Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, met with me for over an hour at her studio - she wanted to get to know me - and then shot what seemed like hundreds of photos in my backyard about a week later, at the hour of golden light.

Blurbs. Gotta have blurbs. Those are the little quotes from other authors that you see on the back of books: ‘compelling, intelligent and sensitive’ ‘makes Jane Austen look like a piker’ ‘the greatest creative genius since God rested.’

 

The Creation    image: catholic.org

 

Authors HATE writing blurbs, or that’s what I’ve heard from more than one. I know very few authors - I had two blurbs promised, but I needed more. That’s why I decided to start reviewing books. I would only review books I was enthusiastic about - there’s not much point in saying “Here’s a book you’ve never heard of and it’s not worth reading.” I didn’t see it as a trade-off (say nice things about me, and I’ll do the same for you) - but as a way to connect with authors. It would be hard to write to a total stranger and ask for a big favor.

This enterprise has only been slightly successful. I received very gracious refusals from several of my hoped-for blurbers, citing deadlines, illness, family troubles. One announced on Facebook shortly before I wrote her that she was no longer doing any blurbs. However, to my delight, I’ve discovered that I love writing reviews. I read more attentively, and I learn a lot by thinking about how other authors do what they do. I’ve decided to start a second blog - Big Books from Small Presses . Like this one, it will link to my website.

I confess I’m a bit worried about the amount of work I’m committing to. I’m working hard 4 or 5 hours in the morning, and often a couple of hours at night. My work with the publicist is about to begin; one of their key responsibilities is assigning me tasks. I didn’t realize when my author life FINALLY began that I was embarking on a full time job. And in this gestation time I’ve only had two days when I could turn to my fourth novel. But when I did, the ideas flowed and the words tumbled out. Now that my book is being published there seems to be a point to it all.

My retirement is over. In the kitchen, in the shower, on a walk, writing ideas or writing business keep popping up. On my magic whiteboard is a long list of things to do. It’s magic because it’s a gift from a Wise Woman - she’s so wise that I simply have to make it upper-case - and I feel her presence in my office as I work on the bed, snuggled by Moe and a blanket, with the whiteboard beside me. I have never been so happy.

image: A. Jennings (the rubber chicken belonged to my late sister, Luli)

Wild Mountain

Book review: Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore. Green Writers Press, 2017.

 

Wild Mountain, a story of a Vermont village, centers on two characters. The first is Mona, a middle-aged woman who has fled a brutal husband to run a general store in her hometown. The second is Frank, who once lived in a commune on Wild Mountain, moved on to wander the world, and now has returned to the town of Wild Mountain to try to live off the grid.

I say two central characters, but in a sense there is a third - the town of Wild Mountain, with the river below it, and the namesake mountain which looms over it. A sense of place provides background  and atmosphere to a story; without it, a novel is flat and empty. But Kilgore’s writing is so vivid, so sensuous that the town, the river, and especially the mountain come to the foreground, and become as large as any of the characters.

Living in Florida, I only know the cliches of Vermont - snowy landscapes, covered bridges, country stores, progressive politics. After reading Wild Mountain I feel I have spent a season immersed in that world -  Kilgore brings to light what the cliches conceal.

 

image: Dreamstime ID 62576588 © Linnaea Mallette

Mona's store is the center of the community, and the novel’s multiple plots and problems are all connected to Mona or seen through her eyes. Foremost is the love growing between Mona and Frank; we see this from both their points of view. He is strongly attracted to her, and with time she puts aside her reluctance to try romance again.

The book begins with an ice jam in the river. “Giant blocks of ice, piled and shoved onto the riverbank, a shattered moonscape. Treetops stuck upside down in the crust, and gnarled roots jabbed like contorted fingers into the sky.” When the river rises and the ice hurtles downstream, it destroys the historic covered bridge, and the Selectboard, or town council, must decide after contentious town meetings whether to undertake an expensive restoration.

 

image: Dreamstime ID 7076392 © Patricia Hofmeester

It must also decide how to respond to a petition to remove Roz, the chair of the Selectboard, and a friend of Mona’s since childhood. Roz is a lesbian, and active in the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in Vermont. She lives in a civil partnership with her long-time partner, Heather, an organic farmer who wants nothing to do with conflict and politics.

As the fight grows more intense, an arsonist attacks their farm, and suspicion falls on Gus, another childhood friend of Mona’s. Mona’s ex-husband lurks in the background, tormenting her with phone calls, threats and sudden visits, and she comes to believe he is the arsonist.

Gus is possibly schizophrenic, possibly autistic, certainly a spiritual force. He lives in a hidden place on Wild Mountain, and rarely comes down to town, though Mona and others leave food for him on the mountain trail. He has found a neolithic stone circle aligned with the sun at the summer and winter solstices, and believes the mountain is a power point like Stonehenge, where spiritual forces are strong.

The end of the book is truly satisfying - all questions answered, all plots resolved. Mona has been healed by the mountain, and the true community of this tiny town emerges from the enmity and quarrels as they go to the mountain to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of one of their own.

You don’t have to believe in mystical spiritual forces to be engaged by Wild Mountain. Kilgore brings even the minor characters to life, and though you may never make it to Vermont, her writing will take you there.

 

image: Dreamstime ID 122407194 © Corradobarattaphotos

Leaving Atlanta

Book Review: Leaving Atlanta, by Tayari Jones. Grand Central. 2002.

 

Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, published in 2018, has deservedly received a lot of attention - it is a compelling tale, beautifully told, weaving the issue of Black men in the criminal justice system into complex family relationships. But I want to tell you about an earlier book, which brings to life the terrible time when a killer was prowling Black Atlanta neighborhoods, his victims mostly young children.

 

 

Leaving Atlanta is told from the points of view of three fifth-grade children at Oglethorpe Elementary. Tasha’s family is middle class; her parents have recently separated. Rodney is also middle class, with a pretentious mother, a brutal father, a severe case of self-consciousness, and a crush on Octavia. Octavia and her single mother, who works the night shift at a bakery, are poor. They have a lovely relationship.

 

image: Always greener, by Meredith Brown

Their story is told in scene after scene of ordinary life, filled with family love, humor, and conflict. At the corner store, Rodney is a master candy-thief. He is aided by the shopkeeper’s prejudice: a boy who attends the AME church, who is in the youth group of the NAACP, who fears his father, would never steal.

A boy Tasha likes buys her M&Ms at the skating rink; it's her first gift from a boy and she wants to keep it as a memento, but her Mama has a rule: no food in the bedroom.

When Octavia gets her first period her mother takes her out to dinner to celebrate. But first Octavia takes a bath, and her mother comes into the bathroom to have The Talk. “She was my mama; everything I got, she had seen before. Still, I didn’t really want to be having a conversation without my clothes on.” She tries to cover herself with soap. “Maybe I could work up enough bubbles to cover the good parts.”

 

image: ID 41408056 © Kakigori | Dreamstime.com

Tayari Jones seamlessly blends the terror that haunted Atlanta with the small sufferings of three fifth-grade outsiders. 'Who will sit with me at lunch?' 'What if the popular girls make fun of me?' 'I’m gonna get a whipping.'

These children, and the families seen through their eyes, are so real, and so loveable, but over their ordinary lives the spectre of the child-snatchings hangs like a sword. There is a killer lurking somewhere in Atlanta, and every few weeks the TV news reports another Black child missing, another body found.

 

image:Wilipedia.org

 

The parents forbid the kids to play outside, to answer the door. Tasha curses a boy who is bullying her - “I hope you die, I hope the man snatches you” - and blames herself when he is taken. One of the children we have come to know and care about disappears. Another is heartbroken when her mother sends her away to live in Baltimore with her father. “I’ll be missing my mama for the rest of my life.”

Tayari Jones brings news stories to life. The people we only read about in a brief paragraph in the paper become real in her novels. These are not merely ‘murder victims,’ or ‘Black families under siege.’ They are individuals with rich, complicated lives, children with hopes and worries and dreams. Though I first read this book fifteen years ago, I have never forgotten these children.

 

Christmas, 2018. Ring Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had a quiet Christmas day, just the three of us, and in the late afternoon Joe and I went to Ring Park. A blue sky, and all the trees lit by the low winter sun.

 

There were few visitors; we were alone on the overlook. We leaned on the rail and looked down to where a clear white-sand-bottom stream runs into the tannic waters of Hogtown Creek. We listened to each other as we puzzled through what to do about a strong-willed teenager who is stuck on a dead end road, and an old woman, her brain damaged by years of alcohol, who is facing eviction.

Then we were quiet and just listened to the woods. A bird call. A family passing on the trail - children, parents, grandparents, leashed dogs. I thought I heard a man singing to his toddler, but when I looked through the trees I saw he was alone with his dog.

You can watch a creek for a long time. The water flows through shade and sunlight over dips and rises in the creekbed; reflections shiver and shimmer. We need an impressionist’s palette and brush to capture the movement and colors: gold, brick, ochre.

I was at Murder Creek in the Oconee National Forest, watching twigs and leaves float by, when my inner voice said, “gifts of the river,” and I knew I had to take in two children who had bounced from home to home in foster care. One stayed with me almost two years, and a few years later I had the granddaughter we’re now raising.

We left the overlook and walked off the trail down to the sandy bank, stood at the bottom of the oxbow loop. We dropped leaves in the water, to carry away our anxiety and anger. We watched them twist and turn in the current, float downstream, enter an eddy and float back up, lie still in a backwater, snag on the bank. I picked up a hickory twig with six leaves - anger, love, resentment, hope, fear, grief. I threw it in, though I knew that tangle of troubles would never make it downstream.

 

If we waited long enough the leaves freed themselves from bank and backwater, but we grew tired of waiting and poked them free. Our granddaughter is stuck: when and how do we intervene, when do we let her find her own way? Can we believe that she will leave the backwater and move on?

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

 

Book review: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. Milkweed Editions. 1999.

This classic of environmental literature is set in rural southern Georgia. “There’s nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pine. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow.”

In her memoir Janisse Ray shows how wrong those people are. If you know how to see and where to look, rural Georgia is full of natural beauty. We learn about her family, with deep roots in this land for many generations, and we learn about what we all lost when the vast forests of longleaf pine were replaced by pine plantations of slash and loblolly.

Though the family was quite poor, and for a few years the father had frightening spells of mental illness, this is a memoir of an idyllic childhood. Ray grew up in a small house in the middle of her family’s junkyard on Route 1. The whole family worked together - cleaning, hauling, dismantling. The parents were deeply in love with each other and devoted to their children.

 

image: Old Car City, White, Ga by Mike Boening Photography. Flickr.com

Ray’s parents, strict Christian fundamentalists, forbade TV and movies. Because bathing suits are immodest, the children couldn’t swim in the hot Georgia summer. There were no team sports, no friends over after school. But they had the huge junkyard, the best of all possible playgrounds for four imaginative children. They played school, with an old red truck for a chalkboard and Ray as the stern teacher. They played baptism in a broken-down school bus. They chased each other across the roofs of junked cars, and found treasure in the seats and floorboards.

Ray was a wild child, with bells tied on her shoes so her mother could keep track of her. She spent all her free time outdoors, playing in the junkyard, climbing trees and exploring creeks, but her deep curiosity about the natural world only began when her fifth grade science teacher took her in hand.

image: wikimedia commons

 

Her family included a grandfather who supported himself by selling raccoon skins to Sears. The wife he left behind - she sent him away when she could no longer tolerate his mad violence - supported their eight children by selling bootleg liquor and running a café.

Ray describes her father as a native genius. He was a fascinating, complex man with a huge and tender heart. He invented, created, repaired: machines, guns, injured birds. Self-taught, he loved knowledge, and posed quiz questions for the children, rewarding correct answers with a dime.

Her mother worked in the junkyard and ran the home, cooking, cleaning, bandaging the children’s wounds and making all their clothes. “As I reached womanhood, when I was first hot for equality, justice, and freedom...I was impatient with my mother’s refusal to assert herself. Only years later did I appreciate her wisdom, her steadfastness.”

Ray alternates chapters about members of her family with chapters about the longleaf pine forests which once covered south Georgia and north Florida. Of the plants and creatures those forests supported, many are now endangered or extinct. She combines the deep knowledge of a naturalist with the gift of clear, precise, often poetic description.

“In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog. ...The trees are so well-spaced that their limbs seldom touch, and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground...”

 

DeSoto National Forest - a longleaf pine ecosystem  image:wikipedia

Her accounts of the evolution of the longleaf pine, of the life course of many creatures - red cockaded woodpecker, flatland salamander, Bachmann’s sparrow, indigo snake - are written as fascinating stories. She imagines the physical experience of each creature but avoids the folly of humanizing them. In minute detail she describes the salamanders crawling back to breed in the lowland puddles where they were hatched, the red-cockaded woodpeckers drilling cavities for their nests, then pecking away at the surrounding bark to send the sap trickling down, “forming a scabby quagmire that helps protect the woodpecker nest from rat snakes...”

 

images: red cockaded woodpecker feeding young john maxwell for usfws @ wikimedia; frosted flatwood salamander usgs.gov

 

I love this book. I often drive the back roads of southern Georgia to a friend’s cabin in the Oconee national forest  click,  and wonder about the landscape and people that have shaped each other. Janisse Ray opens a door to their world.

Green Friday

For about 8 weeks I was sick with bronchitis. I coughed and coughed and coughed, and had no energy or stamina. I was still working on my writing, which right now consists of book reviews churned out at a mad pace, in an effort to expand my almost non-existent writers’ network.

 

image:authorsguild.org

 

But after working each morning I dragged around, lay down between chores, and tried unsuccessfully not to whine and complain. Joe advised  me that rather than say, “I just can’t manage to make dinner tonight,” I could simply say, “Will you do dinner?” And when I emerged from this truly annoying condition, I resolved to banish the word “exhausted” from my vocabulary.

 

image: the-lazy-trader.com

 

It’s been about a week since my energy returned. The first thing I wanted to do was rescue the garden. Huge amounts of spring rain followed by killing summer heat and mosquitoes had kept me away, and when finally the humidity and temperature dropped, the bronchitis hit. So everything was weedy and tangled. The wild hedge by the front walk was way over my head, and the giant bamboo was overhanging the path and slapping the roof of the pool screen.

 

 

Ever since our friend Ted gave me powerful long-handled pruning shears, I love pruning. I cut all the aspiring trees in the hedge down to chest level, and the next day cut back the bamboo. It all made a most satisfying pile by the curb, waiting to be hauled away. Alas, I can’t take a picture of it, since the yard waste truck has come and gone.

Joe’s daughter Leah was hosting her first Thanksgiving, and we were getting ready to drive to New Orleans on Tuesday when our granddaughter Amanda got sick and couldn’t go. She insisted that I should go anyway, that she’d be okay on her own. “I’m not fourteen!” she said indignantly. But I’m not leaving a 16-year-old by herself for five days, no matter how self-sufficient she thinks she is. So Joe went off and I stayed behind, both of us disappointed.

I occasionally descended into feeling sorry for myself, but I invited myself to Chris and Michelle’s for Thanksgiving dinner with a small group of good friends and Michelle’s smiling 96-year-old mother, whose failing memory has not destroyed her lively wit. The rest of the time I stayed busy with books and writing, looking into book publicists, listening to music while I crocheted hats.

 

image:skinnerinc.com

Thanksgiving day was chilly by Florida standards, but Black Friday was mild. After some time doing book things, I fed the birds their mealy worms, and sat in the sun cleaning up the big pots where I grow greens in the winter. The soil was still rich and black; the weeds were easy to pull. The weediest pot, filled with a gorgeous clump of wood sorrel, turned out to be the home of many large rust and black ants. Fortunately they didn’t bite. I didn’t want to kill them, and didn’t think of looking on the internet for a solution, so I put the pot in my cart and rolled it over to the woods, where I dumped it among the ferns.

 

image:fmcprosolutions.com

It took about an hour to weed all the pots. Now I had fifteen pots just begging for plants, so I went to Garden Gate nursery. To my surprise, there was only one other customer. To my delight, the nursery had just received new stock. They had lots of arugula, mustard, and chard, my three favorites, and teeny seedlings of a lettuce I’ve never seen before.

          
images: arugula, mustard johnnyseeds.com  chard bonnieplants.com

I bought 25 baby plants, plus three small red geraniums covered with buds, to replace the thoroughly dead old geraniums by the front door. I couldn’t stop smiling all the way home. Let others stand in endless lines to spend way too much money for huge amounts of stuff on Black Friday. click I’m happy to spend my own Green Friday browsing alone through flowers and greens.

 

Dream Chaser

 

Book review: Dream Chaser by Pat Spears. Twisted Road Publications, 2014

Jesse is a loser. He’s lost his job, he’s lost his wife. If there’s a bad choice to make, he’ll make it; if he makes a promise, he’ll break it. He fights with the bottle to drown his rage and grief, and often the bottle wins. He is a man made of regrets. Yet novelist Pat Spears makes us care about him and root for him in his clumsy attempts to hold it all together. You won’t find Dream Chaser shelved with the suspense novels, but over and over things go wrong, and we ache for them to come out right.

 

image:help.us.org

 

Jesse’s wife finally gave up and left him, seeking a better life, and so he temporarily has custody of Cole, Katie, and Sky. Cole, 16, is in jail. Katie, 11, bright and furious, looks out for Sky, 4, who is seemingly autistic, and doesn’t speak. Fortunately, Jesse has allies - his best friends Clyde and Marlene. Dee and Susan next door help out too. These friends buy groceries, cook many meals, and often look after the kids. Trudy, who takes care of Sky during the day, is a warm and encouraging helper. Even Buddy the sheriff is on Jesse’s side.

image: oxygen.com

Set in the Florida panhandle, the story is about Jesse’s struggle to take care of his family. He finds a night-shift job loading trucks, which means Cole, released on probation to Jesse’s custody after six weeks in detention, is charged with looking out for the girls, and getting them off to school. Jesse has to learn how to deal with everything the children's mother had always handled.

Most important, the story is about his efforts to gain their trust. He loves them, and though the two older children blame him for their mother’s abandonment, they love him. But in his desperate love for them, he keeps making and breaking promises. The only thing Cole and Katie can count on is Jesse screwing up.

Then he makes the stupidest promise of all. Knowing nothing about horses, much less wild horses, he buys an abused mustang mare for Katie’s birthday. It promptly escapes the ill-built corral and disappears into the woods. And Jesse promises Katie he will bring it back.

 

image:parody.wikia.com

Spears’ writing is lyrical, never intrusive. Fireflies “sprinkle soft light across the back yard.” At dawn, “the faintest edge of day cuts a deep purple scar on the distant horizon.” Spears brings us the shabbiness and quiet beauty of rural north Florida.

 

image:onlyinyourstate.com

She shows us decent people living hard-scrabble lives, looking out for each other, dealing with the systems - the school, the court - that have so much power over them, and give them so little respect. Jesse carefully irons his best pants to wear to court, and smells the just-ironed Sunday best of all the moms and grandmas waiting to learn the fates of their children.

Spears shows us a world unknown to many readers, but more than that, she’s created almost a dozen characters who are entirely real. Even those who appear briefly, such as the weary and dedicated veterinarian, come to life. She understands the meaning of community, and the twisting complexity of relationships - of friendship, marriage, and above all parent and child. We watch Jesse's halting, stumbling progress, and cheer for him and his kids.

Dream Chaser is compassionate, profound and moving, a completely satisfying book.

Boca Raton

Book review: "Boca Raton" by Lauren Groff.

Lauren Groff has written a horror story filled with apocalyptic visions. What makes it so chilling is that the visions ring true. I believe we are living in the last days, not decreed by a wrathful god, but brought on by human greed and carelessness, by our relentless breeding and building.

screen shot of partial Google listings

 

Ange and her young daughter live close to the ocean in Boca Raton, in a cottage she could only afford because of its grisly past. The story opens with Ange cleaning trash out of a creek, and a vivid listing of the nastiness she finds, until the corpses of baby chicks rotting around the plastic that killed them make her vomit. For four days she cannot sleep or hold food down.

Pepper Mound Creek, Tampa    image: abcactionnews.co

 

She has visions - of a family waiting to be taken up by the Rapture, and their bitter disappointment when the sun rises and they are still here. Of the ocean lapping across the floor of the library where she works. Of a huge, grimacing face approaching her, a looming darkness gathering, waiting outside her locked doors.Of her daughter in the future, haggard, in rags, trudging north to escape what there is no escaping. She grieves for her daughter, and children yet to be born, knowing she has no power to protect them from environmental devastation.

Groff’s work has always had a strong sense of place. She moved to North Florida about ten years ago. She has absorbed the wonder and absurdity of this place - the snakes and roaches, the hurricanes, the gentle winters and fierce summers, the ocean ceaselessly lapping at the shore.

Florida is just a narrow peninsula of sea-level land enclosed by two long coasts, and sea level rise is already upon us.

 

image: miamitodaynews

Florida after one meter sea level rise  image:researchgate.net

Yet we keep building condo communities, retirement communities, McMansions for the rich and mini-mansions for the striving. We replace natural wonders with tourist ‘attractions,’ pave over still more land to add lanes to the crowded highways, fertilize the golf courses and destroy the springs.

expanding the highway   image:planshillsborough
image: golfdigest.com

sewage, manure, and fertilizer runoff led to toxic algae in Santa Fe River image: earthjustice.org

“Boca Raton” is one of seven short stories about climate change commissioned by Amazon for Kindle in a collection they call Warming.  Written with Groff’s fluent gift for language and unerring eye for the telling detail, it is a haunting horror story for our times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Million Fragile Bones

 

Book review: A Million Fragile Bones by Connie May Fowler. Twisted Road 2017.

 

 For almost twenty years the novelist Connie May Fowler lived in Paradise. Then she found herself living in an oily Hell.  

Alligator Point   image: tugta.com

 

oil from the Deepwater Horizon   image: livescience.com

Fowler's childhood was cruel. Her father died when she was six, and her mother descended into brutal, terrifying madness. Connie May found her salvation in books and writing. She excelled in school and college, and wound up in graduate school in Kansas, but as soon as she could she returned to St. Augustine, Florida, the town where she had lived with her beloved father, from whom she inherited her love of nature.

 

St Augustine - Anastasia State Park    image: orlandoweekly.com

 

In St. Augustine she became an avid birdwatcher and an environmental activist. But her marriage was failing and her best friend left town; when she discovered a tiny community on the Florida panhandle, she knew she had found her home.

The first half of this book is a celebration of the beauty of the earth, and her own particular place on earth - a wooden shack, once an army barracks, on a sandbar called Alligator Point that reaches out from Florida’s panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico. From her house she looked across a two-lane road to the dunes and the Gulf beyond, both teeming with life. The previous owner had planted an orchard of fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and plants to attract birds and butterflies, and built a Seminole-style chickee at the base of the dunes.

 

image: offexploring.com

She spent almost twenty years at Alligator Point, haunted by her memories, gradually finding healing and peace. She makes us fall in love with this place as she did, sharing her joy and wonder as she observes the daily miracles. Monarch butterflies stop on their migration to feed from the wildflowers on the dunes.

... I spy a ragged flotilla, colorful scraps of movement swirling along on the wind...[T]hey float downward, landing on the blossoms, transforming the dunes into a living kaleidoscope...Two butterflies I cannot identify land on my left foot. Then one monarch, then three, and then more than I have the presence of mind to count, light on my arms. Before long, I am a human being dressed in a sheath of butterflies. My skin tingles under the weightless scintillation of tiny legs.”

 

 

image: kidsgrowingstrong.org

 

As a hurricane approaches she watches a squirrel "weave an impermeable pine needle plug..[and] with his frenetic but strong little paws, stuff the woven plug in the opening of a bluebird house...Hours after the hurricane has moved on and the air has been scrubbed fresh and blue...[she watches the squirrel] pull aside the plug, gaze out the hole, and evidently deciding to err on the side of caution, pull it shut again..."

 

image: birdhousessupply.com

With her visiting nephew, she walks the beach and watches "...osprey fishing for mullet, bald eagles spiral on thermals. A large dolphin pod fishes the water just beyond the surf  break and from time to time one leaps out of the water - a silver gray arc...We wade ankle deep through clear water teeming with horseshoe crabs and baby fish and shells that suddenly stand up and move...Stingrays breach the water, and fly, and fly again...Young nurse sharks zip by, unconcerned with us."

 

leaping stingrays image:pinterest.com

 
After ten years living on the sandbar, mostly alone except for her dogs, she has found her rhythm, and the rhythm of the seasons. “In springtime, I feel as if I’m eighteen and in love for the first time. In the harsh northern winds of winter I wrap up in blankets and cook old people food - chicken soup, beef stew, corn chowder. In the summer I fish and stargaze and spend hours in or by the sea, both by day and night. And in autumn, with the temperatures cooling, I begin putting some of my garden to bed...”

She is in love with the abundant wildlife of the dunes and sea, she studies them and collects their bones. She spends her time writing, tending her bird feeders, gardening. She continues her environmental activism, and when she receives a financial windfall from one of her books, she donates it to Refuge House in Tallahassee to expand their domestic violence shelter, which serves eight counties.

She revels in solitude, and then falls in love with Bill, a man who is as immersed in nature as she is, and, as a bonus, can build or fix anything. Eventually he moves in, they marry, and are happy on their sandbar. And then...

 

The Gulf, a breeding ground for hundreds of marine species and the microorganisms that nourish them, is rich with new life in the spring. In April, 2010 the British Petroleum oil rig, the “Deepwater Horizon”, exploded in the Gulf forty-one miles south of Lousiana.

 

image: Grist.org

 

Connie May recounts the nightmare as she lived it, one day at a time. BP lies; the government lies. For five days they deny there is a leak. They assure everyone that the eleven missing oil rig workers will be rescued, until on the fourth day they abandon the search.

Eventually BP is forced to stream a live feed from its underwater camera, showing the oil streaming out of the exploded well, and Connie May watches it compulsively, the way she watches every bit of news about the disaster, and researches the history and science. She learns that BP has been fined 760 times for safety violations. The reports often cite cost-cutting as a cause, especially in safety, maintenance, and staff training.

She begins to smell the petroleum. Her eyes burn, her mouth fills with sticky ropes of mucous, and everything is covered with an oily black soot. Seventy thousand barrels of oil a day - almost three million gallons - are flowing into the Gulf every day. Compare this to the total spill of 260,000 barrels from the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

It becomes clear that no one knows how to stop the leak. They deploy booms to enclose the surface oil slick. They dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, which breaks up the surface oil into tiny particles and drives it underwater, out of sight. Corexit has been banned in many countries. After the Exxon Valdez disaster it was linked to respiratory, nervous system, kidney, liver, and blood disorders in humans. It is toxic to marine life. 

 

containment boom; spraying dispersant  images: earthrepair.ca

Turtles, birds, and baby dolphins begin washing up on shore. After a couple of weeks BP forbids residents to take part in the clean-up; it disposes of the corpses - the evidence - with its own clean-up organization.

 

image: e celano, reuters

By the end of June the oil reaches Alligator Point and a boom is deployed. The government issues a rule: no one is allowed within sixty-five feet of the boom, oiled animals, or the shore. To disobey the rule is a felony.

83 days after the spill, Connie May and her husband, walking on the beach, find themselves ankle-deep in a thick foam, like a mousse, of oil. That night a government spokesman announces on CNN that there is no oil on any Florida beaches. 87 days after the spill, BP announces they have capped the well. 152 days after the spill, they announce that the leak has stopped. But oil keeps appearing near the site.

"The Gulf’s deep sea reefs are dead and no fish are to be found among them. Tuna, shrimp, oyster and crab populations are decimated. Fishermen routinely haul in various species of fish that are covered in lesions and suffering from fin rot...the fish have diseased ovaries and livers...infections in fish and marine mammals are rampant."

Connie May and Bill have to acknowledge that Paradise has been destroyed. They move back to St Augustine for a while, and then to the Yucatan.

A Million Fragile Bones is a vivid and moving picture of a woman’s love affair with nature, and the horror as she watches the destruction of her special paradise. Fowler has given us the gift of her memory of this place. Perhaps such writings are all that will remain to us as we relentlessly destroy our world.

 

 

All We Know of Heaven

 

Book review: All We Know of Heaven by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Kindle edition 2018.

 

This YA novel, by the author of numerous adult and YA novels, begins inside the mind of a girl in a coma after a car accident: “Once she understood that she was dead, her first thought was that heaven was overrated.” If that puzzle pulls you right in, you will enjoy this page-turner filled with twists, turns, and surprises. Mitchard’s skillful, seemingly effortless prose never gets in the way of the story, with its engaging characters and dramatic plots. She is known for writing heart-breakers,  but she doesn’t shy away from humor.

 

page-turner      image:pinterest.com

 

This is the story of Bridget and Maureen, best friends since kindergarten and cheerleading teammates. Their physical resemblance is so striking that they might be twins. Their relationship is complicated - at first Bridget is the star, and Maureen her shadow. “If you want to be my friend, you have to do what I tell you,” says five-year-old Bridget. Maureen does want to be her friend, and follows her lead into pranks and trouble. For eleven years, until the accident, they are inseparable. Though a bit of a bully and mean girl, Bridget is loyal and generous to her best friend.

 

image: pinterest.com

 

The accident scene, the emergency room where staff struggle to save both girls - we see them from multiple points of view, including the brilliantly imagined thoughts of the comatose girl. One girl dies, and one struggles through many months of recovery. When the situation takes a shocking turn, we see the impact of the resulting publicity on their families and friends, and indeed, the whole town. The plot keeps turning, bringing new surprises and dilemmas. In the end, Mitchard doesn’t resolve everything, wrapping it all up in a tidy, happy package, but she leaves us with some consolation, optimistic for the future of complex characters we have come to care about.

 

hopeful for the future            image:asssa.es

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book review: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy. Norton 2017.

 

Camille Dungy is a nature poet. She has published four books of poetry, and edited the anthology, Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. In her frequent travels she hungrily explores local landscape and history. These twelve meditative essays weave apparently unrelated histories into her thoughts on motherhood, race, and nature, creating connections and a clear pattern by the end.

 

weaving: bolga baskets from Ghana   source:binoandfino.com

One essay is a love letter to her infant daughter Callie. Anyone who has had and loved a baby will recognize the nutty intensity of her adoration. Dungy was a well-published poet and a creative writing professor when she had her baby in her late thirties. She was stunned by the power of maternity. “I don’t know if I can define myself anymore, now that I’m your mother. You’ve consumed me.” Hers is an animal love. She wants to gobble Callie up, and has lost all sense of propriety and privacy.

 

source:oaklandpost.org

She watches as Callie topples over in her crib, almost hitting her head on the bars. “How can I name what I felt when I saw you not hurt? Not this time,” she writes, knowing she won’t be able to protect her child from all harm. “I don’t know if there is a name for this in any language, the hope and hurt and hunger I hold when I hold you.”

She examines the passenger list of the Brooklyn, the ship that carried Mormon settlers from New York to California, in a dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. She reads of the babies born and the babies who died on the voyage, and tries to imagine their mothers. “The story of the Brooklyn makes me breathless with sadness and a relief that almost borders on joy. I haven’t lost you yet. I haven’t lost you yet. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” And so she has been initiated into the desperate love of motherhood, the joy that is always shadowed by fear.

 

source: findagrave.com

 

She is in demand for poetry readings and workshops, and she is an enthusiastic traveler. Because she is nursing, she can’t leave the baby at home with her husband, so she and Callie fly all over the country. She is welcomed into the world of parents, a world she was previously unaware of, and finds that her hosts are eager to help her make arrangements. But strangers in airports are often more eager to hold, to touch, to play with the baby than to help her juggle the huge quantity of stuff that traveling with a baby entails nowadays.

 

source: themomedit.com

 

In places like Maine, where there are few black people, people stare. Though friendly, they are curious, and as always in the United States, her native land, she feels set apart.  As the only black person at a writers’ retreat, the other writers expect her to speak for and represent all African Americans. At the same time, one woman says, “I don’t see you as a black woman,” which means, of course, that she doesn’t see her.

The group talks about Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and the movie made from it. She hasn’t read it. “It’s hard to explain to a table full of white folks that sometimes I’m just not interested in spending time or money on films and books that focus on the melancholy of white experience.” I read books by minority authors, by disabled people, by LGBT writers, and seek out books from Asia, Africa, Latin America. But African-Americans don’t have to seek out exposure to the lives of white people; in schools and media they’re surrounded by it.

 

The Hours         source:decider.com

 

“When you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life.” She writes of the freedom and expansive bliss of her time in Ghana, where she could disappear into the crowd.

 

street scene in Accra, Ghana  source:wired.com

 

Dungy’s connection to landscape, her devoted attention to nature, is what makes home for her. She was raised in California, and says, “Once, I knew the silence and wind-cry of my California hills...When I lived in California, I was at home in the language of sky and mountaintop and sea.” When she moved to Iowa, for a long time she couldn’t write. “When a poem finally came, it was written in a different tongue.”

 

California hills source:imgur.com/gallery/2V7y4Bp

Iowa cornfield source:iowacore.gov

As a black woman she wonders, “How do I write about the land and my place in it without remembering, without these memories: the runaway with the hounds at her heels; the complaint of the poplar at the man-cry of its load; land a thing to work but not to own?” When she is menaced by a dog, she hears its owner say, ‘Sic her. Sic.’ But when the owner repeats the command, she realizes it is ‘Sit girl. Sit.’

 

source:greenacreskennel.com

"My poems are informed by displacement and oppression, but they are also informed by peace, by self-possession. When I was a child...the dogs we call bloodhounds...were nothing I knew to remember. When I was a girl-child in that kingdom of open space, and all the land I could see and name and touch was mine to love...When I was a child in the hills behind that street called Bluff View, there was no such thing as history. Sometimes my poems rest again in that quiet space, that comfort.”

 

source:ifsnj.org

Dungy is a poet, and it is a pleasure to read her prose. Her writing flows smoothly, attentive to rhythm and sound. Her thoughts are complex and subtle, though she says, “When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. As with writing about the corruption of the body. As with writing about landscape. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember.” Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun, but the light falls on our world from many different angles. Every individual sees a little differently, and this writer gives us the gift of her vision.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book review:

PUBLISHED AT LAST!

My first novel, Dreaming the Marsh, will be published by Twisted Road Publications in September 2019. I am very excited, as I have been pursuing this dream for over 30 years, with pauses in the pursuit for various events and catastrophes.

I have loved working with Typepad, but in connection with the book I now have a website on Wordpress, and both The Feminist Grandma and my new blog, Big Books from Small Presses, will be there from now on. All my previous posts are also there.

Go to elizabethmccullochauthor.com to learn more about the book and to read my blogs. If you subscribe there, by entering your name and email address, you will get an email when I post something new,  about once a month. I hope you will - having lots of subscribers can help me get my second and third novels published.

Book Review: Good and Mad

 

Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, by Rebecca Traister. Simon and Schuster. 2018.

Did you watch Dr. Blasey Ford testify about being sexually assaulted in high school? The moment I saw that long arc of mostly male faces sitting in judgment, I began crying and cursing, yelling "fuckers, bastards, assholes." My rage astonished me. I saw the fear in her face, her rapid shallow breathing, and worse, her anxiety to please, to make sure she didn’t offend or inconvenience anyone. "Will that work for you?" she asked. "If that will be helpful..." she offered. And as her testimony dragged on, in a show trial with a foregone conclusion, I sat furious, and was relieved when her ordeal was over.

Rebecca Traister’s book on the political potential of women’s anger was written at white heat in four months, and released before the toxic farce of the Kavanaugh hearing. But as I read it after the hearing, it rang true.

 

Good and Mad focuses on women’s political fervor following the election of Donald Trump: the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, and the explosive growth in women running for office, the great majority of them Democrats. It also gives us history. Traister analyzes the role of women’s anger in the long fight for suffrage, and the racist anger of white suffragists when black men won the franchise first. She discusses the Second Wave women’s movement of the 1960's and 70's, and black women's anger as their leadership  was ignored by both their allies and the media.

Traister, a feminist journalist, has thought long and hard about how white males, 31% of the US population, can rule the rest of us through deep individual alliances and divide and conquer tactics.

        images:Min An at Pexels.com                     steemit.com

 

The alliances were personal.The suffragists were sisters, wives, mothers of the middle and upper class men who ruled and shaped their world. To turn against them took enormous courage, and many of these women paid a steep price for their rebellion. In the second wave of feminism, women in consciousness raising groups understood and began to reject the terms of their marriages, and many marriages did not survive.

 

image:acravan.blogspot.com

The alliances were also professional. During the second wave, newly-hatched feminists, mostly middle class, mostly white, began to succeed professionally in the world shaped by men. Grudgingly or whole-heartedly they accepted the ways of that world: job comes first, family a distant second; sexual harassment is just boys being boys.

In the early 70's, as a single mother and newly-hatched lawyer, I was thrilled to be working at an excellent legal aid program. We were united in our zeal to help the poor and oppressed, and the two male directors were smart, supportive, even nurturing. But I spent my years there feeling guilty - inadequate as a mother, inadequate as a lawyer. When I cobbled together a proposal for part-time duties, the directors said “There’s no such thing as a part-time lawyer.” At an annual retreat, some of the men organized a wet T-shirt contest for the young secretaries. We women lawyers were outraged, but it didn’t matter.

we were young and fighting for justice in the 70's

Despite the media focus on bra burning and glass ceilings, second wave feminism was not merely theater, nor only focused on professional white women. Many of us worked on issues of domestic violence, child care, sexual assault, welfare programs. click  And middle-class white women did not invent feminist activism.

Black women have been a consistent revolutionary force in progressive movements. Over and over they take the lead, and then are shoved aside, by black men, by white women. Unlike the media and many white feminists, Traister recognizes their power, and turns to them for examples of courage, expressions of anger.

She quotes Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger,” about black women responding to racism in the second wave of feminism: “[E]very woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions ... which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change.”

 

Audre Lorde  image:spelman.edu

 

Traister tells of Shirley Chisolm in 1972 running for the Democratic presidential nomination, ignored by the media, betrayed by McGovern. In public she was cool, but behind closed doors she cried, according to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who said she was ‘very sensitive, very hurt, and very angry.’

 

Shirley Chisholm image:rockfordha.org

Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black feminist lawyer, wasn’t cool in public. When television reporters ignored Chisolm, and tried to calm down Kennedy, she threatened, “The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is going to get kicked in the balls.” I remember Flo Kennedy, who died in 2000. I was thrilled by her speech to a gathering of women law students in 1973. That may be why, when my father and brother mocked me: “Look at the radical feminist cooking breakfast for her baby boy,” I answered angrily, “Somebody’s going to get kicked in the balls,” and they fled the kitchen.

 

image: amazon.com

Congresswoman Maxine Waters is famously angry, and doesn’t hesitate to call for Trump’s impeachment, a call which is quickly distorted by Trump’s supporters into a call for assassination. Not just Trump, not just Fox News, but even Democratic leaders have chastised her. When she encouraged people to harass Trump’s cabinet members wherever they run into them, Chuck Schumer said it was ‘un-American,’ and Nancy Pelosi called it ‘unacceptable.’

 

Maxine Waters  image: huffingtonpost.com

 

Traister says white women rely on black women to express their anger for them. "In some ways, the cultural caricature of neck-snapping, side eye-casting black female censure becomes easily embraceable precisely because it is disconnected from...power, because its relationship to the threat of actual disruption of white male authority can be understood as inherently comical. Black women's relative distance, from both white supremacy and patriarchal advantage, makes it easier...to applaud their toughness, precisely because it is so far removed from being a true threat to white male domination."

This post-Trump uprising of women surely contains unconscious white racism and black rage. But Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, says there never has been a movement that wasn’t messy with internal issues. “The question for us is, are we prepared to be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together...”

 

Alicia Garza  image:theguardian.com

 

Traister: “The post-2016 movement offers a chance for many white women to be awakened to the many reasons they should be angry. But...the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women...who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.”

We are at the beginning of a new wave of angry women. Traister is repeatedly asked, ‘Is it a movement, or a moment?’ and she answers: “...[M]ovements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements - are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent - only after they have made a substantive difference.”

At the 2017 Women’s March, I wore my old buttons from the 1970's. I have been to many marches; they are both tedious and inspiring, exhausting and invigorating. To me, Traister's book brings encouragement, hope, and maybe even a little bit of activist energy. I believe in the generative power of our anger; there is a difference between fire that rages uncontrolled and fire you use as a tool. Do I want a world of yelling? No. But I believe first you holler. Then you strategize. Then you act.

 

 

A Remarkable Woman: Sandra Lambert's A Certain Loneliness

 

 Sandra Lambert has given us another book of connected stories click, this time stories from her own life. Feminist bookstore owner, successful writer, outdoorswoman, nature photographer, and activist for lesbian, disability and other political rights, Lambert is a woman with many more abilities than disabilities.

 

Polio in early childhood led to hospitals, surgeries, body casts. Lambert grew up using crutches and leg braces, and much later in life graduated to first a manual, then an electric wheelchair.

In a built world designed for those who can walk, Lambert is attentive to her own body in a way many people aren’t. She devises ingenious work-arounds to physical limitations, and she is attuned to all her senses. Set apart by her visible disabilities, she was often lonely in childhood and adolescence, but as an adult lesbian has a large and loving community of friends, with whom she shares nature adventures, travel, food, dogs and writing. Though she doesn’t dwell on it, she mentions in passing her lively romantic life, crowned by a happy marriage in her sixties.

 

marrying at Payne's Prairie

 

Lambert doesn’t suffer well-meaning fools gladly. She puts readers on notice in the second chapter: no pity, no sanctimonious phrases, no offers of help unless she asks. At first in leg braces, later in a wheelchair, she will always encounter strangers who feel entitled to comment, who offer pity, praise, prayers. She’s learned to ignore them - “There’s a mute button in my head for these moments” - unless they touch her. In the laundromat a babbling Christian woman approaches from behind and hugs her, whispers “Jesus loves you.” Her wrath explodes. The mildest part of her response is her threat to call the cops.

 

image: Facebook.com/mango coin laundry

From earliest childhood, Lambert has found joy and solace in nature. Sitting on the wet ground in the woods among lilies of the valley, “the white pearls of flowers about to open would perch on my fingertips, and they seemed to have no weight...the confusions of where to sit on the school bus or why no one sat with me...lost any substance. The honey perfume of the disturbed plants rose around me.” She enjoys wind, rain, dawn and sunset, rolling over bumpy tracks through green woods to riverbanks strewn with alligators. Her writing is as sensuous as her life. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, are all vividly there, and the words flow as smoothly as the rivers she loves. She relishes life.

 

image:visitgainesville.com

Kayaking, hiking in her chair - these bring Lambert into the wild. But she’s not close enough, and she seizes opportunities for direct contact with nature. As a child, “[w]ith braces and crutches left in a jumble...I’d crawl into snow-fed lakes with sudden, immense depths...These days I slip out of my wheelchair and into Florida waters. Spring-fed rivers, warm or cool depending on the season...Atlantic waves toss me until the seafloor scrapes against my skin.”

 

Briefly alone on the flooded Paynes Prairie  she drops from her wheelchair, and towing her kayak, wallows in the wet sand among dry-land plants now wilted and rotting in the water. “And now I think about an alligator swimming and searching for dry land. ...I lift onto my elbows and look around...[T]here are no alligators...I roll back into the new mud.”

 

one of many gator encounters

 

As she gets older she encounters new physical challenges, and increasing pain. Over and over she thinks through and solves the new problems. Here is an obstacle - here’s what she’ll do about it. When she makes plans, she accounts for the aftermath - a kayaking trip will be followed by days of exhaustion and pain, but is well worth it.

 

Lambert in her kayak.

Sometimes she realizes she can’t do anymore what she once loved, because of the expenditure of energy required. Then she’ll mourn the loss, and move on to other joys. But her writing is honest, and she acknowledges the times when she fears what the future will bring, the fear she calls her “personal image of the apocalypse,” that she has mockingly named, “the nursing home and bedsores panic.”

 

image:lazaruslaw.us

“...I can sense the deep sadness that will come, and I can’t yet see the other side of this, the part where something I couldn’t even have imagined comes into my life, where beyond fear and shame there is a grace of some sort. Is it even possible anymore? Do I keep trust that it will happen again, as it has always happened?”

Lambert shares her experience as an outsider, as a woman who must work harder than most of us to live a full life. But her memoir is much more than an account of coping with disability; it is the stories from that full life, stories of the happiness she has found or created. The writing is lyrical, and seasoned with humor, She doesn’t hesitate to laugh at herself. as when she discovers that the park ranger who seemed to be disturbed by her disability was in fact closely confronted by her naked butt in pants that had split down the middle.

image: fresnobee.com

 

What do I love about this book? The writing, the fierce wit, the remarkable woman who speaks from its pages. Disability activists remind the rest of us that we are only ‘temporarily abled.’ If we live long, we will keep encountering new limitations, and keep adjusting to them as best we can. If we are very smart, and very lucky, we may be able to hold on to joy and passion until close to the end, and face the challenges as creatively and intelligently as Lambert.

 

activist

nature photographer - night heron, spider lilies

 

unattributed pictures are from Sandra Lambert's Facebook page, and used with permission

 

A Certain Loneliness is available now from University of Nebraska Press http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496207197/ and on Amazon.

The launch party for the book is September 14 at 6:30PM at the Matheson History Museum  513 East University Avenue  Gainesville, Florida.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Fathers' Day Gift

 

We’ve come to Delray in south Florida for Fathers’ Day with Joe’s dad Ollie and his wife Annette. Whenever we visit here, we go walking at Green Cay or Wakodahatchee Wetlands, water reclamation parks with miles of boardwalk over wetland and hammock - birds everywhere, and the occasional alligator.

  GREEN CAY

I’ve known Annette and Ollie close to twenty-five years. Annette and I, both opinionated feminists, connected very quickly. In early days with Ollie there was the slight wariness of father meeting girlfriend, warm but not knowing whether it’s a passing fancy or a new member of the family. For the first few visits conversation was hesitant. Gradually, a relationship built over dinner and dominoes, our shared love for Joe, and these walks at the wetlands.  

ANNETTE AND OLLIE

On one of our first walks Ollie and I fell behind, leaning on the railing, watching the birds. I saw an interesting one that I couldn’t identify. “Do you know what that is?” I asked. “It’s a bird,” he said. As soon as we returned to Gainesville I bought an Audobon Field Guide, inscribed it in front ‘To Ollie from Liz. It’s a bird’ and mailed it off.

 

 

NOT A BIRD.

Image: Asbruckman at commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3877883

 

Now, twenty-odd years later, Joe has found a much better gift for the indifferent bird-watcher, Florida’s Fabulous Waterbirds: Their Stories by Winston Williams.

He got it on the last day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale, when all the books are 10 cents. He usually comes home with a carton-full: a couple of novels, several art books, and lots of nature books, which overflow a bookcase in our bedroom  Last time the box included this treasure, promptly claimed for his Dad.

A FEW OF JOE'S BOOKS

 

It's a combination of mostly-exceptional photographs, and idiosyncratic prose. The pictures and prose are equally interesting. The baby egret in the nest - yellow face, white punk feather headdress, eyes round and beak wide open with what looks like alarm - is worth the price of the book (even if you bought it new).

This is not a keyed bird-watchers’ guide, but a book driven by the author’s delight. The writing is idiosyncratic, with light-hearted humor that only occasionally falls flat, and fascinating tidbits of information. He devotes nine pages to the brown pelican, clearly his favorite water bird. But he also shows and tells about anhingas, cormorants, storks and flamingos, and has long sections on herons, egrets, and gulls.

Mother Nature has made herons and egrets unfairly confusing, with sex differences and seasonal or age changes. Williams describes the identifying markers, which usually involve beaks and legs, yellow or black. I wish I thought I would remember them.

Cattle egrets were not seen in the new world until the 1930's - they flew across the Atlanic from Africa. They showed up in Florida in the 1950's. What I always considered the weird, backward-bent knees of flamingos are actually their ankles.

image: american-bird.com

“The anhinga spears his prey with his pointed beak like an arrow shot from a bow. Sometimes the spear thrust is so powerful that the anhinga has to swim to shore and pry the fish off his beak by rubbing it against a rock...The size of the fish...ranges from small to unbelievable.”

The little green heron sometimes looks as if it has no neck at all, and sometimes stretches it out to “astonishing lengths. This stretching motion is probably used to help move a large fish through its digestive tract. It is the bird equivalent of taking Rolaids. It is known to animal behavior scientists as a ‘comfort movement.’ ”

Herring gulls and black-backed gulls both have a red spot on the bottom halves of their beaks. “This is believed to be a target that aids youngsters in the nest to peck at their parents when demanding food.”

Joe likes to repeat a line from Elmore Leonard. When a Florida farmer hears of a bird-watching tour he asks, “Watch 'em do what? [Would they] pay to watch me plow a field?” Myself, I love spying on birds and beasts. Ollie may be more akin to the farmer than to me, but I bet he’ll like the wit and pictures in this book, and he’ll certainly enjoy Father’s Day with his oldest son.

 

JOE AND HIS DAD, WITH DAUGHTER LEAH AND THE MAGNIFICENT ULA MAE

Waiting for Birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last spring I decided I wanted a bird feeder in the backyard. I spent a happy hour with the knowledgeable and helpful staff of Wild Birds Unlimited, where the variety of feeders and food is almost... Unlimited.

Just as I finished my list, Joe happened to call. When he learned what it would cost, he balked, and said we should talk it over. I was quite downcast on the drive home, until I remembered that my 70th birthday was approaching in July. Joe agreed it would be a good birthday present, and told me to send him my list: auger pole, a curved double hanger, an antimicrobial tube feeder, a dinner bell, and a bag of seed. Now I had five months to look forward to feeding the birds. Anticipation of pleasure is, in itself, a very considerable pleasure.- David Hume

 

David Hume image:slate.com

I spent a lot of those five months in North Carolina, taking care of my sister Luli, who was dying. At the end she was in UNC hospice, a beautiful place in Pittsboro, with a bird feeder outside every guestroom. Though she was beyond comfort, the birds were a comfort to me. And when I was at home the birds and the bird feeder became an obsession.

Hospice called just before 7am on August 16. As soon as I saw the phone number I knew Luli was gone. Then came the dazed time. I weeded and pruned in the garden, sadly bedraggled after two months of spring drought and five months of neglect. I floated around in the pool, singing and crying. And I watched the birds. I sat on the deck with my binoculars, using the Cornell website for identification: tufted titmouse, cardinal, brown thrasher, Carolina wren, Carolina chickadee.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

images: titmouse wilddelight.com  thrasher pinterest  wren animalspot.net

I haunted the Wild Birds store, and bought meal worms, a squirrel baffle, a bird bath, and suet seed cakes. Spending was out of control, so I put myself on a weekly allowance for books, birds, clothes, plants, and all other gifts to myself. The allowance has reduced both my spending and my money-guilt, and it has expanded my bird feeding array - two poles now, two dinner bells and a tube feeder, a humming bird feeder, and a jury-rigged bird bath.

 

     

 

I am still trying to solve the problem of the bird bath. First I had a shallow plastic bowl resting in a ring on the pole. No birds came. A drip or spray will attract birds, but the whole array is far from running water and electricity. I found a floating plastic lily pad with a solar pump, but it quickly squirted all the water out of the bowl. I bought a deep metal dog dish, but birds don’t like deep water, so I bought rocks to put in the bottom and anchor the pump in the middle. When the sun is bright, the water shoots high, and I have to refill the bath every morning. And sometimes the pump comes loose and floats to the side, squirting all the water out in half an hour.

Cleaning the bath every week is an elaborate process. I keep it high to deter leaping cats, so I have to climb up on my kitchen stepladder to take it down. What with rocks and water, it is very heavy. The rocks go into a bucket with a dilute bleach solution, and then I rinse them over and over with the hose.

I keep coming up with new ideas. The birds have now discovered the water - maybe if I return to the simple plastic bird bath they will come even without the spray. I’m appalled by how much time I spend thinking about this.

Birds love worms. While meal worms are $12.95 for 500 at Wild Birds, you can buy 1000 for about the same price on the internet. I have a standing order for 1000 a month. I keep them in a container in the back of the refrigerator. Every morning I put a few into the dinner bells.

The worms gross out Joe and Amanda, a welcome bonus. For the worms’ weekly feeding (they get a piece of carrot and 8 hours at room temperature) Amanda insists I move them from the kitchen counter to a shelf in the atrium. I have chased her out of the kitchen with the worm-box.

Even in bulk the meal worms aren’t cheap, and the cost comes out of my allowance. I’ve just learned about earthworm farms, used to create rich compost. I’m trying to find out whether I can replace meal worms with earthworms for the bird feeders. It would be another gross project which I would enjoy discussing with Joe and Amanda.

The birds kept me company until November, when I suppose they all went to Miami and points south to escape our unusual cold.

image:123RF.com

 

This last strange, fierce winter not only drove away the birds, it froze almost everything to the ground. The garden beds were bleak and brown. I pruned all the deadwood, reducing the shrubs to small stumps.

I survived Thanksgiving without Luli, and Christmas without Luli. I didn’t struggle to write. I only wrote three blog posts, and never looked at my novel. I held on to the idea, like a life raft, that the first year of loss would be the hardest.

The birds returned in March, and I returned to the deck with my binoculars. I am delighted when a new type of bird visits the feeder, and am beginning to understand bird watchers in the wild, with their life lists.

I first saw doves pecking around the grass under the feeders. Then they discovered the worms in the dinner bell, hopped inside, and stayed until all they had gobbled them all up; the wrens and cardinals were out of luck.

Cardinals zip across the yard in pairs, and often the male feeds the female. They are nesting in the bamboo and in the scraggly woods. Yesterday a female fledging flew to the feeder and ate some worms, followed closely by an adult male who perched above her, watching. As they flew off an adult female joined them and the three entered the woods together.

 

fledgling cardinal  image:terra4incognita.wordpress

 

Last week the first blue jay came, repeatedly. It flew in from the clump of wild growth, visited all three feeders and the birdbath, flew off to the bamboo. It returned to all the feeders and flew off to a tree across the yard. It came back once more, flew to the fence, and then went about its business.

Along with the birds, my garden has returned. The frozen bushes I had cut back began growing again. The beauty berry and princess plant covered themselves with leaves, and the lantana began to bloom. One of my favorites, whose name I have forgotten, blooms in summer with a small red flower. It stayed dead while everything else came to life, but the other day four leaves appeared at the bottom. In Luli's Garden, that I planted in September in her memory, the gingers poked out of the ground.

My writing roared back to life. In less than two months I’ve written 30 pages and plotted out many new scenes in the novel I thought I would never finish. I had to force myself to take a break from it to write this.

From this hard year of mourning I’m learning patience and faith. The birds, the flowers, the writing will come when they come. I can’t hurry them. And though a world without Luli sometimes feels unbearable, I know grief will subside in due time.

 

   
Luli's Garden

Missing Luli

My sister Luli died in August and I’m beginning to come out of the fog. Someone told me that in Jewish tradition a mourner has no obligations for a whole year; friends and family simply take over and care for her. For about a month I stumbled around, losing things, forgetting, unable to process information. I couldn’t read. I certainly couldn’t write. In between bumbled tasks and necessary conversations I lay on the deck watching birds at my new feeder.

I spent hours cleaning up my garden, neglected during the months of Luli’s illness. I threw myself into brute labor, digging up a whole new bed, cutting back the bamboo. I planted a memorial garden, with Luli’s doorstep goddess gazing benignly from one end. Sweaty and filthy, I jumped into the pool and cried.

Though in most things I was inept, cooking became solace. My self- and Luli-absorption meant Joe and Amanda had to put up with a lot, but they were treated to new dishes, and many desserts.

All this activity couldn’t protect me from the sudden flashbacks to her terrible last five months. She was miserable: in pain, sometimes delusional, helpless, angry. I went up to North Carolina five times to take care of her. At the very end we had hospice, and they were wonderful, but even they couldn’t overcome the fact that dying is no fun at all.

The experience has led me to the book How We Die, with its reader-friendly account of how each organ system responds to senescence, leading to death. For some reason it was a great comfort to learn that a miserable death is common - we weren’t singled out for the horror.

Luli pops into my mind constantly. An article in the New Yorker on mythical beasts would have been just her cup of tea. Sexual harassment? We would have talked for hours. When Bill Clinton said, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ she sent me this postcard. I particularly like the nun on the left.

 

My first (and last) cruise to the Bahamas would have consumed at least three phone calls. The Taste of the Bahamas walking tour was worthy of at least an hour, with all the different dishes, and the guide who clogged interesting historical information with lectures about super foods and magic cures.

Luli fills my kitchen. She was a professional cook, and assisted Richard Sax on Classic Home Desserts. It’s crusted with flour, stained with butter, and crammed full of recipes she sent me by email or postcard. She was my private cooking coach, always available with advice by phone. When I stir a bit of butter into the pan drippings to make a satiny gravy, add a spoonful of the pasta water to the fresh tomato sauce, rub the roast all over with salt, I always think of Luli, who taught me these tricks. 

 

I seem to be channeling her. When I’m not cooking I think about menus and imagine recipes. I have long friendly conversations with strangers. For a while every item of outlandish news produced an idea for a cartoon, but though I share her creative imagination, I entirely lack her graphic talent.

We buried Luli's ashes in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. It was a glorious October day, blue sky, and the trees in full color. Her little hole in the ground is under a huge English walnut tree. Nearby is a pond and a tall marble monument to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Down the way is Harriet Jacobs, the escaped slave who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl. So Luli is in good company - Eddy would deny she's dead, and Jacobs was ungovernable.

Nineteen of us - all family - stood in a circle around the hole, with the urn that Ben found at a garage sale looking like nothing so much as a giant nipple. (Michael had a terrible time with TSA bringing the sealed urn from Raleigh-Durham to Boston.)

 

 

We shared memories, and sang. When we finished singing, we each took a flower from the bucket of flowers Clairie had brought, laid them in a ring around the hole, and threw handfuls of dirt onto that ridiculous urn at the bottom. We went on to a sumptuous lunch at Casa Portugal - Luli would have loved it - and then back to Esther's for pastries, tea and coffee.

 

The gathering was comforting and moving. I'm so glad to have my family, and that Luli's ashes are in that beautiful place, with my brother Dickie’s nearby. What stays with me is that bright ring of flowers - daisies, roses, snapdragons, mums - on the ground around her little grave.

 

Clairie took charge of arranging Luli’s grave marker. We wanted one of her cartoons, but Mt Auburn said no human figures, without even seeing her naked, cavorting woman. We settled for one of her cats, and the following verse:

The worst thing about being in your coffin
Is that you’re unable to eat as often.

I knew Luli would have liked people to laugh as they passed her grave.

  

 

 Now I have her picture on the cookbook shelf over the counter where I work, above the KitchenAid mixer I inherited. It’s not a surprise anymore each time I see it and remember she is dead and gone. I am purely and simply missing Luli.

 

 

 

 

 

 

#Me Too

 

I’m waiting to check out at Publix. The headline on People magazine - Taking Down a Hollywood Predator - is surrounded by head shots of young actresses. Just below People is the Time Magazine Commemorative Edition. Hugh Hefner, in his burgundy bathrobe, leans forward with a tight smile.

 

image:bio.com

From Hollywood it’s spreading like slime– politicians, government officials, business leaders, academics. Women are shining a light on sexual harassment, and the nasty young and old men are deer in the headlights. Donald Trump, Bill O’Reilly - we barely hear about them any more - the stories are coming so fast and furious, tumbling over each other.

image:instructionsoninstructing.wordpress.com

I don’t know anything about the reality of Hollywood - I see them as a group of shined-up women and men, sometimes gifted actors, sometimes merely glossy. The casting couch - it was a casual joke. I think I both assumed it was true and didn’t believe it about any particular woman. I believed Hollywood was a land of casual sex and multiple marriages, where an actor’s sexual image was a costume designed by agents and studios, unrelated to his or her real life. Virgin, slut, stud (always heterosexual) - what did the market need this year?

images:theindependent.com, pinterest. playgirldlist.com

 

I do know about the reality I’ve lived, as a privileged white woman, prep school girl, hippie, lawyer, growing up in the middle of the sexual “revolution”and the second wave of feminism. I once taught feminist jurisprudence, and in 1989 wrote a long lecture on law and sex, focusing on rape and sexual harassment, then a new legal concept, though certainly not a new problem. After seventy years, I’m still puzzling over gender relations. I have wrestled with this essay, trying to pin down what I think. The whole subject makes me wonder.

I’ve only encountered sexual harassment second-hand, unless I count the urologist who asked me out after hearing about my sex life.

 

image:healthcare.utah.edu

At the legal aid retreat, the men had a poker game and asked the (female) secretaries to parade in front of them in a wet T-shirt contest. We women lawyers were furious when we heard about it. The men just laughed.

image:hispotion.com

Many years later, a young graduate student confided in me. She had stayed after the office Christmas party to help clean up, but fled when our boss, I’ll call him Peter, came into the kitchen naked. Apparently Peter believed the mere sight of his penis was sufficient seduction. It was too bizarre, and I might not have believed her had another woman, a professor, not told me a similar story. I reported it to the head of the organization. He was appalled, and called Peter on the carpet.

I’m proud that a few months later, when Peter told me someone had reported him - I don’t know if he was confiding in me as a friendly feminist or suspected I was the snitch - I told him. We were not so friendly after that. Perhaps the episode was noted in his personnel file, but it certainly didn’t stop his upward momentum; he rose to the top of the organization. I wonder if he’s shaking in his boots. I wonder why I don’t out him.

I don’t wonder why I myself was never harassed. Harassment involves unwelcome sexual advances. When I was young, they were rarely unwelcome; indeed, I was often the one advancing. I dressed to entice, and rarely refused an offer. Men’s desire made me feel powerful; I almost had notches on my headboard. (Whether I was fooling myself about what I was seeking is a different inquiry, and complicated.)

Don’t fish off the company pier is a fine rule, but sometimes the only people you meet are swimming in the company pond.  A former colleague points out that I ignored the rule. He is now my husband, and an excellent fish indeed, But I never felt sexually pressured by co-workers.

image:canadianflyinfishing.com

I think this is due to my personality. For years I thought of myself as kind and tactful, guided by my mother’s saying: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Looking back, knowing myself much better, I realize that was a delusion. You could call me blunt, or you could call me a bitch. More than one man told me I was intimidating. I imagine they called me a ball-buster behind my back. I would have hated that then, but it amuses me now.

Do women who are harassed bring it on themselves, perhaps with their attire? I’ve heard this from men and women. The mixed messages begin when we are so young. Look pretty. Look sexy, but not too sexy. Newscasters are told to wear skirts so the audience can see their legs under the table. Katie Couric changed her appearance, trading pants for skirts and pumps for stilettos, when Diane Sawyer was slotted opposite her on a rival network.

At the law school, fall was recruiting season, and suddenly the halls were filled with carefully groomed young people in suits. But the women had seen the lawyers on TV - skirts to mid-thigh, cleavage peeking out from the neckline, stiletto heels - and dressed accordingly. We older women fretted, but the TV lawyers were more influential than we.

 

image:express.co.uk

 

Men still run things in business, entertainment, government, academia. The message? You must dress to attract us. We want to see your breasts and thighs, but if you show them, you can’t complain when we are overcome by our powerful male libido.

If I display it, does that give you license to touch it? To comment on it? Certainly not the former; I don’t know about the latter. But I think we all know that regardless of what we wear - knit sheath or boxy business suit, tight jeans or khaki coveralls, steel-toed workboots or stilettos -some men will see our mere female presence as an invitation.

It all makes me wonder. What does it signify that it is so common? If it’s how it’s always been, do we now hold men accountable for their behavior? Yes, we do; sexual harassment has been recognized as discrimination by the law for over thirty years, first by the EEOC, and then by the Supreme Court. Why do women wait so long to come forward? Oh please. Whose job was in jeopardy? Who feels shame about these episodes? Who gets blamed if she lets herself be pressured into a sexual relationship?

Scholar Catherine McKinnon, with many brave victims and their feminist lawyers, changed the legal environment in the eighties. The harassment and abuse continued. “When you’re a star you can grab em by the pussy,” said candidate Trump. Now a bunch of women, who were raised in and worked in a world where that was true, are saying en masse, No, you can’t. This part’s not for sale. My sexuality isn’t part of my job description.

 

image:aclu.org

The powers that be in media, entertainment, politics, legislatures, are scrambling to distance themselves from this tawdry culture. Shocked, they are shocked. They compete to see who can deplore most forcefully, and the particular men who have been called out are being punished severely.

What I really wonder is, will it last? Is this a brief storm, or an earthquake which will change the topography? Social change, a movement - it surges forward, falls back, subsides, gathers strength, surges again. Do we gain ground?

The New York Times, once famously patriarchal, now has a gender editor, Jessica Bennett. She explores how we got here and queries whether this is a permanent change. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist, told her “There comes a tipping point when the ‘frame’ changes. One day, segregated water fountains seemed ‘normal’...It’s just how things were. Then they’re illegal, and a few years later you say, ‘Wow, how did we ever see that as O.K.?’” click

 

image:arts.gov

I’ve lived seventy years in a world ruled by men, with rules of behavior enforced by men and women. My fifteen-year-old granddaughter has learned all these rules. She tells me what you must do to get and keep a boyfriend, and tells me who is a slut. Like all young people, she thinks her generation invented sex, and says, “Things are different now, Grandma.”

I worry that the frame will not change, that each new generation of women will be harmed by it, and not find the courage to resist until they reach middle age. Diana Nyad wrote an op-ed column recounting the trauma of her high school swimming coach’s continuous molestation: “And therein lies the call for our speaking up. We need to construct an accurate archive of these abuses. And we need to prepare coming generations to speak up in the moment, rather than be coerced into years of mute helplessness.” click

image:theextraordinary.org

 

Have we come a long way, Baby? And will we keep moving forward?

Waiting for Irma

To my readers: This is my first post since January. Family troubles, including two serious illnesses and my sister's death, turned off all my writing except my diary for a while. I believe I'm back in business now.

 

Tuesday night I told Amanda I’d go to Walmart first thing Wednesday to prepare for Irma, the monster hurricane that might be heading our way. I told her not to tell Joe, since I was sure he would scoff. She didn’t tell Joe, simply asked me in his presence, “Did you tell Grandpa about Walmart?”

Joe didn’t scoff, exactly, just claimed that we weren’t going to lose power because we never have since the lines were buried underground. I pointed out that in 2004 power went out all over town despite the buried lines. (Gainesville doesn’t get the full force because we’re halfway between the Gulf and the Atlantic,60 miles from each of them. But this is a monster hurricane, extremely large, extremely fierce.)

 

image: weather.com

 

Though I’ve lived in Florida 43 years I’ve never prepared for a hurricane before. When I lived near the coast, in Jacksonville, I was a young single mother, and I would dither and fret as hurricanes threatened: I don’t know how to put up plywood, don’t have tape, what do I do, what do I do? As I look back I realize how very young I was, and how far I’ve come.

Five hurricanes hit Florida in the summer of 2004. Number two, Frances, was a mere tropical storm by the time it reached Gainesville, but some people lost power for two weeks. We only lost power for 45 minutes. We were in bed when our neighbor’s huge laurel oak, hollow inside, slammed down onto our roof, right over our heads. It took nine months to replace the roof and repair all the damage.

 

image:mldavisinsurance.com

 

Irma is coming at a particularly unfortunate time for the Muumuu Mamas. This weekend was going to be our annual beach expedition, eight of us together for three nights, with no responsibility for anyone but ourselves, all of us lovers of food, conversation, dancing, long walks on the beach, and each other. My sister Luli died just three weeks ago, and I needed comfort from those seven mamas, so when our beach weekend blew away, I was gloomy. But then the women came up with an alternate date in November, and Julie found us a house, so I’m feeling more cheerful. click

 

relaxing at the beach 2013

 

Just after 6:00 on Wednesday morning I headed to the nearby Walmart with a short list: water, tuna, soup, crackers, baked beans, pineapple, ravioli and smoked oysters (both favorites of Amanda). The parking lot was only a third full. The shelves were even emptier.

image:financialmoneytips.com

Going down the canned goods aisles was an interesting lesson in what people won’t eat, and what I’m willing to eat if desperate. All the tuna was gone, but there were plenty of water-packed scallops, clams, and oysters. Two cans of herring, two of smoked oysters - I took them all. The only baked beans left were vegetarian or ‘touch of maple.’ I took two of the latter, though now I’m having second thoughts.

All the soups were Campbell's. Cases and cases of cheese soup, and cream of mushroom, and a fair amount of broth. That was it, except for three four-packs of chicken noodle - I took one - and a few cans of Slow Kettle Style portobello mushroom-and-madeira bisque, and andouille sausage jambalaya with chicken and ham. How nasty do you suppose they’ll be? No ravioli, and I turned up my nose at the spaghetti-o’s. I got saltines and peanut butter crackers - the only peanut butter available was flavored, or swirled with jelly, and I just couldn’t.

Am I too fussy? images: target.com, reddit.com

 

Little snack packs of nutella for Amanda. Canned pineapple and canned corn - the only canned produce I can stomach. A jar of peanuts, a box of raisins, instant oatmeal. I asked a woman stocking the chips shelves where the bottled water was. She said there was none left at Walmart but they had pallets at the Publix at Hunter’s Crossing, which opened at 7.

I arrived at Publix at ten to seven. They had opened early; people were already leaving, with carts loaded with water. This was the on-their-way-to-work crowd. I took two 24-packs of pint bottles, though I hate buying plastic bottled water. But inside, in the water aisle, a man was just unloading pallets of gallon jugs. The Official Recommendation is a gallon per person per day for three days, so I took 8 gallons and returned one of the 24-packs.

Publix’ shelves were more generous than Walmart’s. I bought lots of tuna, four cans of Progresso soups, ravioli. In the ethnic aisle I considered a can of beans that contained blood sausage,chorizo and ham, but thought better of it. I love blood sausage, but in a can? I don't think so.

image: cubanfoodmarket.com

People who only bought water were in the ‘ten items or fewer” check-out lines. (I love that Publix’ sign-makers know the difference between less and fewer). Everyone else was in the regular lines, twenty or more people in each line, the lines stretching way down the aisles. I took an instant dislike to the man in front of me, and reached all sorts of unsupported conclusions about him. He muttered gloomily that there’s a thin line between humanity and chaos, and people shouldn’t panic. I was sure that in an emergency situation he would try to take charge, bossing everyone around, with no skills nor information.

There was no sign of either panic or chaos. Instead people were cheerful, saying how many families they were buying for, what happened to them in previous storms, claiming expertise because they’d lived in South Florida for years and were used to it. Somebody pointed out that after it was over we could always donate the water jugs to some other emergency down the road. There was a pleasant sense of community, and it cheered me up to be doing this, brought me out of the very inward state I’ve been in since Luli died.

At home I stored my supplies, and told the family we don’t TOUCH them unless the power goes out. For extra security I hid the oysters and nutella behind other cans. We can celebrate the end of hurricane season with a most peculiar feast, and donate the water bottles to the HOME Van.

 

I felt a proud sense of accomplishment as I looked at my tidy stash. And last night Joe, who has been following every detail of the forecasts, and analyzing how they are produced, said that he took back his mocking, and thought I had done an excellent job. It’s only Thursday, but Amanda's school has already cancelled Monday’s classes.  Nothing is supposed to happen in Florida till Saturday morning, and north Florida doesn’t expect trouble till Sunday afternoon. The roads north will be godawful jammed, the gas stations are running out, the sky is gray. We’re waiting for Irma, who may not visit us. I hope she veers way east to the middle of the ocean, but if she hits us, I will eat weird soups, and enjoy NOT saying ‘I told you so.’

 

UPDATE: I’m posting this Friday morning. Gainesville is now smack in the center of the cone of uncertainty, and so am I, with a small nervous knot centered somewhere between my throat and my belly, and possible tension covering head to toe. My sense of humor may evacuate. I fret about all the possible horrors for everyone else, but for us I just focus my hopes on: Please no more trees on the roof.

Duct Tape

 

2 New Year's gifts for my dear readers: a light hearted encomium to the sine qua non of home maintenance, and an easy recipe.

A couple of months ago Joe said, “I’d like a birthday party this year.” We only celebrate our birthdays in a big way every few years, so I told him if he’d give me the list I’d organize the whole thing. Then I forgot, and I think he did too, until eight days before the date. We went into high gear. He gave me the list, and some email addresses, and I sent forty invitations.

What about the menu? I suggested a big pot of chili, fried chicken from Publix, salad, and of course birthday cake. Over the years I have let go of the show-off cook, so I felt no need to prepare all the food for thirty or so people.Joe made it even easier. He wanted oysters, and he wanted to be in charge of them. He vetoed the chili, asked for deli sandwiches and fried chicken. And for everyone who asked “What can I bring?” the answer was salad.

After consulting with Luli, my sister and on-call food professional, I decided I could quadruple the Blitzen Kuchen recipe to make two sheet cakes without any unanticipated chemical reactions. (I did not consider the capacity of my stand mixer, and after beating the butter, sugar, and dozen eggs I had to transfer it to my largest bowl and mix in the flour by hand.)

The bowl was too small

The guests were all old (in both senses of the word) friends of one or both of us. There were clusters of guests - Joe’s poker buddies, his movie and football buddies, and the Muumuus - many with spouses. These were supplemented by a few outsiders who were welcomed by the different groups, including my middle-aged son - some of the people had known him as a toddler. And people saw old friends they had lost track of - there were warm reunions complete with pictures of grandchildren.

The weather obliged us. The sky was overcast and blustery, almost chilly, perfect for raw and grilled oysters out on the deck, with plenty of beer. As it got darker and colder, we moved inside to eat sandwiches and chicken by the fire, with Etta James on the stereo. Sitting on couches and folding chairs and coffee tables, people talked of books and movies and old affairs and (ugh) current affairs, which led Kristin to give us a song about Hitler’s (and Himmler’s and Goering’s and Goebbel’s) balls. She sings very well.

image:michael'stvtray.com

The party was well underway. Joe was basking in friendship - I’m not the only one who loves him. I was moving from place to place, checking on this and that, responding to the teenage girls’ boredom complaint with a look and then Netflix on my laptop, when Bruce said, “Liz, the front door won’t close.” “Whaaat?” (Translation: I don’t have enough to think about?)

It stood open about 18 inches, letting in the cold and letting out the cat. It wouldn’t go over the threshold. On our knees we discovered that the bottom of the door had come loose and slipped down. We agreed that this called for Larry, a retired cabinet maker with meticulous skills and a generous willingness to help. I went out on the deck and said, “Larry, please stop shucking oysters and come help with the door.” (We had bought a bushel and hired a shucker, but guys like to stand around shucking oysters and shooting shit.)

 

image:gypsygema.com

I went about my business while Larry and Bruce investigated, until Larry called for...duct tape. So much for the gifted cabinet maker. They jammed the bottom board up where it belonged and fastened it neatly. “To fix it you’ll need to take the door off the hinges. This is just a temporary fix,” Larry said. But I wasn’t so sure. Duct tape is a theme of our decor. The lovely silvery gray complements our lifestyle (I sneer at the brightly-patterned stuff they sell at Office Depot.)

Seven years ago Amanda was, to put it kindly, rambunctious. Sometimes it was a product of anger, but sometimes it was sheer exuberance. She was dancing in the shower one night when she slipped and grabbed onto the ceramic soap dish set into the tile. It broke off, leaving a gaping hole which exposed the pipes. (I still don’t understand how the weight of a slender seven-year-old could accomplish this, but that was her story.) Call the tile man? No. Get the duct tape. Joe, an ingenious - if not a handy - man, made a neat silver rectangle which has lasted to this day.

 

 Three years ago Amanda had settled down and we had a slumber party for her 11th birthday. click This entailed moving all the living room furniture against the walls and laying down pads and mattresses. It was a lovely and boisterous affair, and after she had slept it off, Amanda was very cooperative in restoring the house to our standard of tidiness. Alas, in pushing the piano back into place she smashed the light switch plate and rheostat. Clearly a job for...Superduct!

This repair only lasted a week or two. I was uneasy about all the unprotected electrons shooting around behind their silver cover, and tired of not being able to turn on the lights, so I called a handyman.

image:warningacooleelectric.co.uk

I have written before about our low standards of tidiness and decor click. I love to visit my friends, their houses filled with beauty and the tranquility that comes from order, at least when they have visitors. Our disorder is a product of laziness, distractions, and perhaps most of all, the way messes become invisible as time passes - I no longer see the shoes in the middle of the living room, the pile of books waiting to be shelved.

Joe and I are fortunate to be well-matched - I can’t imagine a tidy person living with either one of us. It’s not that I’m proud to be a slob - sometimes I even think how nice it would be to be otherwise - but I’m no longer embarrassed. And in the way we all redefine our faults as virtues, I have created a new etymology for sLOVEnly.

 

 

 

BLITZKUCHEN

350 degrees (325 for pyrex)   8"pan, greased and floured   25-30 minutes

1 C white flour

1 t baking powder

pinch of salt

1 stick unsalted butter, softened

3/4 C sugar 

3 eggs

zest and juice of half a lemon

1/2 t vanilla

Cream butter well, add sugar and lemon zest, beat well. Beat in eggs, lemon juice, vanilla. Stir together the flour, baking powder, salt, and beat in at low speed just till blended.

Frosting:

1 stick butter

1 C powdered sugar

2t vanilla

3oz unsweetened chocolate, melted (I do it in the microwave at 50% power)

Cream butter a LONG time, beat in sugar for a while, add vanilla and chocolate. If too soft to spread, refrigerate a while, if then too stiff, put in bowl of warm water and beat again.

 

 

The First Week - Dealing with It

I vote a week early. I get tears in my eyes as I black the little oval next to Hillary's name. On election night I am excited, set up my computer to watch the numbers roll in. But they’re rolling the wrong way. Hope eroding with the numbers, I go to bed at 10:30. Maybe I’ll wake up to good news in the morning.

 

 I wake at 12:30. It looks worse. At 1:15 I go to Facebook; I have to say something, anything.  Judging by the response, many of my Facebook "friends" are awake. I stay up until 4.

Before she went to bed I had told Amanda, “Don’t worry about it honey. She’s going to win.” When she wakes up in the morning I have to tell her. In the car I try to acknowledge our outrage while warding off despair. “Why do you have to talk about it. You know I’m mad; leave me alone.”

For a couple of days it doesn’t seem real. I shake my head as if to clear the bad dream. Then for a little while I think - maybe the president won’t be as awful as the candidate. After all, he has no firm opinions. But I know he is a racist, a misogynist, hateful, impulsive, still a two-year-old at 70. I fear his ignorance, his incompetence, his willingness to exploit what is worst in us to win.

I try to avoid information, but the New York Times and Facebook keep drawing me in. I see in the Times the committee that will manage the transition - I recognize Steve Bannon from Breitbart News, and Pam Bondi, the Florida Attorney General who received $25,000 from the Trump Foundation and then did not investigate fraud allegations against Trump University - and realize things may be as bad as I fear.

Bondi and friend  image:NYTimes.com

 

A few weeks before the election I had started writing about Michelle Obama’s New Hampshire speech - the one about Trump boasting of assaults on women - trying to understand my response to it. On Friday - has it only been three days? - I watch it again on YouTube, download the transcript. And now the crying begins, on and off for two days, until it feels like this new reality has loomed forever.

 

The looming horror: image of Hurricane Matthew in news-press.com

 

I’ve long thought that it’s past time for the American Century, the American Empire, to be over. Maybe this is just a marker on that road. But the crumbling won’t be painless, and most of the rubble will fall on the poorest, the least powerful.

 

image:bbc.com/gettyimages

I watch David Chappell, Steven Colbert, Seth Meyers, Whoopie Goldberg. I cry. I have to do something. What can I do?

Wednesday is the HOME Van food pantry at Arupa’s house. I hand out medicines, tents, sundries. To my surprise - usually the political views I hear there are right wing - most of the talk in the long line is dismayed, or outraged. I go to the annual celebration at Grace Marketplace, our two year old homeless services campus, knowing I’ll see familiar faces. I go to collect hugs. I get plenty. I ask a friend about the mayor’s book circle - first they read Ta Nahisi Coates, now they’re going to read Ibram Kendi. I'm going to read it. Good old progressive, prosperous, white me, I want to learn more, I want to connect. 

 

 

From my car I wave and smile in the rural southern way at pedestrians, especially non-whites. I wish I had a Clinton bumper sticker. We go for an evening walk and pass the home of the two gallumphing Great Danes. In their yard is a Trump sign. I call to the neighbor. “I love your dogs. But they’re not big enough!” - and she laughs. We walk on and I mutter to Joe, “But I hate your sign.”

 

image:danesonline.com

 

Everything makes me think of the election. Sunday afternoon we go to the new Depot Park to hear some reggae - it’s been open a couple of months but this is our first time. It was built on a brownfield full of contaminated soil and water, which was treated and removed. How much its recent opening influenced the latest eviction of nearby homeless camps, I can't say. In Gainesville we have big camp evictions every few years, with no provision for the campers to go anywhere else, no regard for the functioning community they have created. The people scatter and find new sites.

Despite my misgivings, the park is as wonderful as I’ve heard - still new and raw, but when the trees grow up it will be glorious. Plenty of seating - rocks, benches, concrete risers - and curved walking paths. In the center is the playground, full of delights. Fossils planted in the sandbox. Little digging machines that kids can sit on, the sand shovel controlled by the pedals and handlebars. A wet area where water spurts from the ground, slides down a wall, sprays out from moveable metal tubing. This is Florida, mid-November; we can still play in the water.

 

image:independentfloridaalligator.com

 

Joe and I sit by the sandbox and watch the children, parents, grandparents. It’s like an advertisement for multicultural diversity. Asian faces, faces framed by hijabs, children black and brown and white, talking English and Spanish, and is that Chinese? A 7-year-old blonde girl makes sand angels. A 2-year-old brown boy with glistening black curls stamps his feet in the water. I nod and smile at everyone I pass. This is not Trumpworld, this is America.

 

 

 image:sandia national laboratory

 

Light a candle and curse the darkness - it’s been my motto for many years. What can I do? There is a Progressive Women’s Meeting Sunday afternoon, but meetings?... Oh God, I can’t anymore. A Million Woman March January 21. Possibly. The last big demonstration I went to in DC was for abortion rights. I remember the exhilaration -seeing clusters of women in Atlanta at the gate for the DC flight, masses of women on the DC subway. But I was 45 then - I could stand for hours and hours. And I hate crowds. 

image: huffingtonpost

 

The news keeps getting worse;  Bannon will be chief advisor. What can I do? What can I do?

 

It’s been a week. At 3AM Tuesday morning I see two posts on Facebook:

Amanda Debour Bartlett asks people to protest to Congress about the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump’s senior advisor, followed by much discussion regarding Congress’ lack of power in this matter. I think, and say, that if we protest as often as we can on the truly horrible decisions (and with Bannon in charge there will be many of them) Congress may believe it has to resist the executive when possible. I share the user-friendly Common Cause website to “find your representative.” click I resolve to keep addresses and stamped envelopes by my writing chair, and dash off notes whenever I feel the outrage.

 

 
from Common Cause website: my representatives - alas (mostly)

 

 Another post:
“...Join me in showing love and respect to others. Find your way to swing the pendulum in the direction of love. Because today, sadly, hate is gaining ground.” (Mara Carrizo Scalise on Instagram, posted on FB by Karen Epple, shared by Arupa, and comically mocked by her husband) I vow to work hard on kindness, friendliness, civility. To wear the safety pin. click

 

 

 

Is it all silly? I don’t know. Will it help? Probably not. Maybe only to assuage my feelings, to save my own soul. I am still crying.

 

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Que Sera, Sera

 

For years I’ve had an idea running unnoticed behind my thoughts, the way programs run in the background on a computer: this is the way my life is supposed to be.

image:slideplayer.com

 

It’s an idea that can lead to resentment, but recently I’ve had a revelation. There’s no supposed to be; there’s just what is. Maybe this new (to me) version of truth will help me with my quest for acceptance, as in, “Accept the things you cannot change.”

It’s not that I’ve ever thought life was supposed to be all gardens and beaches. Accidents and illness, struggle and heartbreak - I’ve long known they were part of the mix. Since I was quite young, I’ve had a vision of how life works. You go along happily for a few years, encountering joys and troubles along the way but staying fairly upright, when suddenly life comes along with a catastrophe and pulls the rug out from under you. 

 

image:missionblueprintonline

Still, I had a sense that there was some natural progression from infancy to old age, stages of life that would come in a certain order. This was one of a number of unexamined assumptions produced by a safe and secure childhood. As a child I lived in a luxurious cocoon. I was the youngest of four children, the baby of the family. My family was intact, my father made a very good living, my mother made a comfortable home life, my brothers adored me.

a luxurious cocoon  image:busyknitter.com

Some of these unexamined assumptions are useful: I can do it; I am loved. Some are just silly. I was born when my parents were in their forties; we lived in big houses. My grown brothers lived in tiny apartments. I concluded that when you’re young you’re poor and when you’re old you’re rich. This idea miraculously survived years of working in poverty law. I was probably forty when I realized there wasn’t a natural progression from one state to the other.

images:thetinylife.com, wikipedia.org

When I was little I assumed my future was college, husband, housewife, motherhood. (You can tell from this when and into what class I was born.) This assumption exploded with the second wave of feminism, with reading the Second Sex at fourteen and The Feminine Mystique at fifteen. When the dust had settled, a new assumption took its place. I was in charge of my life, I could choose my path.

I’ve always known life isn’t fair. When I was raising two kids they’d say, as siblings do, “It’s not fair.” And I’d annoy them with a little ditty, “You always, you never, IT’S NOT FAIR,” and tell them no, life isn’t fair, that’s just the way life is. Every year I’d spend a semester and three credit hours trying to teach my law students that life’s not fair. They had not entirely earned their good fortune, nor did poor people deserve their misfortunes; a good deal of everybody’s situation was due to luck, good or bad. click

Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I’ve known this for years; I’ve said this for years. Yet there in the background, belying this knowledge, was the belief that my life would proceed in ordered stages. 

image:thepragmaticcostumer.wordpress

The gods have laughed at me over and over, yet I have to learn the lesson again and again. I had to learn it once more when my son came home to recover from a serious illness. Now the four of us - hard-working husband, retired wife, teenaged granddaughter, and middle-aged son - are bumping along together as well as we can. It’s not what I expected when I retired. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

All my life I have struggled to accept what comes my way. I should have been an alcoholic; then I could have gone to meetings and heard the Serenity Prayer. Maybe it would have sunk in. But I can’t go much beyond one drink without getting drunk, and I hate being drunk. I prefer musical inspiration anyway; I want to learn to take One Day at A Time. click

Writing has always brought me clarity. But I’m still confused, still trying to understand. There's no supposed to be. There's just what is.

N.B. This post is full of God and Jesus. I haven’t become a believer. Growing up in a sanctimonious culture, I’m saturated with pious aphorisms. And just about my favorite music is gospel, full of trouble, promise, and joy.

 

 

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Political Fiction: West Wing and House of Cards

In this year of totally distressing, not to say horrifying, political campaigns click, Joe and I turned to West Wing. He brought home DVDS from the law school library, and we binge-watched, together and separately. (I fall asleep when I watch anything after 8pm.)

image:twinversity.com

After five seasons, the show lost steam and we lost interest. But now I had the TV habit, and, fearing I wouldn’t get enough exposure to politics, I turned to House of Cards. I had watched one episode a few years ago, but I found the characters so loathsome I didn’t want them occupying my living room or my mind.

 

THE WEST WING

 image:theatlantic.com

In West Wing, the liberal’s wet dream, various domestic or international crises force the characters to reconcile their ideals with the need for political compromise. The President is just one of many major characters in the show, which focuses on senior White House staff. Each episode has multiple story lines, which may reflect each other, and there is often a humorous side story.

The scripts are stuffed with policy discussion presented in rapid-fire arguments, but at the core of the show are the almost-family relationships among a group of people working long hours towards usually common and often elusive high-stakes goals. They argue and get really angry, cover their caring with teasing and jokes, and support each other through tough times.

I enjoy these struggles. Not everyone does. In Wikipedia I found critic Heather Havrilesky: "What rock did these morally pure creatures crawl out from under and, more important, how do you go from innocent millipede to White House staffer without becoming soiled or disillusioned by the dirty realities of politics along the way?"

an innocent creature   image(leopard gecko): dreamstime.com

a soiled politician  image:izquotes.com

 

HOUSE OF CARDS

Frank and Claire Underwood  image: netflixlife.com

In House of Cards, the paranoid cynic’s delight, everybody does heinous deeds and then they blackmail each other. The show is about two ruthless people with one ambition: to reach the top. They remind me of a law student I once interviewed for a public service internship whose ambition was to “be a leader.” I kept trying to find out what issues he cared about, what he wanted to achieve; he just kept saying he wanted to be a leader. Finally I asked, “But where do you want to lead people?” He had no answer.

 

Whither the wethers?  image:gapemogotsi.com

 

The show is also about visual style. No matter where it takes us - homes, offices, cars, stores, motels - the entire world is decorated in shades of brown and gray and ivory. Everyone is thin. Everyone’s clothes match the decor. Two exceptions to the neutral pallette: outside we may see a touch of green, and the blood is always red.

 

image: businessinsider.com

Robin Wright, as Claire Underwood, wears very high needle-thin heels and tailored suits (sometimes tailored dresses) regardless of what she’s doing, unless she’s running or rowing. Then it’s a skin tight black workout suit.

image:pinterest.com

Obviously these costumes reflect and enhance her characterization, and my friends might say I’m in no position to criticize someone’s attire click, but as with the set design, they distract me. When a viewer is more intrigued by the show’s design than by the characters, there’s something wrong.

And that brings me to Kevin Spacey, an actor I usually admire. In House of Cards he seems to have two notes, sneering contempt and instrumental charm. The former is the major note - he can’t say he wants a cup of tea without scorn dripping from the line. In the later episodes, he rounds out the character a bit, but that over-the-top contempt still dominates. Robin Wright’s character seems more layered than Spacey’s. Doubt and second thoughts sometimes shimmer in her face. She is also considerably less talkative than her husband, and therefore less transparent.

 

It should be obvious that I preferred West Wing to House of Cards. West Wing is made for me, a left-of-liberal with a fairly positive view of people (in sum: few of us are evil, most do the best we can, but we are led astray by self-interest, ignorance, blind spots, and incompetence).

 
image:cathtatecards.com

But I don’t think my preference is only because of my politics and world view. I think it comes down to the difference between character-driven and plot-driven fiction.

The West Wing crew, both major and minor characters, are complex. They grow in each episode. Though I binge-watched the show three months ago, I remember the names of many of the West Wing staff. I finished watching House of Cards just a few weeks ago, but while I can picture the faces, I can only name the two major villains. 

House of Cards is all about plot, the more outlandish, the better. Old plots (both stories and dastardly schemes) return from time to time, giving the series continuity and depth. I continued watching to the bitter end because I was curious about what melodrama the writers would devise next. But I sometimes had trouble remembering who did what to whom, and why it mattered.

I think that’s because, while heavy on plot, House of Cards is light on character. Everyone is cynical and ruthless, or a hapless victim, and not much beyond that. Villains are supposed to be more interesting than saints; good guys can be insipid. But villains with no redeeming features are as flat as heroes with no flaws. You can show their vulnerabilities, and throw in some back story to explain how they got that way, but it's not enough.

images: wikia.com, somesaints.tumblr.com

I am neither cynical nor paranoid (though I sometimes wonder whether Donald Trump was hired by the DNC to destroy the Republicans). I understand that loathsome heroes are currently a popular trend in television series. At the risk of being called a goody two-shoes, I think that consuming large doses of evil as entertainment promotes cynicism and despair.

image:wikipedia.org

I don’t have to be inspired, but I do prefer characters with more than one note, and characters I can like, or at least care about. If I’m going to let them into my living room, they should be people I’m willing to hang out with for a while.

 

The Cute Old Days

Most of my old friends near and far are grandparents now. They share their grandchildren’s pictures on Facebook, and though I usually ‘hide’ cat and dog videos, I love looking at babies and toddlers, especially when my friends are in the picture, beaming happiness.

My grandparent status is different, though hardly unusual, because I’m raising mine, and she’s a teenager. She lived with us for a couple of extended periods before coming for good when she was eight. We’ve had the usual travails of child-rearing, and then some. But I’ve had a grandmother’s full share of adorable and adoring. And I want to share those stories, because mine was once just as cute as yours, and because I like to remember those days.

Just as cute as yours

I love to sing, and in those days Amanda loved to hear it. I wrote a song for her before she was born ‘Ukelele, huckleberry, Amyanda Rose, she’s the sweetest baby, everybody knows, Orange blossom honey from her head down to her toes...’ To sustain us both through hours of walking (me) and screaming (her), I had Elisa’s song from my childhood ‘Aa naa naa mi nena de mi corazon..’ click.   I wrote a toilet training song: ‘I went peepee in the potty... I’m such a great big girl.’ To my amazement she sang it to me just the other day.

And then there was the huge repertoire of songs to get her to sleep at night. She had me trained to stay with her until she slept. I particularly remember holding my breath and inching my body off the bed after twenty renditions of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, only to hear “Grandma,” as I reached the door. We had On Top of Old Smoky, You Are My Sunshine, Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night, Down in the Valley, Go Tell Aunt Dora, and many, many more. I look back and wonder, what was I thinking? I’m a great believer in bedtimes, and bedtime routines, but somehow our routine had become sing until you drop. I think I was a pushover because I worried about what was going on at home.

 

Like Grandma, like Grandbaby: until she matured into self-consciousness, Amanda would frequently break into song. At three we took her to Jacksonville Beach. Joe went in to ride the waves, Amanda and I sat in the sand at the edge of the water, making drip castles. Every time the water ran up under our bottoms the castles washed away. Every time, she laughed. And suddenly she began singing, ‘Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.’ click

First trip to Jax beach - in winter

 

We took her camping at Cumberland Island when she was seven. It’s a special place, only accessible by ferry, a national seashore in southern Georgia with long empty beaches, wild horses, and billions of birds. Though it was supposed to be a tenth anniversary celebration, suddenly we had Amanda. So we borrowed a bigger tent and went on our first real family trip.

 

some of the billions:oystercatchers  image:Jacksonville.com

Everything was new to Amanda. It was her first boat ride - she and Joe stood in the bow to catch the wind in their faces. We disembarked and got a cart to haul our gear over the long trek to the camp site. We slept cozy in the tent, the October weather mild and the mosquitoes gone, and through the night heard the wild horses galloping down the trail.

 

image:ajc.com

We rose early, and Amanda and I took flashlights to walk the long path to the bathrooms, and then through the woods to the beach. Through the moss-draped oaks the sunrise filled the whole sky with rose and gold. And Amanda began singing, ‘Oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, please shine down on me.’ click

 

image: m.flikie.com

 

Cumberland Island is magical in so many ways. We watched the waves and birds and sunrise, and then returned to the camp where Joe was making breakfast. When breakfast was cleared away, the three of us set off to explore the island, walking carefully down the trail to avoid the piles of horse shit. “Grandma, the doodoo is moving!” We squatted down, and sure enough, iridescent dung beetles were patiently rolling balls of horseshit along to wherever they thought it should go.

image:toptenz.net

Children like shit. Whenever Amanda was staying with us, we would go for a walk in the evening, Joe holding Trisket’s leash, Amanda on her tricycle. I was in charge of picking up the poop, until the day when Amanda said, “I want to carry the doodoo.” Proudly she led the parade, with the plastic bag of shit dangling from her handlebars.

Maryanne and I have been friends since 1980; like me, she acquired a child late in life. When they were little the girls loved to play together, and Joe and I spent a lot of time with Maryanne and Larry. We were so at home at their house that I could honestly say ‘Being with you is almost as good as being alone’(and they didn’t take offense).

On a chilly night Larry made a fire in the living room and the girls roasted marshmallows. Soon they were covered in melted marshmallow, particularly fetching on Amanda’s dark skin. They were purely happy; so was I. Sharing this unexpected road with Maryanne has doubled the pleasure and cushioned the bumps.

When Amanda was in kindergarten I picked her up every morning to take her to school. One day she found a soup pot and wooden spoon in the back of the car (no, I don’t remember why), and she decided to make breakfast. From then on, I chose my daily breakfast from the menu she recited. I could have bacon and eggs, pancakes, spaghetti and meatballs, black beans and rice, or chicken soup. It was all delicious, especially satisfying on winter mornings as we drove through darkness with dawn just breaking. I asked her once what was in the soup. “Chicken...and soup,” she told me scornfully - any fool would know that.

All you need is chicken...and soup. Images:recipesfab.com, allrecipes.com

Amanda was briefly a Brownie, and in fourth grade Joe took her to the Father-Daughter Dance. We went all out for this, knowing it would likely be the last time she would happily go dancing with Grandpa.

Brownies selling cookies

She needed a special dress. Until now, fearing squabbles and tantrums, I had always bought her clothes, returning whatever she didn’t like. This was our first shopping trip together, and it was a revelation. She was quick and decisive, and we found a dress in twenty minutes. And what a dress: very grown-up-looking and entirely modest - we both loved it. We had time and energy for shoes - jeweled silver sandals with a slightly elevated heel. And later I went to Beauty Max (the place for costume jewelry) for diamond earrings and a hairclip.

The afternoon of the dance, I painted her nails and fixed her hair in a bun, and we came out to present her to Joe in her full glory. “Wait,” he said. “There’s one more thing.” And he went to the refrigerator and brought out a rose corsage.

 

She won a prize for her dancing

 

Since I saw her born, I’ve known I was lucky to have my grandbaby living nearby. People often say the joy of grandchildren is you get to have them for a while and then you get to send them home. We don’t have that with Amanda, instead we have the complex joys of raising her.  A recent article in the paper told me that people who take care of their grandchildren have a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s. I was delighted, until I kept reading and learned that those who are full-time parents to their grandchildren have an increased risk. Oh well.

 

Now we have a brand-new grandbaby, who will be the borrow and return type. Joe’s daughter Leah gave birth to a HUGE baby, Ula Mae, on June 1. All is well there - the love was immediate and overwhelming, and mother and baby are champion nursers. James is doing everything fatherly possible given that he lacks functional nipples. The little issue of sleepless parents will resolve itself after a while. They don’t live quite close enough, but New Orleans is only an eight-hour drive, and I’ve learned from my friends that Facetime does wonders. It’s my turn again to be fatuous and adoring, and I can’t wait.

A Long Labor

 

I have written three novels; each one took several years. But my fourth novel has been gestating for eight years. My back aches from the weight of it, and I wonder if it will ever be born.

image: scitechdaily.com

 

I’ve started my story three times. In my first attempt, a middle-aged woman finds her mother’s high school yearbook and tries to imagine her deceased mother’s life, while her mother argues with her from beyond the grave.

 

image:oaklandtech.com

 

The second version is the life of that same middle-aged woman. I’m confident that this third version, the story of her parents’ long marriage, is the right one, but I’ve put it down to revise other books, write the blog, travel, have surgery, adopt a granddaughter. I’ve written close to 380 pages, and I’ve only gotten the defenseless pair to their third and last pregnancy.

In my long dalliance with these people, I’ve had to do a lot of research, which is really fun. The most fun was learning about life on the home front during the Second World War. I found a Rosie the Riveter website with first person narratives by the women, now in their eighties, who helped build the ships and planes. click

 

Working on an airplane engine...

and a dive bomber

both photos of unnamed "Rosies" by Alfred T. Palmer of the Farm Security Administration

 

I read letters from women to their soldier boyfriends. I watched a documentary series about the war. As it turns out, my story begins a month before the end of the war, so I know a whole lot more than I can use (always a good thing with “historical” novels).

For more general research, and inspiration, I bought the complete New Yorker from 1925 to 2006 on CD’s - a bargain at $60 - which gives me a lot of contemporary news and views and culture. For instance, I learned (and used) the fact that in the spring of 1947 Richard Wright escorted Simone de Beauvoir around Harlem.

images: independent.co.com; national archives

From these old New Yorkers I get a sense of the writing of the time, and a certain insular Manhattan attitude that I need for some of my characters. It also gives me wonderful pictures of clothes and cars. I have yet to figure out how to browse through it without becoming caught up in a story or article.

I struggled with my other novels, but I don’t believe any of them were as challenging, had as many stops and starts, as this one. None of them required research into an era. None of them covered more than two years - this story lasts about forty years. More than that, none of them began with biographical bits of me. This one has strayed so far from its beginnings that I have disappeared, but one of the versions was very much me, and I found I wasn’t very fond of myself.

A couple of months ago I examined the situation. I’m 68, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life not finishing this book. My son suggested that if this one is such a struggle, maybe I should write a different one. But it doesn’t work that way. This story, these people, inhabit me.

A few weeks ago I reached a milestone - the end of the first section (courtship, early marriage, moving out of Manhattan) and began to believe again that someday I will reach the end. All I have left is the years with young children, the teenage years, the childless years, and the last year. The first draft will be massive, but then it will exist, ready to be cut and chopped and molded. I hate creating; I love revising. Michelangelo said “Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.” I will have a huge block of stone to carve.

image:wikipedia

I've labeled my current work, about the years with young children, chunktwo; I’m three chapters into it. The milestone has given me confidence and new resolve. I can do this. I know where I’m going. I’ll work first thing every morning, after feeding the beasts. What could stop me?

the beasts

Anyone who writes knows what could stop me. A thousand distractions beckon, and the most tempting lurk in my laptop: Email, Facebook, Free Cell, the New York Times. Even if I avert my eyes from the Firefox icon and go straight to my word processor, when a question arises the Internet is at hand to answer it. So I’ve returned to Freedom, an app which I tried a few years ago and abandoned when I found how easy it was to get around it. It’s not easy in the latest version. I set a schedule to block the Internet, and it’s in effect until I change it - and I believe I can’t change it while it’s actively blocking. (Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong.) I’ve given myself Internet access five hours a day in three parts. It’s wonderful how this has freed up my time, not just the early morning writing time, but the rest of the day. I’m completing all kinds of tasks and projects, and reading more than I have in several years. click

Along with the Internet, my self-imposed monthly blog deadline troubled me. The blog posts take several days; I feared they would destroy my momentum. I ignored my May 6 deadline  and kept on chugging along in the novel. But I like writing the blog: it clears my mind; it amuses me; it’s a great writing exercise; and I love finding the illustrations. And so I’ve decided that every time I finish a chapter, I’ll stop and write a blog post. If the chapters come fast and furious, I’ll stockpile posts.

I just finished a chapter (As often happens, I didn’t realize it was ending until it did.) So here I am, in my look-at-me way, telling you about it.

NEXT POST: Sometime in June, or whenever the next chapter is done.

How I Spent My Vacation

 

It was Sunday, 8am. The car was loaded - CD’s, snacks, maps, and my own big-font back-road directions. I was headed to Lake Dreher in South Carolina to camp a night with my high school friend Emily, and then to Chapel Hill for four nights with Luli. Freedom! Giggles! Long intimate talks! What could be better? I had just buckled my seat belt when my cellphone rang.

A campsite at Lake Dreher

It was Luli, but not lively Luli. It was her dead voice. She was speaking from the abyss. “Lizzy, don’t come. I can’t have houseguests. I can’t see anyone.” I had never heard it so bad, though I’m careful not to miss our daily phone call when she’s depressed. Of course, when she’s at the bottom, she doesn’t answer the phone.

I called Luli’s psychiatrist, who told me to come right away. I called Margaret, Luli's good friend and neighbor, who promised to keep an eye on her. I called Emily and told her my sister was sick and I was going straight to Chapel Hill. Ten hours later I was driving in the dark, lost as usual in the surreal meanderings of 15-501. I called the motel Joe had booked for me. It was only two blocks away, and in a few minutes I had collapsed on the bed. Luli refused to see me, but agreed I could call her in the morning.

image: aaroads.com

In the morning, she said Margaret and I could come over after breakfast, and the first thing she said when we arrived was, “My sense of humor is returning.” Luli’s depressions can go on for more than a year; this had been only twenty-four hours. She wasn’t all the way out of the pit; she lacked energy and had that frailty of someone who has just emerged from a nightmare. Still, Luli was back. Despite a sharp pain in her gut, which she attributed to a new iron prescription, she was ready to visit. We settled her on the couch with a heating pad.

By mid-afternoon she told me to cancel the hotel and stay with her. Nausea had joined the pain, but she remained pretty cheerful. I ate a delicious supper of salad and Luli’s frozen clam chowder. She ate a few bites of yoghurt and threw up. She persisted in blaming it on the iron pills.

 
images:chowhound.com, foodnetwork.com

It was 2:30 in the morning when she woke me up and said we had to go to the emergency room. I found the directions on Mapquest; at that hour there was no traffic, and it was a straight shot and short drive. Or it would have been had I turned left intstead of right on Columbia - I blame Mapquest but it certainly could have been me. When I knew I was lost I pulled over, turned on my flashers, and called 911.

image: driversed.com

As I had hoped, a police car pulled up. Officer McDonald said we could wait for the ambulance or he could lead us to the ER, a mile away. I chose that. Luli was in no condition to choose anything - she was doubled over in pain, which now stretched from her belly to her breast.

The parking lot was full. Officer McDonald, his name now inscribed in the Book of Good Deeds, told us to inform the receptionist we’d left our car in the driveway. The waiting room was even fuller than the parking lot. I muttered to Luli, “Tell them you have chest pain.” In classic Eder-family fashion she began by minimizing it, so I interrupted and said, “She has chest pain and vomiting.” We were in triage in less than a minute, with a kind, plump doctor who sent us back immediately to the “cardiac room” a big room with one bed, one plastic chair, and many monitors and machines, right across from the nurse’s station.

 

image: southcountyhealth.org

Mary Scott, a lovely 14-year old nurse, spoke soothingly as she took Luli’s vital signs, set up monitors, started the IV and - Hallelujah - began the morphine. I sat on the chair, covered with coats and purses, and watched Luli’s lips slowly curve upwards.

The Land of Morphine  image:neurorexia.com

 Luli is not a whole lot sillier on morphine than she is in real life. She was back, and she proceeded to charm everyone who came in the room, flirting and joking and making it clear that there was a real person underneath all the tubes and monitors. While she enchanted the staff, I wrote down everyone’s name and what they told us.

At 7 o'clock the shifts changed, and brought a new nurse, Peter. Like Luli, he was a New Yorker, and they talked about neighborhoods and theater and everything New York while he learned all about her condition and did a thousand medical things. If he hadn’t been living with his fiancé, I think he would have asked Luli ro marry him. I asked him if we could turn off the lights so we could get some sleep. He had only been at UNC a few weeks, and though he looked all over the room he couldn’t find the switch. He went out in the hall, crossed his fingers, and flipped a switch. “I hope this doesn’t turn off anything important.” The lights went out, an aide found a recliner for me, and we slept a bit.

 

Nurses work REALLY hard. image:mlive.com

I was too tired to be tired; Luli was drugged. Coffee for me, X ray, CAT scan, blood tests for her. A resident came in with the results - there’s a hernia and an intestinal blockage, we’re going to consult the cardiac team (Luli has a bad heart valve) - and he was gone. Luli was still on morphine, she didn’t care. But I knew “intestinal blockage” was serious. And I didn’t know what they were going to do about it, or when, or ANYTHING.

I went looking for Peter, who was watching two monitors, writing in a patient chart, and eating a bagel. He didn’t know who the doctor was, and I couldn’t remember his name. But shortly afterwards a tall blonde woman came in followed by two young women and a man. They were the surgical team, led by Dr Dreisen. She introduced herself to both of us and carefully explained what they were going to do, down to the different types of mesh they would use depending on what they found inside Luli. If the piece of intestine trapped in the hernia were healthy, things would be pretty simple; if it were infected or dead, they would do a bowel resection.

image: drugs.com

Luli was still stoned, and still charming, but she was calm and lucid. She asked about the possibility of a colostomy. She told about the nightmare of her week-long UNC hospital stay seventeen years ago after a pulmonary embolism, when ineptitude, neglect and cruelty reigned. Dr. Dreisen apologized for what used to be, and assured her they would take good care of her this time. As soon as they had consulted with cardiology they would get her into surgery.

In less than an hour I was following Luli’s gurney all over the hospital and in to a pre-op cubicle in the surgery suite. Another team of three came in, led by the anesthesiologist who specialized in cardiac cases. She was as clear, thorough, and kind as Dr. Dreisen, and even taller. She questioned Luli at length, and responded to each answer with “Awesome.” She explained that they were going to lower a camera down Luli’s esophagus so they could keep an eye on her heart during the surgery. After the long interview, which included medical and personal details, and Luli’s somewhat strained wit, she concluded that we were both awesome. My concern at having a twenty-year-old responsible for my only sister’s heart was allayed by her awesome knowledge of all things cardiological and anesthesiologocial, and the clarity of her explanations.

I sat in the surgery waiting room with all the other people whose loved ones were being cut open. I was exhausted. I was scared. I had a raging case of cystitis and was desperate for pyridium, the pain-killer. I asked the very kind volunteer where the nearest pharmacy was, and she told me there was one in the cancer hospital. I walked and walked to the far end of the complex, to discover that this was the pharmacy where outpatients got their prescriptions. I walked back to the other end, and almost cried when the volunteer in the little sundries shop said yes they had pyridium. I swallowed two on the spot.

 

It's really four hospitals, and VERY large

I returned to the waiting room, and then Luli’s friend Kathy showed up to keep me company. We talked about everything. Though she was dealing with her father’s severe medical emergencies, her mother’s distress, and the imminent death of an old friend, she was going to spend the night with Luli in the ICU.

At about five Dr Dreisen came out, gleeful. All had gone well, they’d shoved the healthy intestine back where it belonged, and patched up the hernia. From that moment, things just got better and better. Luli is a 71-year-old woman who works out vigorously five days a week. They kept her in the ICU because of her heart valve, but she recovered ridiculously fast. We had gone to the ER at three in the morning Tuesday, and left the hospital at noon on Friday. I stayed with her till Monday. Four weeks later Dr. Dreisen told her she could return to the gym and resume her regular workout, with the exception of the rower and Pilates.

 

 image:crossfitsweatshop.com

 
Hospital World makes the outside world disappear. There’s nothing but long corridors and elevators, bustling people in scrubs and white coats. I must have encountered two hundred people at that hospital: desk clerks, doctors, orderlies, nurses, cafeteria workers, aides, housekeepers, medical students. I met them at length as they cared for Luli, or briefly as they served me a meal. In elevators they greeted me with “How are you doing?” At the information desk they helped me find Margaret - I was waiting for her in the Corner Café; she was waiting for me at Starbucks. Fourteen hours after we’d arrived at the ER, when Luli was out of surgery and settled into the ICU, I went down to see about my illegally parked car. The parking lot attendant: “We were trying to find you, we didn’t want to have it towed, we paged you, aren’t you Gonzalez?” And there was my car where I had left it.

The parking attendant was one of 100's of kind people. image:hospitalparkinguwo.ca

 

Clearly management has set the tone for this hospital. I suspect the head honcho is a nurse, because the focus is on the patient, and families are welcome, even in the ICU, where the patients are in private rooms instead of multiple beds around the nursing station. The predominant note is kindness - I think they pump it through the ductwork - followed immediately by knowledge, technical skill, and clear communication. We only encountered a couple of staff who need some coaching: the resident who delivered bad news with no explanation and then disappeared, and a housekeeper and transport orderly who talked non-stop, wearing us both out.

I have read that hospitals are making themselves over, with fine cuisine and chic decor. I don’t care about that. What matters is people who remain humane as they deal with crisis and killing workloads, who know that what is routine and ordinary to them is unique and frightening to patients and families.

I don't want lobster (Lenox Hill Hospital  image:NYPost.com)

Even with the best of staff, no one should be alone in the hospital. And no one should be alone waiting to hear the news after surgery. Kathy distracted me in the waiting room with videos of her grandbaby; Margaret organized Luli’s friends and shared night duty with me and Kathy, while other friends spelled me during the day. Staff were impressed by the support, and the anesthesiologist said, “I don’t think my sister would do that for me.” In our case it’s payback. Years ago I arrived at Luli’s house with the flu. She spent a week taking care of me with garlic soup and single malt. After each of my knee replacements she came to Gainesville for a week. She cooked delicious dinners every night, and left us with a freezer full of stews, soups, and chicken pot pie.

image:todaysparents.com

It was an unusual vacation, not at all what I had hoped for. But this dramatic and terrifying emergency, which in the end was merely a hernia repair, brought several unexpected benefits. My sister and I are closer - I wouldn't have thought that possible. I got to know Margaret, who is my kind of people. And Luli, whose brief depression had been brought on by the prospect of cardiac surgery at the place that had ill-treated her so long ago, saw that UNC Memorial had been transformed. She met and admired the cardiac team, and learned all about the proposed valve replacement. I can't say she's excited about the prospect - she'd probably prefer a week in Paris -  but she's not dreading it anymore. She'll probably get it done sometime this summer. And I bet that by Labor Day she'll be back at the gym.

It’s Really a GRAND Canyon

Seventeen years ago, when I was 51, Joe and I donned 35-pound backpacks and hiked down the South Kaibab trail click to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. There we camped for two days, eating huge delicious meals at Phantom Ranch, and then hiked out on the Bright Angel trail. click  We started out early in the morning, and I was so exhilarated by the beautiful dawn light and the glory of the Canyon that after we crossed the bridge and began climbing, I started to sing. ‘Yay for me, yay for me, I’m as happy as a bunny in a tree, Yay for me, yay for us, if it came along you know I’d take a bus.’ This proved conclusively that exercise is intoxicating, and annoyed the hell out of four exhausted hikers in spandex bike suits who were sprawled by the side of the trail.

When we emerged from the Canyon, I was both giddy and exhausted. A mother with two young girls stopped us. “Excuse me, did you just hike up from the bottom?” Proudly I said yes. “Would you mind if I ask how old you are?” Proudly I told her. “You see, girls.” she said, “You can do ANYTHING.”

Back when we were young

 

Planning for our Thanksgiving 2015 trip to the Grand Canyon began a year in advance. Joe reserved two cabins for two nights at Phantom Ranch. Originally, there were going to be ten of us. But two women got pregnant and one man developed knee issues, so they and their partners had to drop out. Other preparations included Amanda saying she wouldn’t go, and me telling the trainer at the gym that I had to train for the hike.

And train I did, until I was rowing at a furious pace, proudly dead-lifting 80 pounds, and doing all kinds of lunges and burpees and other horrors, which became less horrible as I grew stronger. I climbed down and up the 230 stairs at the Devil’s Millhopper, working up to six repetitions, defeated only by boredom. My pulse stayed pretty low through the climbing and rowing, but I quickly grew short of breath. Still, after an echocardiogram and pulmonary tests, my doctor cleared me to go.

 

image:epicweird

I knew I was fitter than I had ever been. I had strengthened my legs so that as I walked I felt a new sense, or perhaps a youthful sense, of certainty, confident that if I stumbled on loose rock or uneven ground, my legs would not let me fall. I knew I would be slower than the others, but that would give me precious solitude. I looked forward to coming out of the Canyon with the same sense of triumph and pride I had felt seventeen years before.

As Thanksgiving approached, Joe’s emails to the rapidly shrinking group increased. So did Amanda’s resistance. I began to worry that we would have to drag her on to the plane. Since she is 120 pounds of solid muscle, this would not have gone well. Then someone suggested we invite her best friend to come along. To my surprise, Ella’s family agreed she could go. Amanda was very pleased: “At least Ella and I can suffer together.”

Our trip started in Las Vegas, a city at the top of the hole-in-my-bucket-list of places I had vowed never to visit. I was surprised and pleased to find that everything about it made me laugh. And the girls loved it. Our 20-year-old Australian cousin Johanna joined us after a grueling trip from Sidney, and the five of us shared a hotel room surprisingly amicably. Joe’s brother Matt and his wife Amber (one of the pregnant non-hikers) were in town for a conference, and we all went together to Valley of Fire State Park, where we walked a trail of rocks and cliffs entirely covered with ancient Native American graffiti. Petroglyphs are among my very favorite things. That night Amber had a birthday party for Matt, complete with an astounding magician, who delighted everyone, but especially the girls. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a happier beginning to our adventure. My throat was sore and scratchy, but I attributed it to the zero humidity.

 

Petroglyphs at Valley of Fire  image:inzumi.com

 

We made the five and a half hour drive to the Canyon with no mishaps, checked into our motel, and walked to the rim to see the views. Amanda took a zillion pictures with her new selfie stick. We were up late getting our packs ready, and up very early to eat breakfast and catch the 7am shuttle bus to the Kaibab trailhead. It was freezing cold, clear, and beautiful. I was so excited.

 

At the trailhead

The girls start down the trail

The other four soon were far ahead of me, and I enjoyed the solitude. The early morning light just adds to the magic of the Canyon. Down and down and down, awed by the constantly-changing views, getting used to the hiking poles, opening my jacket, removing my hat and scarf as I got warmer. I passed people, and people passed me, and we all exchanged cheerful greetings. Younger hikers expressed admiration in that sweet but condescending way that young people talk to old people. I kept drinking plenty of water, and I tried to eat some snacks, but I found I had no appetite. The trail became tricky - lots of ruts and loose rock.

 

 

At Cedar Ridge, (1.5 miles down), my gang had waited for me. There were pit toilets, and beautiful views. At Skeleton Point (3 miles down) a lot of people had stopped to rest and have lunch, and I found my gang again. I ate what I could - some cheese and sausage, some bread - but I didn’t feel hungry. Mostly I feasted on the view. After eating a lot, the girls were restless, and we sent them on ahead. They leaped and pranced down the steep switchbacks.

After Skeleton Point, nausea set in. I tried to nibble on trail mix, but I couldn’t keep it down, and didn’t dare put anything else in my queasy stomach. The others were far ahead, and I wondered whether I should turn back, send a message down to Joe with passing hikers. I was afraid he would be angry. I didn’t want to give up my dream of the trip. I wanted to do this, goddamn it. So I continued to Tonto Platform (4.5 miles down), where they had been waiting half an hour. I ate bread and jam, lay down for a bit, and trudged on.

Passing hikers now expressed concern instead of admiration. A woman hiking alone said, “You look like you’re worn out,” and I said yes, annoyed. “You’re kind of grouchy.” “I’m just trying to keep going, I don’t want to talk.” “Let me have your pack.” And then I saw the patch on her jacket - she was a ranger. She took my pack, commented that it was heavy (I always take too much water) and strapped it over her chest, so now she had one in back and one in front. It was a lot easier walking without it, and even easier because she chattered away, distracting me from the hard slog. I asked her if there was any way out besides hiking - maybe there was an extra mule? - and she said no. But she assured me that our route out on the Bright Angel was much easier - the Kaibab trail was a mess, she said, and passed some remarks about Congress and funding. She stayed with me to the foot bridge over the Colorado River (6.3 miles down) and then turned around to hike back up to the ranger station, leaving me with a mile and a half of easy level walking to Phantom Ranch. I had been hiking nine hours, though the trail usually takes about six.

 

Footbridge over the river

 

My family was already settled in. Amanda and Ella shared one cabin, which they never left except for showers and meals. Joe, Johanna and I shared the other. The cabins were built in the 1920's; each had four bunk beds, a nightstand, chair, sink and toilet, and very little remaining floor space. We used the extra bunks for our gear. I had time for a shower in the bathhouse before dinner.

Dinner is served family-style at the Ranch - steak or hikers’ stew, salad, cornbread, chocolate cake. After an all-day hike it is the best meal you ever ate, though the stew, loaded with beef and vegetables, is oddly seasoned with cloves. But I was still nauseated, and could only nibble a bit. I went to bed immediately after dinner, and knew nothing until morning.

 

 

Phantom Ranch cabins  image:tinyhousedesign.com

 

In the morning my hunger was as huge as the breakfast - eggs,sausage, bacon, pancakes, potatoes, juice and canned fruit. The day was sunny and warm, and like my appetite, my happiness had returned. Johanna went off by herself, and Joe and I walked the trail along Bright Angel Creek for a couple of hours. In the afternoon we wrote postcards in the dining room, and at dinner I did justice to the meal.

 

The Creek Trail (little white line at the bottom)

Happy on the Creek Trail

Cactuses on the Creek Trail  (Honi soit qui mal y pense)

 

We didn’t settle down to sleep till 11. About 1am my cold came on full force. With my nose completely blocked I slept little, and lay awake dreading the day ahead. We got up at 5:30. We had agreed I would start before the others, and when they caught up, Joe would hang back with me, and Johanna, Amanda and Ella could go on as fast as they liked. He gave them our credit card so they could check into the motel when they reached the rim. Still hungry, I ate a big breakfast, and started off alone under the stars.

I crossed the bridge. I was happy, proud, grateful to Joe for planning the trip and watching out for me. The vastness, the solitude, the sky brightening and the river gold with dawn, my legs strong, and my head clear now that I was no longer lying down. The colors of the Canyon gradually emerged with the light. We had five miles of beauty and steady walking up hill. Approaching Indian Gardens, the half-way point, where there is a campground and ranger station, the trail is lined with tall feathery cottonwood trees, and the view is green all around you. We were ready for a long lunch break. We took off our packs, sat on the benches, and pulled out the food.

 

Indian Gardens  image:cedarmesa.com

Still happy at Indian Gardens

The mules came and the riders creaked down from the saddles, staggered around on their unaccustomed legs. I was so glad not to be on the mules. At narrow sections of the trail the dizzying views threaten to suck you over the edge; I can’t imagine being elevated above mule-height, with no control over the four legs beneath me.

 

image: grandcanyonhistory.clas.asu.edu

 

I ate a big lunch, feeling content, and we started off again. The next stop would be in a mile and a half, at the rest house three miles from the rim. But as we got closer, I had less and less breath. My sinuses were clear, but the cold had reached my chest. I could catch my breath after a brief rest, but only two or three steps left me breathless again, and I was really cold. Though I hated my weakness, we quickly realized I couldn’t keep going.

Joe settled me on a bench in the rest house, a small open stone shelter. He wrapped me in an emergency blanket and called the rangers on the emergency phone. The dispatcher asked many questions as he reported on my condition, and said they’d send a paramedic ranger down to help. I felt guilty and ashamed, but mostly I felt enormous relief at the thought of being rescued. I was still cold, but getting warmer under the blanket.

 

Three-mile resthouse  image:visionbib.com

 

The ranger, a young woman, arrived in about half an hour. She unlocked the emergency stores box, wrapped me in a sleeping bag, and began heating water for ramen on the little stove. She questioned me at length, and then explained our options. She could hike back down with us to Indian Gardens and we could spend the night at the ranger station there, then hike out. Or we could all slowly continue the hike out, and evaluate my condition when we reached the next shelter, a mile and a half from the rim. If necessary, we could spend the night there. She said it might be one in the morning before we made it out, but she could definitely get us to the rim. The helicopter I had been dreaming of was not an option. I learned later that at $20,000 a trip, the helicopter is reserved for cases which have to get to the hospital fast. Even a broken leg only gets you carried out on a stretcher.

Neither Joe nor I was willing to give up the elevation we had gained after Indian Gardens and hike that mile and a half over again. So we decided to hike out with the ranger. I was miserable, but also relieved to have the ranger take charge of my pack and our pace. Joe was relieved too; it was hard to be the one responsible in what had become a dangerous situations. After more ramen soup, we started out, first the ranger, then me, then Joe. We walked at a pace so slow that I didn’t lose my breath, and we stopped to rest, sitting on rocks, about every hundred yards. The ranger kept us entertained with stories. We walked that way for hours. By the time the stars had come out I was falling asleep every time I sat down.

We reached the next shelter about 10:30. The last mile and a half of the trail is a brutal series of steep switchbacks; the ranger said I couldn’t possibly tackle them without some sleep. We would have to spend the night in the shelter. That was bad news, but I knew she was right. The really bad news was yet to come. She only had an hour left in her shift. They’re not allowed to work overtime, and so she couldn’t stay with us. It was Thanksgiving night, and though she checked with the dispatcher, there was nobody else to send down. She would set us up with emergency supplies, but we’d be on our own. Joe was furious, but he controlled his temper. I was just stunned, and horrified. I had felt so safe with the ranger there. And I was still trying to get my mind around the thought that we were going to have to spend the night outside, in temperatures below freezing.

 

Shelter for the night  image:gjhikes

She heated up more soup, and spread sleeping bags on the floor. She covered us with emergency blankets, and spread a tent over us for more warmth. She promised to get a message to Johanna that we would hike out in the morning. And then she left.

I slept hard. I woke several times to take the long walk up to the toilets. The full moon lit the looming cliffs and deep drops of the Canyon.

 

image: gubbyblog.blogspot.com

 

We set out again before sunrise. Five hours of sleep had restored me. We had a mile and a half of steep climbing ahead of us, but I had learned how slowly I needed to go, and had no doubt that I could do it. Joe went ahead to tell the girls we were okay. I found my way back to the motel, we packed up, and drove the five hours to the airport. I slept all the way. I don’t remember anything about the flight home.

For ten weeks I battled repeated respiratory and ear infections, with three courses of antibiotics. I learned that you don’t treat a cold with a ten mile climb and freezing weather. Joe remains convinced that I didn’t train sufficiently. This makes me angry, but I know I can’t change his mind. I also know he’s wrong - the only part of me that didn’t fail was my muscles. I was only a tiny bit stiff after both hikes. Nevertheless I was ashamed of my failure. I couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t write about it, couldn’t think about it much. I couldn’t look at the pictures; they brought back my fear and desperation.

It was a long time before I realized that I hadn’t failed. I had hiked seven miles down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and hiked back up ten miles. I had survived the freezing temperatures and high altitude, and persisted through nausea and a respiratory infection. It was anything but an elegant hike; it was a slog and a struggle. It’s still hard for me to focus on the details. But bit by bit I am remembering the glorious times as well as the horror. Slowly I am coming to feel proud of what I willy nilly accomplished.

Some people find comfort in their faith in a benevolent and loving God. I find comfort in the indifference of the universe. All the joys and troubles of my life don’t matter a bit in the large perspective, and I am no more significant than a dust mote in space. I felt that comfort as I looked out into the Canyon under the full moon. I was awed by its power. I know I was fortunate to be forced to spend the night in this place.

As for Amanda, our reluctant and resentful hiker? She hasn’t thanked us for the trip. But she never complained during the hike. And in the last month she has said no fewer than three times, “I still don’t like walking. But sometimes I like it if we have to walk a mile or so. I tell my friends, ‘This is nothing. I hiked ten miles out of the Grand Canyon.’ ”

 

Unless otherwise credited, photos are by Joe, taken with his cellphone.

 

 

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NEXT POST: APRIL 1

 

What’s Votes Got to Do with It?

 

Is this the longest running campaign in history, or does it only feel like it? The 2016 presidential campaign has been afflicting us since Barack Obama was reelected in 2012. It feels as long as the War on Terror. I am not a political junkie, but you can’t avoid this campaign unless you turn off the TV and radio, and only read the funnies. The Gainesville Sun’s multi-page coverage, with the heading “Campaign 2016" and a little flaggy logo, threatens to surpass hearing-aid ads for most pages devoted to a single subject.

I blame the media. Many journalists seem to have a herd mentality, and turn their attention to the same limited number of stories. Far too many of them devote their considerable intelligence to writing or talking about the daily shenanigans of would-be Leaders of the Free World. Tirelessly they analyze the cause, effect, and meaning of each dip and rise in the polls. Breathlessly they await the outcome of each primary, then eagerly move on to the next.

 

On to the next primary!   image by Paul Taggart  :potdpdn.online.com

They seem to be amazed that the decision hasn’t yet been made, despite all their attempts to predict the two parties’ candidates, proclaiming a new rising star with each poll. “Bloomberg’s efforts underscore the unsettled nature of the presidential race a little more than a week before the first round of primary voting,” says the Associated Press at the end of January. Isn’t it supposed to be unsettled? Aren’t the primaries supposed to begin to decide it and the conventions finally settle it?

 

How to reach an intelligent decision.   image:washingtonpost.com

 If I were Supreme Goddess, I would ban all fund-raising, polls, and public discussion of the presidential campaign until six months before the election. (Goddesses are not constrained by the Constitution.)

image:historyprojectformsmuslim.weebly.com

There have been times when presidential elections excited me: Fanny Lou Hamer and the Missipppi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic convention - I was seventeen and still a believer, not yet jaded. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, and his subsequent election.
 

 
image:biography.com

image: rjustin.wordpress.com

But now I am just disgusted and disheartened. If anything good is happening, if any of the candidates actually have solutions, and actually will be in a position to accomplish something when elected, I can’t see it. My feelings are some blend of a pox on everybody’s house, and it’s time for the American Century to be over. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old, or because I’ve had three viruses since Thanksgiving. But I believe my grumpiness and despair are widely shared. If I’m fed up, so are a whole lot of other people. I’ll probably vote for Sanders in March, and Clinton in November, but my heart won’t be in it.

image: dailymail.co.uk

 

 

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NEXT POST: MARCH 4

 

 

Christmas Garden 2015

Our Christmas this year involved lots of drama and three of us sick, including the dog. You don’t wanna know. But Christmas Day was sweet and peaceful, just Joe, Amanda and me. Herbed mushrooms, scrambled eggs, a pecan streusel coffee cake, few presents, and an interminable game of Uno. 83 degrees and sunny in the garden. Here's some beauty from that day.

 

 

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

 

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NEXT POST: FEBRUARY 5

 

MOOC

 

Last spring I discovered MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), when my friend Sandra posted a notice on Facebook of a Stanford course, Ten Pre-Modern Poems by Women. My sister Luli and I both signed up.

The professor, Eavan Boland, is an Irish poet and professor of humanities and creative writing at Stanford.click  She was aided and abetted by young poets in the creative writing program. After Boland talked a bit about the poet and her time, and described the poem, we read it and gave our first impressions. An illustrated lecture went more deeply into the poet’s life and times, and analyzed the poem. A contemporary poet commented on the poem, and then we had homework assignment. Faculty and students responded to each other in the discussion forum.

Some of the poems - Browning’s “How do I love thee?” and Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest” were very familiar. I’d seen them so often that the words had lost their meaning. But doing the homework, and reading the faculty and students’ remarks, I saw them fresh.

"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach"  Image: The Grand Canyon. National Park Service

 

"When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head..." image: Flickriver.com

I’d never heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, but I loved her poem, “Washing Day,” a picture of the weekly disruption in an 18th century English middle class family when the washer woman comes to do the laundry. It’s full of vivid scenes and pictures: the clotheslines break, the dog knocks over the drying rack. a little boy loses his shoe in the mud. We see the whole population of the household: the wife, husband, maids, children, grandmother, visitors. There are enough characters and action in Washing Day to make an amusing play, or if you are novelistically inclined there are plenty of scenes to get you started.

Laundry Day c.1765. Image: British Museum

 

For each week and poem there was a choice of three homework assignments, always including the opportunity to write a poem of your own. For me this was the easy way out. Rhyme and meter are in my blood - doggerel runs in my family. I can write a bad sonnet with the best (or worst) of them, but I soon found I focused more on the poem under discussion if I wrote one of the essays instead.

Rosetti’s poem came alive for me again when I went to YouTube and heard it set to music. I listened to three versions with different melodies and performers. The different songs transformed the poem into something new, and led me to examine the original more closely. click

I was enjoying this course so much that I signed up for another one, Harvard’s Poetry in America: the Civil War and its Aftermath. It had a great deal more material than the Stanford course, all of it tempting. It included a baritone singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot under a slide show of engravings and photos, a discussion of The Gettysburg Address, a Confederate nurse’s diary, and John McCain reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee, which he learned in Vietnam when the prisoner in the next cell tapped it out in code. I soon realized that if I added that course while continuing the Women Poets course I would be a full-time student. I don’t have time for that, so I stopped after a couple of weeks.

 

Union nurses in the Civil War. Image:civilwarsaga.com

 

I finished Ten Pre-Modern poems in June, and early in September I started taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from the University of Pennsylvania. Each poem was accompanied by a video discussion between the exceptionally good professor and his grad students, conducting close readings of all the poems - word by word and line by line, not neglecting punctuation and line breaks. There was a lot of additional material available, as well as very intelligent discussion on the forums. This was the best and most challenging of the three courses. I stuck with it for eight weeks, through the Beats, but with my Voices Rising concert and a trip to the Grand Canyon looming, and from sheer intellectual exhaustion, I stopped.

UPenn Prof. Al Filreis and grad student Anna Strong.. I loved watching these video discussions partly because Al reminded me so powerfully of my late friend Jim Hardy, down to his voice and the twinkle in his eye.

All the courses have participant discussion forums, and participants come from all over the world. I love hearing furriners talk about us, because it reminds me once again how very parochial we are. People from Peru or Pakistan aren’t necessarily affected by the American orthodoxy-of-the-week. In the Harvard course, several recommended Gone with the Wind as an excellent portrayal of the horrors of the Civil War.

 

image: ew.com

Most forum posts drew no response - I suppose we’re more interested in our own thoughts than in anyone else’s. In the Civil War poetry course, the longest thread by far was started by someone who asked people to share their creative work. The poetry poured in. None of it had anything to do with the Civil War.

Like any college student, I like to gripe. Judging by the professors in these courses, the current fashion in academia, perhaps stolen from literary fiction, is to discuss everything in the present tense. I hear journalists on NPR do this too.

I suppose somebody has decided that it brings history to life, but it annoys the hell out of me. Aside from impoverishing the language, it flattens our sense of history, and creates a false intimacy, a pretense that barriers of different world-views and culture don’t exist or don’t matter. It leads directly to our presuming to judge the outrages of other eras as though we sensitive souls of the 21st century occupy some moral high ground. I’m convinced that wickedness and cruelty, intolerance and exploitation, selfishness and greed continue in humankind at pretty much the same level through the ages. Only the victims and methods change.

 

image: thinglink.com

image: linkedin.com

 

The discussion in the women poets course frequently raised issues of class, race and gender. While I’ve been obsessed with these most of my life, I found myself impatient with what seemed to be requisite and rote comments. I finally wrote a waspish response in my essay about “Washing-Day,” which I generously share with you:

Yes, they hired laundresses, who doubtless had rough lives. Maids worked very hard and had little power or independence. The poet could have written about The Washer Woman, but on this occasion she chose to write about what it was like in the household on wash day. I see no need for 21st century readers to tut-tut about the evils of other historical periods - we have plenty of our own. If I read a contemporary poem about a young girl who is a gifted gymnast, I don’t feel impelled to discuss the sweatshops in which the beads were sewn onto her costume, unless the poet is implicitly leading me there.

 

Gabby Douglas. Image:usa.com

 

Aside from my quibbles with substance, I found the technology cumbersome. It took four tries to create a damn password for the Stanford course - with each try, they came up with a new rule: must have numbers, can’t use symbols, must be gluten-free.

  image:passwordmeter.com

                                                                                                                            
All my passwords are gluten free. image:fixyourdigestion.com   

 The Harvard course was worse. It ate my three paragraphs of delicious analysis TWICE. It buried all kinds of critical information several layers down in various links: there were eleven pages of FAQ, and then a separate FAQ thread in the discussion section. It took a lot of digging to discover that the course was designed for Chrome, and Firefox users (me) were particularly likely to have problems.

I recommended the course to Luli, but suggested she just read and view the materials rather than try to respond. She claims she once took a hammer to a recalcitrant computer, and the obstacles in this course were so frustrating that I was afraid she would blow up her whole office.

If I had a hammer...  image:hongkiat.com

 

The Modern Poetry course, which Luli was very engaged with, refused to recognize her after a couple of weeks, and though she and I spent hours on the phone trying to fix the problem, she finally had to give up.

It was their loss. Luli’s participation in the Women Poets course had enriched it for me and many others. Thanks to a wild and crazy adolescence, she barely finished high school and never went to college. She’s as widely read and knowledgeable as anyone I know except our sister-in-law Doris, but she hangs out with a number of highly educated writers and librarians, and she thought it would be cool to have a certificate saying she completed a course at Stanford.

 

Luli got a certificate. Image:stolinsky.com

 

We enjoyed the course together by phone and email. Luli in academia is a little like Alice in Wonderland - she sees things for what they are, rather than accepting the strange transformations of truth that blossom in the groves of academe. For example, here was her response to my discussion of the You Tube performances of Rosetti’s poem:

cor blooming blimey! what a load! i listened to the ones you mention, plus a passel of others...not all the way through any of 'em, because i thought them all total rubbish. as maudlin as a bunch of drunks. which the poem isn't. and so many overblown orchestral arrangements for this simple, tongue in cheek song. my god. but, i liked your essay.

A bunch of drunks. image:crujonessociety.com

 

For all my carping, I think MOOCs are great. However, be warned. Though all of the courses emphasize that you can participate as much or as little as you want, it’s hard to resist doing more than you have time for. It’s like  spreading a buffet in front of a hungry person. The Ten Pre-Modern Poems course is the least demanding (after all, it’s only ten poems) and its approach, including the assignments, the least rigorous. But I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it didn’t eat up my life. The Civil War poetry course was rich with material, and I will probably return to it. Though I didn’t stick with it long, my impression is that their poetry analysis is more historical than literary. The Modern Poetry course felt like a graduate seminar in poetry - very intense, and very focused on the poetry. I gained new appreciation for Dickinson, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Ginsberg, and met others I’d never heard of. I do intend to go back to it, though I’m a little daunted by the time required to do it well, and I may tire of the close reading approach.

Here's a link to find MOOCs. click. Courses in subjects like engineering, computer science, and business far outnumber the arts and humanities. But their search engine is good, and if you’re so inclined you should be able to find the courses I’ve mentioned, as well as other humanities courses.

In the quest for eternal life and vigor, boomers are advised to keep exercising their brains along with their bodies. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me, though vigor sounds nice, but I love reading poetry, and learning new stuff is fun.

.

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NEXT POST: JANUARY 8

Lavender and Old Ladies

   


Amanda came into my office this morning in a rare friendly mood and said,
    “Yes! Now this place smells like old ladies.”
She was standing right by Trisket’s bed, which is under the desk, so I wondered.

    “You sure it doesn’t just smell like Trisket?”
    “If I leaned over and smelled her bed it probably would. But no, this is old lady smell.”
    “What do old ladies smell like?”    
    “Cinnamon and old libraries.”
That was a relief. She might have said something about pee. I pointed out the musty books that produce the old library smell, then directed her to the dried lavender and roses hanging on the closet door.

    “Take a whiff of that.”
    “That’s it! That’s the old lady smell!”
    “Oh I’m so glad. People always say old ladies smell like lavender”.
    “You like that?”
    “Yes. I love being an old lady. And I love that smell."
    “You’re weird, Grandma.”

I’ve always loved smells - sweet, floral, sour, pungent, funky. Even nasty smells intrigue me, though I draw the line at those that make me gag. About ten percent of women lose the sense of smell as they grow old - this is known as anosmia. Parosmia- when fragrant smells turn foul - is worse. I hope I never suffer either one.

My garden is full of fragrant plants - citrus, roses, anise, tea olive and many more. The most successful is my HUGE lavender bush. It keeps going through frosty winters and baking-hot summers. I’ve never understood why it’s so happy in my yard. It reminds me of rosemary, but numerous rosemary plants have shriveled in the same bed. (I decide whether plants are similar according to whether they remind me of each other. I am not a skilled horticulturalist.) This year, for the first time ever, it has produced a single little flower. It also has a resident spider.

I love this plant. I tear off branches and carry them around with me for happy smelling. I used to put sprigs in all my drawers and in the linen closet and under the bottom sheet on our bed, until Joe told me he doesn’t like the smell of lavender. So now  I make big bunches of lavender to give to women in stressful situations, such as my friend April when she was pregnant and surrounded by babies. I hang bunches out on the atrium to dry, and then crumble them into ziplock bags to give away.

Every room in our house has a different smell, some pleasant, some not so. When I was little, I liked the musty smell of my grandmother's New York apartment. I cherish the title “old.” click  I’m happy that my room - my retreat and my refuge, filled with photos and paintings of women - smells like an old lady.

 

Paintings by Arupa Freeman click

My mother at twenty

 

Collage by me (images by many, including Esther Garcia Eder click)

 

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NEXT POST: December 11 (I hope - I got very sick on a family vacation and am recovering.)

Pro-Abortion

 

I have always been pro-choice and pro-abortion. Having a baby transforms a woman’s life, and abortion is often the best solution to an unwanted pregnancy. I have participated in a few demonstrations about abortion rights.  

I am ambivalent about the value of demonstrations. But the latest outrageous attacks on Planned Parenthood have really pissed me off, and when I see a notice on Facebook that the anti-abortionists are picketing our local affiliate (which doesn’t provide abortions), I decide to join the counter-protest.

 

Planned Parenthood in Gainesville

 

The event is at 9am on a Saturday in August. I arrive at 8:50 and nobody’s there. ‘Shit,’ I think. ‘What if the Anti’s show up and I’m the only Pro? I gotta have a sign.’ I had thought Someone Else, as in ‘let someone else do it,’ would bring signs.

I park at Office Depot, across the street from Planned Parenthood, to buy supplies. Three SUV’s pull in, two with out-of-state license plates. I read the bumper stickers: They’re all about Jesus. Probably not my allies.

In the store I buy a giant foam board and a pack of six colored Sharpies on sale for three bucks. I’ll move my car to a shady spot and make my sign. Oh. The foam board doesn’t fit in my car. I lay it on the sidewalk in the blazing sun and open the Sharpies. They’re super-fine, and barely make a mark. I go back into Office Depot to exchange them for jumbos. Can’t leave the foam board outside where the Anti’s might steal it. (I don’t think they’re all as righteous as their signs and prayers imply). I take it inside with me and ask the clerk to keep an eye on it.                    

I need to write something brief, visible, and to the point. Support Planned Parenthood?  I Support Choice? Both too fuzzy. Support Abortion Rights. That’s what I write, in black block letters . Fill them in with black zigzags, crossed over with red zigzags. I’m pleased - it’s very visible, if a little crooked.

I cross Tenth Avenue, holding the sign so drivers can see.  I cringe a little at expressing myself publicly. What if somebody doesn’t like me? I lift the sign higher and feel good, if self-conscious. As I cross Thirteenth Street I see about twenty-five people. I recognize some from Occupy Gainesville, and see that old chestnut, the coat hanger sign. I’m greatly relieved - I won’t be just one crazy old lady in muumuu, big hat, and sunglasses. A little farther down the sidewalk are four or five Anti’s with signs. Oh boy, we outnumber them.

image:rackjite.com

It doesn’t last. Within half an hour, a few more Pro’s have arrived, and maybe sixty Anti’s. Most of the Anti’s line up across the street, in the shade, while two small groups split off and stand on either side of us in the merciless sun.

The day is a cloudless ninety degrees. I’m perfectly attired in my big straw hat and breezy muumuu with no underwear, and I have a water bottle full of minted iced tea. But sweat runs down my face and all down my torso.

 

ready for action

 

I see a lot of familiar faces. Sharon, who used to be head of Planned Parenthood.  She was a leader in Voices for Choice in 1988, when Gov. Martinez responded to the Supreme Court’s Webster decision by proposing many restrictions on abortion, and women around the state organized to fight him off.  Shirley, who’s now working to save Payne’s Prairie from an even loonier governor. Linda, who put out the call on Facebook for the demonstration. She was a volunteer at the domestic violence shelter when I was president of the board, and stood in angry solidarity with staff against the board when we hired a new director in a process they felt excluded them. Joe, who founded the Civic Media Center, hub of radical and progressive action in Gainesville. And wonderful Zot, tireless advocate for the homeless, currently working with the residents of Dignity Village. It feels good to see them all, to feel connected to my 35-year history in Gainesville, to know we’ve all kept on keeping on.

And it feels good to see a lot of young women with hand-made signs like mine - one says “My Choice and No Regrets.” She hadn’t heard about the demonstrations, but tells me that when she drove past she had to make a sign and join in.

 

image: Shirley Lasseter

Oh my, the signs. Many are too tiny or cluttered to read. On their side we have “Aborted 2nd Trimester embryo” with a large bright red photo of an embryo. On our side we have a very neatly lettered sign that says, “Every ____________ deserves health care.” In the space is an odd pink object, like a child’s stuffed animal. I can't tell if it's a pig or some kind of Pokemon character.  Across the street is a well-lettered sign, easy to read: “Men Regret Lost Fatherhood.” I can't help it, all I can think is ‘Tough shit.’

 

It's a uterus. Image: Helen Strain

 

It all takes me back, though I’ve only been an occasional demonstrator. On both sides you have your Aggressive Protesters, who yell at each other. “Baby-killer.” “Religious fascist.” They like to get up close in each others' faces and make all sorts of accusations.

 

image: bostonglobe.com

I’ve never liked the hateful ones. I can’t stand self-righteous closed minds. I’m too deeply imbued with “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” from my mother. And I’m a great believer in ‘You catch more flies with honey...’

image: pitara.com

Finally, I don’t think any of us can say or do anything that will change each others’ minds. By definition, protesters are among the more opinionated people about any particular cause. In fact, I have to wonder why we do it. For me, this time I was just fed up, so I wanted to speak up. And perhaps waving signs at passing drivers will call attention to the issue, and remind them that, over fifty years after Roe v Wade, it still matters.

One woman comes along our line holding a truly beautiful 3-month-old baby - one of those plump, bald, round-headed ones. She looks at each of our signs and asks if she may give us a hug.  At first I think she's pro-choice, but soon realize she's an Anti. I give her a hug anyway, and whisper, “I don’t want to interfere, but PLEASE put something on that baby’s head. The sun is brutal.” She thanks me and goes on down the line, hugging whoever is willing. Then she puts the baby in its stroller, covers it with a cloth, and leaves it in the sun. She sets up a folding chair for herself and begins saying Hail Mary’s and other prayers to the Virgin.

 

Get that baby out of the sun! image:havebabywilltravel.com

Meanwhile I, and several others, are becoming increasingly distressed about the baby in the stroller. “Please put the stroller in the shade,” say Polite Protesters. “That’s child abuse.” “You don’t give a shit about babies.” “I raised three children and I’d never do that.” “Fuck Jesus Christ,” says Aggressive Protester.

Finally someone calls the police to report the baking baby situation. When the police car arrives, the mother promptly pulls out her breast and begins nursing, leading Aggressive Protestor to say, “Oh right, stick in the nipple when the cops come.”

image: coolmompicks.com

 The police officer walks along the lines on both sides of the street and
ensures that nobody's blocking the sidewalk or trespassing on property, and then approaches the mother. He speaks to her for awhile, and then leaves, suggesting that she put the stroller in the shade. As he passes me I hear him say into his radio, “The baby is breathing, its heart rate is normal and it shows no signs of distress.” The mother switches from praying to singing, in a very pretty voice, though I can't make out the song.

Sharon says they want a couple of “point people” to talk to TV 20 when they arrive. They have Erica, from Wild Iris Books. Will I do it too? Of course I will - the old warhorse smells the cannon smoke and is chomping at the bit. Or something like that. As we wait, I think of what I want to say.

 

image: benjaminhale.tumblr

We had planned to leave at eleven, but we wait in the sun till 11:40. Then the organizers (a loose term) say they don't think TV 20 is coming, and Joe of the Civic Media Center says it's just as well because it would publicize their big crowd, and we gratefully gather our stuff and leave. I'm pleased to see the Anti’s trooping into the Office Depot parking lot with their signs too.

Here’s what I planned to say: "The anti-choice people have been relentless and very well-organized, and statute by statute, case by case, have eroded our right to abortion, and also succeeded in making people think abortion is shameful. I’m 68, and I had an abortion in my early thirties, and again in my early forties. Both were complicated decisions, which no one else could have or should have made for me, and I’ve never regretted either one."

The constitutional right to privacy is the legal underpinning of abortion rights. But thanks to years of effort and propaganda by anti-abortion forces, privacy has become shame.

Katha Pollitt calls for everyone who has had an abortion, or participated in an abortion as a father or friend, to tell their story. “...[T]oo many pro-choice people are way too quiet...Nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by the time she reaches menopause. Why don’t we hear more from them?...It’s not that they think they did something wrong: A recent study ...finds that more than 95 percent of women felt the abortion was the right decision, both immediately after the procedure and three years later. They’ve been shamed into silence by stigma.” (NY Times, August 5,2015)

It’s been fun to write a light-hearted story, complete with illustrations, about all us earnest people on both sides of the street. But I don’t take this issue lightly. I was 41, and deeply involved with Voices for Choice in the fight against the Webster decision. I was driving to Tallahassee for a meeting, when I suddenly realized, in the way you do, that all the tiny signs -  sleepiness, a missed period, a rash - meant I was pregnant. In the next couple of weeks I weighed many factors, including a boyfriend who didn’t want a child. It brought home to me the absurdity, the outrageousness, of a bunch of legislators or anyone else presuming to interfere in my choice of whether to have a baby. This is truly a decision that belongs to the pregnant woman, and whomever she chooses to involve.

I don’t think we need to tell our full stories. Why a woman has an abortion is entirely her business. She doesn't have to justify it to anyone. But maybe if everyone who has had an abortion acknowledged it openly the stigma would fade. Your mother, your sister, your Catholic girlfriend, your fundamentalist boss - any one of them is likely to have had an abortion. I’m not brave enough to go on Facebook with it; I’m afraid I’d drown in ugliness. But at least I will say so here.

__________________

To read a very moving, anti-abortion and pro-choice essay by a wonderful writer, click here. click

 

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NEXT POST: NOVEMBER 6

Deadline

 

 

As I write this post, my self-imposed deadline looms three days away: September 11, a date fraught and ominous.  I could try writing about All That, but instead I wanted to think about deadlines.

I began this blog four years ago, posting every week. So afraid was I that I would miss a deadline that I wrote five posts in advance, to have a cushion, before I went online. I was glad I did. Mastering Typepad, the blog host, took a couple of weeks, with many inquiries to customer service.

 

I have always given myself a deadline and announced it at the end of each post. Deadlines make you accountable to someone else. Without one, it’s hard to persist. My novel, for instance, has no one waiting for it. The sheer momentum of the story, the eagerness to see what happens next, the delight in seeing what I’ve written the day before - when these fail me, there’s nothing left but discipline and desire, and sometimes both disappear.

This summer all the air went out of my balloon, and for the first time I missed my blog deadline. I offered myself both reasons and excuses. 

 

image:businessinsider.com

First, I went off to my fiftieth high school reunion. The weekend was rich with material. Between meals and parades and long conversations, the blog easily wrote itself. Then I lost my notebook on the trip home.

I could have recreated the piece, but upon reflection, I decided my thoughts were too snarky. This was an elite boys’ school that in 1974 had swallowed up Abbot Academy, the girls’ boarding school I attended and loved.

 

Draper Hall, Abbot Academy

On the first night of the reunion I was taken unexpectedly by white-hot rage, but the next morning, I calmed down and realized the 68-year-old men in their tie-dyed reunion t-shirts were not to blame for the loss of my alma mater.*

 

image: Tom Hafkenschiel

My reluctance to offend trumped my need for self-expression. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, my mother told me, seriously hampering my development as a writer.

Second, two of my friends died this summer. Neither death was unexpected, but still...

 

image: Time.com

 

And finally, minor injuries and illnesses, combined with a complicated family trip, provided flimsy but effective excuses for procrastination.

Once our travels were over, I made several false starts, but none of the ideas caught fire, and I let them fizzle out. In the end, a month after the missed deadline, I posted the following apology: ‘To anyone who breathlessly awaits my monthly promised posts - I'm sorry.... I will be back by the end of August.’ The minute I wrote this, I felt confident again. It was a great relief. I was still a writer; I would be back. I immediately started writing, and posted my next piece on August 14.

I checked Thesaurus.com for a synonym for deadline, to avoid the tedious repetition of the word,and found exactly nothing. The closest they came was “time limit,” which is not the same thing, and lacks intensity. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that the word, first used in 1920, may have derived from the practice of Captain Henry Wirz, the notorious Civil War prison commander of Andersonville, who ordered guards to shoot any prisoner who crossed an imaginary line twenty feet or so inside the stockade.

 

Andersonville prison  image:georgiaencyclopedia.org

No one shoots a writer who misses a deadline. Instead she enters a strange state of listlessness. There’s no reason to start a piece on any particular day, and the days keep going by, filled with brooding and laundry. I’ve tried the ‘Write every day, regardless’ approach, and it works, but I keep letting go of it.

 

The Brooding Girl   image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot.org

FILLING MY DAYS

A Labor Day weekend plagued by adolescent angst has me in low spirits, and even with only three days to deadline I fiddled around on Facebook and played three games of Free Cell before beginning to write. As you can tell, I also zipped back to the internet, avoiding writing by consulting dictionary and thesaurus, but at least that provided some material, and I didn’t linger.

 

Goddamn Free Cell

I can’t say I am happy when I am writing, but I am certainly happiest when I have written. Writing makes me happy, and deadlines make me write.

 

*Alma mater: I wrote these words and thought, Oh! It means mother of my soul - how poetic, how true. But it doesn’t. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it means bountiful mother. Mrs. De, our fierce and peculiar Latin teacher at Abbot, would be ashamed of me.

 

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Next post: October 9

Unsolicited Advice*

    I’ve been retired for 13 years. But I still have days when, sitting reading the paper, I think “Yeehaw and hallelujah, I don’t have to go to the office.” This is what a more sophisticated writer might call a frisson.

 

 
Yeehaw and hallelujah! image:chroniclelive.co.uk

 

    With Amanda at camp, Joe and I took a road trip - two days with my sister in Chapel Hill click, two with Ed and Lisa in the Smoky Mountains, and two with Sue and Max in Atlanta. Ed has been retired since June, Sue has been retired six months, Max has been retired several years. So the trip gave me a chance to, among other things, ponder the puzzle of retirement.

 

Joe in the Smokies -pondering retirement?

 

Many people can’t afford to retire. Others think they can only retire if they have enough to continue living in the style to which they have become accustomed, or by which they have been trapped.

 

Trapped?   image:dailymail.co.uk

Free?     image:hgtv.com

 

Some people love their work and never want to retire; some dream of retirement all their working life. Often they have a list of all the things they want to do when they retire. My list was short. I wanted to write, garden, learn to play the piano, and get a dog. Six weeks after I retired I developed tendonitis, and couldn’t play the piano, garden, or write. I got the dog click. When the tendonitis was gone, I returned to writing and gardening and gave up on the piano.

 

Gathering dust   image:sweetlilmzmia.co

 

Generally writers don’t retire, though they may write less, or change their genre. In very old age, Donald Hall switched from poetry to prose click. Alice Munro keeps announcing her retirement, and then comes out with more stories. She claimed she couldn’t write fiction anymore because of her failing memory, but several years later she had another brilliant book.

 

Munro the Magnificent    image:therumpus.net

 

In the first few months after retirement, people fritter away the time. All our working lives we’ve dreamed of free time, and at first it’s every bit as blissful as our dreams. A friend sat on the couch each day and watched the birds in her back yard. I read old notebooks and letters.

 

image:birdorable.com

image:dreamstime.com

New retirees putter. Many begin with a long-postponed house project. I cleared out my bookcases.

Maybe I need to do it again

 

But thirty years of remunerated work, of dancing to someone else’s tune, leave their mark on the soul. With no schedule and lots of idle time, retirement can begin to feel empty rather than free. We lie on the couch, eating and feeling worthless.click click

Then we start making lists and plans for tasks and travel. We start, at least, an exercise program. We wonder where we might put our talents to use. For me, retirement meant giving up committees. No more collaboration and compromise. From now on, my work would be my own, no need for consultation or permission. I dusted off my No Bird to take care of all the requests that came in when people realized I had retired click. I was already part of the HOME Van, but I loved most of that work. It is an anarchic organization, and I never had to attend a staff meeting.  

image:powerpointforpreachers.blogspot.com

 

For a few years my retirement was what I had planned. Lots of writing, some travel, playing with friends, exercise programs that I often complied with. But as we all know, when people plan, the gods laugh. They may send illness, or death of a loved one. In my case, the goddess laughed and I found myself raising a child.

 

Hestia the hearth goddess laughed at me. image:theoi.com

 

So Fortune and I filled up my time. I had a mini-retirement when the HOME Van stopped doing drive-outs click. I was bereft, and wondered how I could find another work as wonderful as that. But I was surprised by how much time I gained - I realized I had been putting in at least a full day a week. So I puttered again, and postponed looking for other work, and then Arupa called and asked if I’d help with the food pantry one day a week. That is great fun - meeting people in small numbers and visiting with Arupa in between customers. And no eggs to boil or soup-makers to coordinate.

 

 

 

 After long experience with retirement, and spells of thinking about it all, I offer the following advice to people entering retirement: Allow yourself to flounder for a while, and relish the emptiness. When you’re ready to fill it, minimize the gottas and oughtas, increase the wannas, and enjoy good health and loved ones as long as they remain.

 

*"Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life." - Leah Jackson

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NEXT POST:  SEPTEMBER 11

My absence

To anyone who breathlessly awaits my monthly promised posts - I'm sorry. This is the first time in almost four years that I've been unable to meet my self-imposed deadline. I will be back by the end of August. Minor illnesses, deaths, travel, and confusion have prevented me from writing.

Retreat!!

My friend Sandra, mentrix in all things writerly, is a great proponent of writing retreats. She spent six weeks at Yaddo, and has just started a month at Studios of Key West, where she has solitary time and space to dig deep and bring forth wonderful work. click  These are both coveted creative retreats, complete with fellowships that provide  rent and more. But when Sandra doesn’t have a fellowship, she sometimes hauls herself off alone to a state park or a Cedar Key motel to burrow into her work.

 

   
KISSIMMEE STATE PRAIRIE, A PARK WHERE SANDRA CAVORTS WITH THE MUSE

 

I have always thought these self-made retreats were a wonderful idea, but until recently I didn’t feel free to abandon Joe for a week on his own with Amanda. Now that she is fairly self-regulating and insists she has no need of us except as chauffeurs and food sources, I have gained a lot of freedom. But I still had to figure out where to go.

DOCK AT CEDAR KEY

                                   
Cedar Key doesn’t appeal to me for more than a day - surely somewhere there is shade in Cedar Key, but I’ve never seen it. My friend Sue has a cabin at Murder Creek in the Oconee National Forest in Georgia, but it’s a six-hour drive, and maybe a little too isolated. click The prospect of being completely alone with my thoughts and the blank page, nothing but woods around me,  was daunting.

Then another friend, Mary Anne, told me of the Cross Creek Lodge, across from the Yearling Restaurant, and a mile up the road from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings homestead, where Mary Anne is a docent. It’s a tiny motel right on Cross Creek, owned for several generations by the Palmeter family, and mostly used by bass fishermen. The price was $65 a night. And when I called to reserve a room, Gary Palmeter told me that Harry Crews used to come there to write. I would be surrounded by writer ghosts.

 

 

When my dream publishing house rejected my first novel last fall, the publisher generously gave me a long and insightful critique. Since my second novel is currently on submission, and my fourth novel, my work in progress for the last eight years, was comatose, I decided to take novel #1 to Cross Creek to begin my revisions.

In the weeks before my retreat I was very excited and very scared. Getting away from daily life and troubles is always appealing. The lodge had no Wifi and very limited TV, excellent conditions for creativity. But what if I holed up in Cross Creek and didn’t do anything but watch TV and eat cookies? What if I got scared of the solitude and spent my days driving the back roads, goofing around in the antique stores in Micanopy? What if my four days weren’t PRODUCTIVE? click  I had the solid reassurance of an already thoroughly polished  manuscript, and useful ideas for revisions. But my doubts were almost as high as my hopes.      

 

I made my packing list. Clothes: mostly muumuus. Gear: notebook, laptop, and flash drive. Entertainment: Jane Gardam on my Kindle, sheet music and voice warm-ups, and a hat in progress in my crochet bag. Food: Cheeses, bread, salad greens, salad dressing, tomatoes and fruit. A half a bottle of single malt in memory of my brother Dickie. click

I was elated as I drove the green and sunny road to Cross Creek. The Lodge was just over the bridge. There were eight cinder block motel units attached to a block house, and several mobile homes around the property where family members live. I was greeted by one large black dog, very friendly, and one tiny dog, very fierce. I knocked on the Palmeter’s door, and was welcomed warmly by Glory and Randy, who gave me the key, and told me to knock anytime if I needed anything.

The room was simple: a bed, small kitchen table, a kitchen sink, microwave and mini-fridge, a few dishes, salt, pepper, condiments, tea and coffee, a rocking chair and TV, a bathroom with a shower. I unpacked all my things and made the room my home.

I’m an early-morning writer, so my only ambition for the first day was to read over the publisher’s critique and let it percolate overnight. I went for an hour’s walk, and then took a glass of single malt out to the concrete deck overlooking the Creek. I sat in a grimy Adirondack chair sipping my whiskey, thinking of Dickie, who would have blessed this enterprise, and of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Harry Crews, both of them more experienced writers (and drinkers) than I. 

     
RAWLINGS                                                           CREWS

It was late afternoon and I faced west, the sun just above the trees, the mosquitoes not yet active. Cypress trees and cypress knees, a squat palm tree with its spiky trunk. Butterflies, dragonflies, a lizard threatening me with his bulging red neck.  Four men in two small boats with trolling motors. They smiled and waved; I lifted my glass. The creek swelled and rolled in the wake, and then was still, dark tannic water mirroring the leaning cypress.  Peepers and croakers and birds sang for sunset. I heard the splash of mullet jumping, but always looked too late to see anything but the spreading rings in the water.  

 

CROSS CREEK - PAINTING BY KATE BARNES

I ate my supper in front of The News Hour, read for awhile, and went to sleep early. I always sleep long and soundly when I’m away from home, so I didn’t wake till 6 on Thursday. I tried drinking my coffee on the deck, but it was mosquito prime time, and I fled. I settled down at the kitchen table and worked a solid five hours, going through the manuscript and making a to do list, ideas hatching and flying around.

It was about the same each of the three days - work, lunch, a long walk, a nap, dinner, some reading, some crocheting, early to bed. One night I had dinner at the Yearling, where the best food is fried. I ate in the bar, reading some Jane Gardam, thinking about not much, listening to the middle-aged local crowd tease and gossip. Friday I went into Gainesville for my singing lesson, bought bandaids and bug spray, and picked up a pulled pork dinner at Pearl’s in Micanopy, which sufficed for Friday dinner and Saturday lunch. Saturday night I celebrated with a bloody Mary and fried green tomatoes at The Yearling.         

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES (AND GATOR TAIL)

At home I do well to work for two hours straight. I wrote novels #1 and #2 in forty-five minute bits each morning. Now I had worked five steady hours for three days, and put in three hours before I checked out Sunday morning. And the magic of retreat continued - I finished all the revising and new writing in about two weeks at home. The new draft is resting until I have sufficiently forgotten it to read it fresh. Meanwhile...

I puttered around with blog work and some other things. Then my friend Nancy told me about a cabin on Lake Swan, outside Melrose, that was only $39 a night. Novel #4, which has three 100-page beginnings going in three different directions, was calling. I love this novel, connected as it is to my mother, but it’s been a real challenge. So five weeks after I returned from Cross Creek I was off to Lake Swan.

This retreat was much like the previous one. I had a larger room with big ceiling fans, a DVD player instead of a TV. There was a lovely shallow lake to swim in after I finished work. I had a bottle of icy cold, really bad white wine instead of the single malt, and I could sit with a glass and watch the sunset over the lake. Melrose was two miles away. I had gloppy Italian food at Betty’s Pizza, and excellent meatloaf with mashed potatoes at the Melrose Café. The art galleries were closed till the weekend, but I went into a junk shop and bought two fifty cent books. 

 

SUNSET AT LAKE SWAN

 

Despite the success of my first retreat, I was even more scared this time. It’s one thing  to revise an existing manuscript, with all sorts of material ready to inspire you. It’s another to stare into the void, to write from nothing. But I knew which version of the fourth novel I was going to go with, and I had a file with one-sentence sketches for the next few chapters. So I dove in.

I wrote four or five hours each of the next three days and by the time I was done had written almost forty pages. This time I was absolutely exhausted; new creation really takes it out of you. But again the momentum continued when I returned home - I’ve written almost every day, sixteen pages in two weeks. As soon as I finish this blog post, I’ll be back at it.

In these two retreats I began to practice the persistence I’ve tried to master for many years: moving on through the dead spots, writing even as my thoughts seem to spin and go nowhere. I have high hopes for finishing the fourth novel. It’s very exciting, because I have only the dimmest ideas of what I will see along the road to the end. There are few states more miserable than living with a dead novel, few more exhilarating than working on one that has come alive again.

 

WHAT'S UP THE ROAD?

I am very lucky to have Joe, who enthusiastically supports my writing, and is happy to handle the home front while I run away. When I returned from Lake Swan he said, “You might want to do this twice a year.” I haven’t told him yet that I’m thinking of every three months.

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NEXT POST: JULY 3

 

 

 

Dabbling with the Muse

 

Neophilia. The word was coined by my sister Luli. With two more letters it could be something rather ghastly, but as it stands it simply means loving novelty.

Every few years I discover a new creative passion. I pursue it with fervor, but never develop any great skill. I love learning something new, and I love producing a physical object. My work, whether lawyer or teacher or mother, always consisted primarily of ideas and people.

I like to create something concrete (or butter)   source:iowastatefair.org

It began with crochet. When I was 28, my friend Saralu and I drove from Jacksonville to Lakeland for a cram course before the two-day nightmare that was the Florida bar exam. We had packed frozen soups,stews, and a crockpot, cheese and fruit, cookies and wine.

The cram course consisted of long lectures and written summaries of the entire body of common and Florida law, each subject - torts, contracts, trusts and estates, etc, crammed in a tiny font on both sides of  laminated pages. They were dense as a Claxton fruit cake, though less digestible. Every evening we returned to our motel room with heads buzzing - fee simple with remainder, statute of frauds, the mailbox rule, equitable estoppel.

After supper we poured wine, opened the cookies and sat on our beds, diligently memorizing the incomprehensible for about fifteen minutes.Then Sara unpacked her yarn and taught me to crochet.  In three nights I had made half a shawl. In the next few months I had made shawls for my friend Sue, my sister Luli, and both my sisters-in law. That took care of Christmas. 

 

For several years I entertained myself with yarn. I made a sweater for my son in brown, black and rust. He was five, young enough that he didn’t mind wearing it. I made a couple of lace shawls in a fan pattern. I invented my own granny square, a sunburst in brown, beige and yellow, and made an afghan for my boyfriend. Unfortunately I joined colors by simply weaving them in, as recommended by the crochet book, rather than knotting them. In a few years, the whole huge thing was beginning to unravel. Then I tried my hand at knitting. I bought expensive wool in lavender, pale pink, and deep cherry red, and made the front and back of a gorgeous sweater. Alas, I lost interest before I got to the sleeves, and I never finished it.

I took drawing classes. I learned to stare and stare, looking for lines and shapes and shifting shades of color. I drew a pair of shoes, a paper bag, and my masterpiece, a pair of hands holding a baby’s tiny feet, drawn from a photograph. I spent hours on Sunday afternoons, totally absorbed, leaning over the table, focusing so intently the sweat rolled down my face. I did lightning sketches at a Saturday morning drawing group, where $5 bought a couple of hours with a model. I carried a small sketchbook everywhere. I drew people in airports and animals in Africa. I realized that drawing from photos was easiest - the image already reduced to two dimensions - so I drew many earnest talking heads on McNeil-Lehrer.
 
I enjoyed the sketches, but it took hours to draw a full picture. I searched my craft closet while I wrote this post, and found the big brown portfolio from my drawing class. The pictures were dated March and April, 2002, before Amanda was born. Even though she usually lived with her mother in the early years, big blocks of empty time became less available after Amanda.

I gave up copying the world and began doodling my inner visions with colored markers. This was great fun, frequently fueled by marijuana. It resulted in many strange images on greeting card stock, often phallic or uterine or both. My all-time favorite is an anxious-looking multicolored bird pursued by little turd-y haystacks, a perfect depiction of aspects of my life.

 

 I took another class, and discovered the joy of collage. For eight weeks I worked on a huge naked goddess, with flames for hair and a rainbow of flowers above her head. The crowning touch was interchangeable merkins* in different colors - thread tangled up and stiffened with glue, attached to her mons veneris with velcro.

She has been in the closet for many years, and when I took her out I still loved the suggestion of musculature in her disproportionate limbs. I  could only find one merkin, a purple one that has faded to a boring brown.  I don’t want her anymore, and I was planning to throw her away if I could figure out how to put her out by the curb without horrifying the neighbors. But Luli begged me to send her to North Carolina. So I shall veil her in newspaper and take her to Fed Ex. It will be Luli’s last 70th birthday gift.

 

Goddess of Flowers and Fire

 

After this tremendous project my ambition shrank to a more manageable size and I began making greeting cards. Collage is very slow, or maybe I am very slow, and a single greeting card takes me several hours.

I love my collaged cards so much that I can’t bear to send them away; I have several waiting for an occasion worthy of their splendor. However, I did send one to Michelle Obama. It was a strange-looking woman, rather fat, resplendently attired with a belt and brooch, wielding a peppermint-striped cane. I wrote a gushing message expressing my great admiration, told her the card was inspired by her fashion sense (belt and brooch), suggested that Malia and Sasha might enjoy guessing the source of each scrap in the picture, and enclosed an answer key. I received no reply, nor did the Secret Service pay a call.

I made the card for Mrs. Obama when I was recuperating from my second knee replacement, shortly after Obama’s first inauguration. Recuperation entails a lot of time on the sofa, painful physical therapy, and frequent hydrocodone. Most of my creative work is not inspired by drugs, but when it is, it is truly...inspired.

I

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting T-shirts was my passion for a while. I made one with hippos for my brother-in-law’s fortieth birthday. I made two with large birds, one nibbling strawberries from the crew neck, the other with baby birds peeping from the pocket. These were for my older brother Don and his wife Doris, who wore them all over China, looking very pleased and completely ridiculous. I drew a strange grinning face in black marker on a gray shirt for Luli. I liked it so much that I made one for myself in color labeled, “Grandma.” I used the same design on a dress for 3-year-old Amanda, with the caption: “I’m with Grandma.” It helped people match black toddler and white guardian, prevented them from saying, “Where’s your mother,” at playgrounds.

 

I have recently returned to crochet, and made about nine hats for homeless people. Several groups of women in Gainesville make hats for the homeless, and the HOME Van used to display them on a clothesline in the trunk of Nancy’s car - a wonderful assortment of styles and colors, all hand-crafted. It was a treat to see people shopping for their favorite, and an even bigger treat when somebody chose one of mine. Now that HOME Van driveouts are, alas, no more, I can donate my hats to the clothes closet at Grace Marketplace, which Nancy and her pals have set up as an elegant boutique.

 

Hats and stole (to keep the Feminist Grandma warm as she works)

To my surprise, digging into my craft closet to find my old work depressed me. I had been celebrating creative play. Now I was surrounded by abandoned pursuits, and suddenly Oughts and Shoulds and You Never Stick to Anything echoed around me. Apparently I’m not good enough unless I’m a great writer, drawer, singer, crocheter, and shoe and fabric painter. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind this nagging work ethic so much if it resulted in great achievement.                       

Every dabbler needs a craft closet

  
I am not worthy of the name of amateur. An amateur is one who loves passionately, who devotes herself to her art or craft. I am a dilletante, a dabbler. I have many brief, passionate romances, like a bee going from flower to flower, producing mongrel honey.

But damn it, I’m retired. Why can’t I just have fun? Consider the lilies of the field. Why should I have to toil and spin all my waking hours? I don’t suppose my goofy painted shoes click and t-shirts are quite as splendid as good old Solomon’s array, but they please me. Someday I may be sufficiently sane to acknowledge that is enough.


 
* Merkin: artificial pubic hair. “According to "The Oxford Companion to the Body," the custom of wearing merkins dates from mid-15c., was associated with prostitutes, and was to disguise a want of pubic hair, shaved off either to exterminate body lice or evidence of venereal disease.” source: Dictionary.com

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NEXT POST: JUNE 5

 

In the Garden - May 2015

I was itching to get working in the garden, but I had three weeks of the Gainesville respiratory crud in March and April. Still, without any help from me, everything's green, and flowers are getting started. First, the volunteers:

  Wild petunias, really a lovely pale blue, pop up everywhere.

So does spiderwort, aka dayflower 

I know, it's just a weed - Spanish needle

And finally, mimosa - a skinny tree that leans from my woods into the yard every spring, with fragrant flowers that make you think peaches and oranges got cozy over the winter.

Next, the planted garden:

Drift roses - fragrant, thorny, and trouble-free (except I have to keep cutting them back)

These berries will soon be blue and sweet.

Lipstick plant and I-can't-remember-its name. I'm not even sure I like these two, but they're so happy where they are I can't bear to pull them up.

Milkweed's almost open - and I've seen 2 monarchs flying around waiting.

And here's my Simpson's Stopper, aka twinberry, blooming this year for the first time, with a licorice-vanilla scent (though the internet claims it's nutmeg-y) (And also said it will reach 20 feet - uh oh, I thought it was a shrub!)

  Everything's coming up zinnias - my first time planting from seed - I've planted two kinds of zinnias, two kinds of basil, and a spring garden mix. Oh boy, can't wait! (Yes, I know I have to thin them.)

Are You Writing?

“Are you writing?” someone asks. “Oh, not really. Just the blog.” And I change the subject.

I began this blog three and a half  years ago, and have posted about 90 short essays. I  used to write one a week. I switched to every other week because the non-stop deadline was too much pressure. Then I switched to monthly, to make space and time for my novel.

The blog posts come easily, though I work hard on each one. When a subject occurs to me, I throw all my random thoughts onto the page. Each thought leads to another, and in a few hours I have a first draft. Then comes a bit of research, a lot of revision, and the fun of finding illustrations.

Writing the blog is satisfying. I figure out what I think. I feel no anxiety; I am completely confident that ideas will come, and that I will be pleased with the final product. I get gratifying responses on Facebook and in Comments. No one ever writes a negative comment - I suppose that people who don’t like my writing simply go away.

So when you ask me if I’m writing, why do I say “Not really”? It puzzles me. I AM writing.

Woman Writing, by guess who? image:wikiart.org

 

It’s true I like fiction better than anything; I like a long, engrossing novel that opens up a well-inhabited world. But it’s not merely that I want to create what I love. I’ve already done that. I’m very fond of my three completed novels.

 

A well-inhabited world. Children's Games by Bruegel the Elder. image: en.wikipedia.org

 

I want to be read.  But the funny thing is, my blog does get read. I usually seem to have about 150 readers. In the blogosphere that’s not even peanuts; it’s more like teeny black lentils. Still, I love knowing I’m being read and appreciated. Like most of us, I want people to love me and think I’m wonderful. (Comments which say you already love me and I am wonderful will not pass muster with the comment moderator.)

 

image:agoramedia.com

 

So it’s not enough that I’ve written three novels, and I regularly write likeable essays. It doesn’t count. I’m afraid I also want to be validated by the Voice of the Fathers. I wish I didn’t, but my father and his ilk had very loud voices.

 

Dad's ilk. image:bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com

 

A Father may be a brother. My late brother Dickie, a prominent book critic, told me my first novel was a page-turner. “I mean that as a compliment,” he said, but I knew my novel was not to his very complex and elevated taste. A few years later he called me to rave delightedly and in gratifying detail about my blog. “I think you’ve found your form,” he said. Ouch.

 

are miniatures my form? igavelauction.com

 

A Father can even be a woman. Any publisher is a Father, and I’m currently courting a small publisher run by a wonderful woman.  I'd cut off my pinkie to be published by that house, except that it would hurt.

I want the recognition that publication brings. Not that the world will recognize me. I have no delusions, though I have all the usual Terry Gross-Pulitzer-Major Motion Picture fantasies when I get a nibble from an agent or publisher. But I want to hear the voice of the Fathers saying, “Yes, this is worthy. You are a writer.”

image:barlow.byu.edu

Maybe I want to write novels because it is so challenging. The Fathers, as you can see from the illustration, are earnest Victorians.  If it’s not hard it doesn’t count. "Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?" Maybe in heaven I’ll finish my fourth novel.

Some writers love writing the first draft and hate revising. Not me. I love revising, because it comes easily. I am confident in my editorial instincts, and very decisive. I rarely dither. But to write a first draft is to create something out of almost nothing. My novels begin with an image that floats up to me - a baby lies abandoned behind a dumpster; a woman sees a man behind her reflected in a window; a sinkhole opens suddenly under a house raised on pilings. I follow the image and years later I have a bunch of characters carrying on and creating a story.

 

image: abcnews.com

It sounds simple, but every day of working on the first draft is like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking out into a great empty space. I throw little ideas into the darkness, hoping one will shine and cast some light. I make small desperate noises as I write a first draft. Worse, I often fall asleep.

 

image:pixshark.com

Still, even though it’s excruciating, it’s what I want to do. I hoped that if I dug around in my psyche to find the root of this foolishness, I could pull it up and be done with it. But this attempt at writing therapy hasn’t succeeded. Even as I work on this post, I decide I’ll finish this, and the second one about Argentina, and the one about the HOME Van. I’ll get them all into the queue for posting and I won’t have another one due till the beginning of May. Then I can go back to my real writing, the writing that counts.

 

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NEXT POST: MAY 8

 

 

 

It's Tough to Say Goodbye

Last Thursday, February 26, was the last HOME Van drive out. At all three stops we saw mostly familiar faces, and some people who are very dear to me. Many people came up to Arupa to say goodbye and get a hug. I occasionally hid behind a car to cry. I only lost it completely when I said goodbye to Mike, one of the sandwich makers, whom I have come to respect and admire as he and his wife nursed a friend whose house they shared.

The house, a small bright green geodesic dome, was built for the owner by several homeless men, who lived there on occasion. Showers and laundry were available on a regular basis, and there was a small food pantry. Gainesville is dotted with informal, almost clandestine services for homeless people, in homes and churches, and in our case, in an old gray van and a couple of cars.

 

Arupa and Bob Freeman, whose house is HOME Van Central, and who have been working 40-60 hours a week to run the project, are well past retirement age. The growth of services at Grace Marketplace, the new center run by the Homeless Coalition, has brought our numbers down, and the time has come to shift direction. Arupa and Bob will run a small food pantry, and respond to individual needs and emergencies. We will still deliver water to campsites in the hot months. Our main focus will be to buy tents for the people who want to move near Grace Marketplace, where people can get hot meals, showers, and many other services.

sunset and rainbow at Grace Marketplace  photo by Greg Undeen

We all have our favorite driveout memories. One evening, going through the medicine boxes, I came across a bottle of  flavored personal lubricant. “Who the fuck donated this?” was my ladylike reaction, and Arupa and I had a giggle. But a little while later a man and woman came up to the van window and shyly told me they had gotten married a few days ago. They were beaming with happiness. I slipped it into her bag - a lot of the women we meet are modest about intimate items.  She thanked me the next week, and every once in a while I brought another bottle of lubricant for the honeymooners.

 

A woman in her sixties lived in a tent on the dental lab property in Tent City. She had greasy gray hair and filthy feet, but she had a strong sense of dignity and self-respect.  The winter that she got a week-long cold night motel voucher, I brought her a bag of groceries. She opened the door in her bathrobe, with her long hair wet from the shower, and I realized that I had thought of her dirtiness as part of her. I was struck once again by my ignorance.

After the Bath by Edgar Degas

When she turned 65, I took her to apply for Social Security, and discovered she had been married five times. It was quite an enterprise for her to recall all the names and dates. The Social Security official was polite and patient. Not long after, she married again, to a 28-year-old man, and the HOME Van held a wedding ceremony. The bride spent the morning at the beauty parlor, and then I drove them to the downtown plaza, she in her white dress and veil, he in a tuxedo, where Reverend Dave, the HOME Van minister, married them.

image: worth1000.com

 

I have so many memories of the early days of the HOME Van, when the numbers weren’t so crushing, and we had more time for frivolity. Arupa and I spent an afternoon decorating Easter eggs to distribute on the driveout. At our first Christmas party I passed out song sheets, and my brother Don led the singing on his harmonica. On our third anniversary we had a big party on the downtown plaza, with ribs and chicken donated by David’s Barbeque, and a band of homeless pickers and singers. Less frivolous were the memorial services we held on the plaza - a circle of people holding candles, speaking of their friend who was gone, and Reverend Dave saying a few words of comfort and faith.

 

image: bangordailynews.com

As one of my very favorite customers said when he heard that the driveouts are ending, “All good things must end.” I have tried to understand why this makes me so sad. I won’t miss boiling ten dozen eggs, or as I used to do, baking five  batches of cornbread. I won’t miss organizing the soup rota, or making five to seven gallons of soup when I had no volunteers.

 

we usually did better than beanie wienies

 
I won’t miss making sandwiches on Thursday mornings, turning six loaves of bread into pb and j’s. But I’ll miss the other sandwich makers, three men whom we met years ago on the drive-outs, all now housed.  Arupa puts on Pandora, usually old country music or rock, and we talk as we work. Lots of gossip - celebrity gossip, local politics, who’s sick, who’s in jail. Personal history and family stories, what’s going on in our lives. Lots of joking, lots of teasing, especially of me.
 
I won’t lose track of one of the guys. He lives near me, and we rode together every Thursday to sandwich-making and then to deliver a food box to a former HOME Van customer. In the afternoon I’d pick him up to go to the drive out. He house sits for us when we go away, and now that he’s losing his HOME Van gig, he’s going to come walk our dog on weekday mornings. But I know I’ll rarely see the other two. I remember how close I was to my colleagues at the law school, and how quickly we lost touch. There are work friends and friend-friends, and you lose touch with the former when you retire.

 

Trisket needs her exercise

I have so many memories of so many people. A gentle schizophrenic man in many layers of clothing and scarves. It was years before he would look me in the eyes with the sweetest smile, and ask for "whatever you have." I settled on giving him vitamins and bandaids and Tums. Another man, of enormous intelligence, integrity and courage, who has been in the woods since he was released from prison, where he spent fifteen years for avenging his daughter. A man who moved to the woods so he could support his daughter in college with his small Social Security check. I’ll miss the hugs, the jokes, the God bless you’s, the homemade card Rose gives us at Christmas.

image nydailynews.com

For years I was in charge of socks and candles, dispensed from the trunk of my car. This sounds tedious, but each transaction was a little connection. Can I have some dress socks for church? Do you have any more of those diabetics’socks? When we had more volunteers  I graduated to medications, freeing Arupa to wander in the crowd and talk with anyone who needed something special, or merely a dose of Arupa.

image: sockittoemsockcampaign.org

 

I liked distributing medicines, because it gave me genuine, if brief, contact with a large number of people. I’m no good at names, but people expected me to remember their illnesses and injuries, and I often did. I sat in the passenger seat of the van, with a daunting line of people at my window, stretching around the parking lot. I heard of many ailments. People like to show their wounds.  I have a weak stomach and would always let my eyes go out of focus when confronted by scars, stitches, burns and boils. I’d urge them to go to Helping Hands or the Rahma Mercy Clinic, the emergency room or the VA.

Rahma Mercy Clinic image: sam felter

I remember the woman who lived in Tent City and rode her bike to chemo treatments at Shands, the man who was between two surgeries and living with a temporary colostomy bag, the woman I saw on our last drive out, who had major abdominal surgery four days ago, and was about to start radiation.  People were discharged from the hospital, sometimes sent home in a taxi to the trail that led to their camp, with expensive prescriptions which they couldn’t fill. Arupa carried some cash and could sometimes help, but often the cost was beyond us. We could give them ibuprofen and acetominaphen, but no real pain meds. We had bandaids and ointment, but no antibiotics.

image: theguardian.com

I retired more than eleven years ago from the law school, and never looked back. The only thing I was going to miss was my students, and even them, not so much. At the time I retired, the HOME Van was less than a year old. Now I’m facing a second retirement, and I’m not looking forward to it.

In all the years of riding with the HOME Van, I only saw the tip of the iceberg. After a winter drive out in the freezing rain, or a summer drive out where we fought mosquitoes and gnats, I struggled to wrap my imagination around how it would be to live homeless. People who live outside have complicated lives. Some of them traveled, many stayed put. I was just a tiny part of their lives, but they were a huge part of mine.
 
To JC and Gary and DJ and Rose, to Buddy and Michael and Bill, Matt and David and Nick, to Wanda and Nina, Diane and James, Nate and Judy, Ashley, Tommy, Renata, Charles. To all the people who live or have lived outside, coping every day with hardships and troubles I can barely imagine, making their happiness with or without booze and drugs, I will miss you more than I can say or you will know. You have blessed my life.

FOR MORE ABOUT THE HOME VAN AND HOMELESSNESS IN GAINESVILLE, GO TO CATEGORIES/HOMELESS, AT LEFT

 

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NEXT POST APRIL 3

Searching for My Mother: Argentina, Part 2

In the previous post, I wrote about some misadventures on our trip to Argentina. Why Argentina? I was born there. My father worked for an imperialistic American company, which I am still embarrassed to name, and he handled their legal affairs in Argentina. My parents lived in Buenos Aires for many years; my brothers Don and Dick were raised there. My younger brother fell in love with Esther, the little girl next door; they married at 22, had seven children, and were together almost sixty years.

Dick and Esther and the first three

We left Argentina and returned to the States when I was 6 months old. I had been back only once, for a glorious two weeks at Christmas when I was nine. We lived in Bolivia, and though we were living high on the hog, it was a very scrawny hog.

Surely our parents took us around to see the sights, but all that I remember from that vacation is the food. In Buenos Aires we ate huge  quantities of beef and dairy. I had frogs’ legs and snails for the first time, bamboo ray with black butter and capers. We stayed in a luxurious old hotel, and breakfasted in our room on eggs, bacon, creamed mushrooms, croissants, and hot chocolate with whipped cream. At night my parents went out and Luli and I had room service again: delicious sandwiches of turkey and ham, fresh fruit and butter cookies.

 

In the 1930's when my parents moved to Argentina, many middle class families in the US still had maids. When they moved back home in 1948, they didn’t understand life in the States. They brought with them an Argentine cook, a maid, and a nurse for my brother, who was recovering from polio. The maid and the nurse soon found other jobs; Elisa Dellepiane, the cook, stayed with us until I was eighteen, and returned to nurse my mother when she was dying.click

I write this in my newly cozy office, where I’m now spending a lot of time on the day bed, Here I read, write, crochet, practice my singing, and retreat from my uneasy role as mother of a teenager. To my left is a large sepia photograph of my mother at twenty, in front of me a black and white photo of her at forty. In this room I feel loved.

Like any immigrant who goes back to the old country to find her roots, I went to Argentina looking for echoes of my family’s life. I knew the stores and streets had changed. But on every corner, in every cafe, I tried to imagine my mother.

Mother about 1932

On Christmas Eve, after our money-changing adventure click, we took our taxi back to the Recoleta neighborhood for lunch and a museum. Our driver pointed out all the sights along the way, including the race track and polo grounds. My parents loved to go to polo matches and horse races, along with Buenos Aires high society, which took its cue from the British aristocracy.

Dad was descended from Jewish Eastern European immigrants. His maternal grandfather had gone to Colombia in the nineteenth century and established a sugar plantation. My great-grandfather is referred to as El Fundador (the founder); I call the Colombian side of the family the oligarchs.

El Fundador

  Dad grew up in New York, and while he acknowledged that his father was Jewish, he always denied that his mother was. Like the Argentines, he yearned to be British aristocracy. Esther, my sister-in-law, says he always reminded her of a little boy pressing his nose against a bakery window.  

We sat outside at an elegant Recoleta cafe, and relaxed for perhaps the first time in BA. Amanda had a very disappointing ham and cheese sandwich; Joe and I split a delicious “lomo” sandwich on baguette - the most tender, tasty beef, cooked medium rare.  Amanda was happy and jokey, asking about how I learned Spanish, interested in everything she saw.
 
We sat a long time in the warm sunny day, under the shade of a huge historic rubber tree. Its spreading branches were supported by posts, except for one, held up by a statue of a man bending over and taking its weight on his back. A busker nearby, wearing a most penile clown nose, played carnival music on his accordian.

 

That evening we went to the outdoor ‘midnight’ mass at Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Pilar, next to Recoleta Cemetery. It was held at 9PM, since Argentine families have their Santa Claus and Christmas feast on Christmas Eve. As we neared the church after a mile-long walk I heard Adeste Fideles in Spanish.  The night was soft and clear; people brought folding chairs from inside the church. It was a big crowd. The choir, high school kids, sang many songs, and the congregation often sang along - Christmas carols, soft rock, folky songs.

 

Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Pilar  source:Barriada.com.ar

 

The priest’s brief sermon was sweet and kind, focusing on the shepherds, and how you can change the world, Argentina, Buenos Aires, and yourself, by letting Christ into your heart. Or something like that. I understood 87 percent of everything that was said, and of course recognized all the readings from Luke and Matthew. They finally got the bread turned into flesh and the wine turned into blood, and many people lined up to take communion, while others carried their chairs inside and left.
    
The service moved me, because it all carried my own past, while I felt the strength of this community and how much I was not a part of it. And throughout it I was thinking of Mother. She was Episcopalian, my father was an atheist, but I imagine they both went to the Anglican church in Buenos Aires. They probably went to Christmas Eve midnight mass. The feeling kept rising in me, “I want my Mommy.”

Joe wanted to see inside the church. I stayed outside with Amanda, who had been well-behaved and surely dreadfully bored during the service, despite the lots of music, and was now surly and loud-voiced. ‘Ooh, I want to drink the wine, why can’t I.’ I told her I was disgusted and ashamed of her and I didn’t want to hear another word until we left the service. She shut up for a while, and then said, “Can I ask a nice question?” I agreed, and she asked why we left Argentina. She was very interested in my history, and impressed, I think, by my fluency in Spanish, as was I.

On Christmas Day we tried and failed to visit several parks and zoos, and found them closed. But one of the most famous places in Buenos Aires was open. The fourteen-acre Recoleta Cemetery is almost two hundred years old. Over four thousand above-ground tombs are crowded together along paved paths divided by tree-shaded pedestrian boulevards, each family striving to outdo its neighbor.

 

"La Recoleta Cemetery entrance" by Christian Haugen 

 

 "Liliana Crociati de Szaszak (full)" by Iridescent

 

We arrived in the late afternoon when the light was particularly lovely, with long shadows and glowing statues. Joe went off to take pictures, and I was free to follow the pamphlet guide I had printed from the internet. Without it I would have been lost and aimless in that huge corpse-filled place.

The pamphlet gave a lot of information about Argentine history, which I appreciated, and explained the arrangement of the tombs. You can peek inside and see one or two coffins, maybe some urns, with an altar above them. The decor is elaborate - stained glass and wood paneling, sculpture and bas relief, crucifixes, paintings and photographs. Stairs lead underground so that when a new corpse arrives the decomposed remains can be moved to the basement. Families must pay for maintenance; when they stop paying, the spiders and dust move in.

I only made it to the first twenty-one tombs highlighted by the guide, but it was plenty. I didn’t see Evita Peron’s tomb, but the pamphlet had lots of information about her, unlike the stupid French biography I had tried to read, which was full of dreamy postmodern musings.

Eva Peron

Evita died at 33 of uterine cancer. The military didn’t want her embalmed corpse to be a political organizing symbol, so they stole it from where it was displayed in the Peronist’s headquarters, and each general kept it for a while in his house. One general was so worried about it being stolen that he slept with a gun under his pillow.  When his wife came home late one night he claimed he thought it was a Peronista come for the corpse, so he shot her dead. Hmmm.

Another story of marital disharmony was reflected in a large elaborate tomb. White marble man seated pompously, looking like a nineteenth century business man. Seated behind him, back to back, white marble wife, looking like a satisfied and respected materfamilias. She was a very extravagant woman, and he became so frustrated that he put a legal notice in the paper: ‘I will not be responsible for any debts incurred...’ She was so angry that when she had the tomb built she said she wanted to face away from him for eternity.

The sky was deep blue, the sun hot but the air dry. I loved all the stories, loved the puzzle of following the map and locating the tombs, peeking inside, looking at the statues. A guard came through, ‘fifteen minutes to closing,’ so I made my way to the entrance. I glanced at a very new tomb on a corner, brown granite with a full-length metal bas-relief of a rather glum woman with leaves above her. The family name was Dellepiane. I was stunned - that was Elisa’s name, Elisa who had been for me some combination of grandmother and aunt, who spoiled me and Luli in the kitchen, who shared the mate gourd with us in the afternoons.

 

Elisa, Liz, Luli

 
For a few moments I thought, My God, could it be Elisa’s family? I looked for names and dates, but apparently nobody was buried there yet. I was pretty sure Elisa’s family was not of the class that would be buried in Recoleta. Sure enough, when I googled it, I found a famous general, an Avenida Dellepiane, a Dellepiane Bar listed under gay bars, and all kinds of Dellepiane’s on Facebook, far too many to try to track her down. With all my thinking and grieving about Mother as I wandered in Buenos Aires - I only just then realized and remembered that this was Elisa’s life too.
 
Memory comes in scraps and bits, woven together by imagination. The stories I imagined as I wandered around Buenos Aires weren’t even my own. I pictured Mother with my baby carriage in the square in Belgrano, Don and Dick and Esther in the white uniform smocks that children wore to school, Elisa returning to her niece’s family when she retired.

  School uniforms

 It is all fiction, but if I were rich, I would go back to Argentina for a month or two, and dream more memories.

 

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NEXT POST: MARCH 13

 

A Trip to the Zoo: Argentina, Part One

    
“I love traveling and I hate traveling.” - Amanda the Wise

For over thirty years I have celebrated Christmas at home with family and friends. But none of my family were coming this year, and Joe finds the traditions a little tiresome, so we decided to try Christmas away from home. We arranged a trip to Argentina: six days in Buenos Aires, where I was born, and two days at Iguazu Falls. We arrived in Buenos Aires at nine-thirty at night on December 23.

We had rented an apartment in Recoleta, a posh neighborhood filled with trees, parks, cafes and shops. The manager, Mariana, let us in and showed us around. She had stocked the kitchen with coffee, oranges, and chocolate alfajores, cookies filled with dulce de leche.  I loved the apartment, with its huge windows, wood floors, hundreds of books and an impressive collection of  CDs, mostly American music from the sixties and seventies.

After Mariana left we went out to find dinner. I was amazed to find myself out and about at one in the morning. Amanda was impressed to see families with children in all the cafes and restaurants at that hour. After filling up on empanadas and pizza, we returned exhausted to the apartment, ready for bed.

Now we met our first challenge. The key to the building worked fine. The elevator worked fine, though it was barely bigger than a phone booth, and landed each time  with a most disquieting shudder and thud.  We were on the fourth floor. At the tiny landing shared with one other apartment, Joe took out the ring of three old-fashioned keys. He tried each key in every lock.  Ten minutes of trying.  He couldn’t open the door.

We went back downstairs to take the rear elevator to the back door. We couldn’t open it. “I’m at a loss,” Joe  said.  It was past two o’clock. We had been traveling since 6:30 the previous morning. Everything we owned was inside the apartment, including contact information for Mariana. I pictured us lying down to sleep on the landing. Going out to find a hotel. Finding a friendly police officer to help us.

Can I find a friendly one?

We went back to the front door, Joe tried and tried, as did Amanda, as did I. No one was pleasant, though Amanda and I were smart enough to hold our tongues as Joe struggled. Finally, he did it. Within a few minutes, we were all in bed. The lock was a problem when we came home the next afternoon too, but Joe figured out the proper combination of jiggling and turning and pulling, and we all mastered it.

The next morning I made great coffee, and we feasted on oranges and cookies. Our first and very urgent job was to change money.  We knew that stores and everything else would begin to close about noon, and stay closed through at least Christmas day.

Argentina is once again suffering terrible inflation. The official exchange rate is 8.5 to the dollar, but the unofficial “blue’ rate, published daily in the newspaper, is about 13, so no one goes to the bank to change money.  People keep and carry huge amounts of cash, and assault and robbery have become more common. (There is a video on You Tube of a tourist being robbed at gunpoint by a man on a motor scooter.  I didn’t watch it, having been sufficiently spooked by all the articles I read on the internet.)

Money-changers on the street call out their rate, but they are likely to give counterfeit pesos, so you go to an exchange office, or casa de cambio.  I am befuddled by the ethics of all this, uncomfortable at taking advantage of another country’s economic mess, uneasily telling myself “when in Rome.”

Mariana had drawn us a map for the best casa de cambio - in a gallery-mall next to the snazziest hotel in BA (rooms start at $600 US/night). It was a very long walk, but she said the taxi would wait while we changed our money. We should call first to be sure they were open.

I called - it went to voice mail. I called the snazzy hotel to ask if the mall and cambio were open today, on Christmas Eve. No. The snazzy hotel clerk went off to inquire, and returned to tell me that no casas de cambio were open December 24 or 25.  Banks were also closed. They would all open on Friday. But on Friday we were being picked up at 8:30 to spend the day on the Pampas, in gaucho country, and we wouldn’t be back till 8 at night. Cambios don’t open till 10am, not to mention that we needed pesos Wednesday and Thursday.

I called Mariana. “Let me call Carlos.” I’d never heard of Carlos, but that was okay. She called Carlos, who called someone else, and then Mariana called us back with the following instructions. We were to go to a lottery shop in Belgrano, ask for Lucas, although he would not be there, and tell them Carlos sent us. “It’s a code,” Mariana said.

The lottery shop closed at noon, and it was now just before 11. As usual, Amanda was getting a slow start. We told her she could stay behind, but then reconsidered. We could be getting into any kind of mess, and if we didn’t come back, there she’d be all alone. So she had to come with us.  

It was easy to hail a cab. Thrilled that my Spanish was quite fluent, I had a long chat with the taxi driver. His son had just graduated from medical school, and they would soon return to Barcelona, where they had lived a dozen years and his four other sons still lived. I told him about my parents, my brothers, our trip to Africa. All the while the clock and the meter were ticking. I asked Joe, “Is that a decimal point after the 82?” Yes, thank God, so the fare so far was only about seven bucks at the blue rate.

We got to the lottery office about 11:45.  It was a tiny office, filled with colorful posters listing the numbers you should play depending on your dreams. A man stood at the counter behind a grid. “I’d like to speak to Lucas, please. Carlos sent me.” Briefly I became a willowy blonde in a suit with padded shoulders, smoking a cigarette.

The man said Lucas was not there; how much did we want to exchange?  I said 500 dollars. He unlocked the gate. ‘Thank God it’s working,’ I thought.  ‘We’re going to be robbed and murdered,’ I thought. But no, he told us he’d give us 13 to the dollar, and pulled out huge wads of 100 peso bills, holding them below the counter so they were not visible from the office or street, and asked us to count them. We exchanged some amiable remarks and walked out with 6500 pesos.

The next day was Christmas, a family holiday. For tourists, it's a good day to visit parks and the famous Recoleta Cemetery. I searched the internet to see what was open.  All the parks run by the city of Buenos Aires would be closed; the list included the Lakes of Palermo and the Botanical Garden, but the zoo wasn’t on the list, and the cemetery was open from 7am to 6pm.

While I searched the internet, Joe had mapped our route. A short walk, he said. But Amanda refused to come. The New York Times had an article the other day about the Obamas facing the challenge of traveling with teenagers - I was amused and reassured, as it resembled our experience, though of course the article contained none of the painful details of the sulking, grumbling and carping.  And I imagine when the Obamas leave Malia and Sasha to sleep late in a foreign country the girls are under heavy guard. Nevertheless, forcing her to go to the zoo didn’t seem wise, and I wanted to send the message that we knew she would be fine on her own. With some trepidation, we left her, with strict instructions not to go out. I had gone to the supermarket the day before so there were plenty of sandwich fixings in the refrigerator.

We had no security guards for Amanda

It was a beautiful day, with an intensely blue sky, hot sun, cool breezes, and the temperature in the eighties.  And it was lovely to be alone with Joe. We walked and walked and walked through Recoleta and into Palermo and finally came to the botanical garden, which looked beautiful through the locked gate. Joe couldn’t understand why you would close a park; it’s not as though you need staff there. I held my tongue.

The zoo entrance was beyond the garden, another long two blocks. It too was locked. I stopped a young couple to ask, and they confirmed that it was closed. “But I looked on the internet and it didn’t say anything about the zoo being closed.” They had done the same; they were also tourists, from Brazil.  “I can’t believe this,” said Joe. “That’s because you expect things to work as they should; I assume things will go wrong.”  He thought I was criticizing his attitude, but we resolved that. The little frictions of travel are so much easier to smooth out without an adolescent third party observing and commenting.

The elephants were on holiday

We walked on past the zoo, which was surrounded by a low stone wall topped by a fence. Graffiti on the wall called for ‘Liberacion de animales’ in red spray paint.  ‘Zoo = carcel.’ Then a dialogue: another red ‘Zoo =,’ followed by a swastika. A black border had effaced the hooks of the swastika, leaving a simple box with a red cross inside. Had the second artist been offended by the swastika, or by equating the animals’ imprisonment with  the Holocaust?

Dense bamboo blocked our view through the fence. I could hear strange bird calls and monkey screams. Then a gap in the bamboo revealed three llamas standing in the sunlight, necks erect, long faces disdainful. We watched them a while; they never moved.  It was their day off.

The zoo is in a tree-filled city neighborhood of tall apartment buildings. I imagined living in the penthouse. I would sit out on my balcony behind my red geraniums, eating medialunas with my excellent coffee, and look down into the whole zoo. I wondered about the animal racket. Joe wondered about the smell.

Alas, our trip to the zoo included very little zoo.The challenges of travel are exhausting and frustrating. Novelty is exhilarating, but familiarity is a comfort. When we arrived back in Miami Amanda said, “Yes! Everything is in English.”  I haven’t decided whether for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home. Next Thanksgiving we're planning to hike the Grand Canyon. Maybe we'll spend Christmas in Gainesville.

 

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NEXT POST: FEBRUARY 6. ARGENTINA, PART TWO
   

We Gather Together

 

My brother Richard Eder died last Friday, after a long illness and two final days in the hospital. I have just come from three days with family - his wife and seven grown children, six grandchildren, two great-grands, and assorted mates - and a funeral mass and burial in Mt Auburn Cemetery. We spent the days together in Dickie and Esther’s apartment overlooking Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, talking, crying, laughing, singing.  Lots of coffee and tea and wine, lots of food.

 

Mt. Auburn Cemetery  image:bostoncalendar.com

 

And now I’m sitting in Logan Airport on Thanksgiving Day, with my sister Luli, in front of a television with three bright and smiling news announcers. The airport is fairly empty, the flights are fairly full. They are talking about Black Friday, interviewing a man who’s first in line at a Best Buy. He’s been camped there for a week. ‘What are you planning to buy?’ Two tablets, a laptop, a 55-inch TV...I lose track. And they speak in doleful tones of the dying out of the American Black Friday tradition. The thrill of the deal. Families camping out together. The great tradition is being eroded by sales that begin on Thanksgiving day, Internet Saturday specials and on and on.

 

Black Friday   image:protectamerica.com

Black Friday has never been part of my life. It has been going on for about fifteen years. How can anyone call it a tradition, how can anyone mourn it, even in jest? It is a celebration that horrifies me, a celebration of buying stuff, stuff and more stuff, like eating contests where contestants down 60 hotdogs in ten minutes. I am not alone. Adbusters, a Canadian magazine, promotes Buy Nothing Day, and urges people to stage creative protests in stores and shopping malls. click

               
For me, Thanksgiving tradition is families coming together from near and far, eating too much of the foods they have always eaten, a long spell of digestion in the living room with desultory conversation, a long walk together, and then a return to the kitchen for sandwiches of leftovers and more slices of pie.  It is consumption, but not consumerism. If I had my druthers I’d introduce a custom of going around the table with everybody saying what they’re grateful for. And if I were religious I’d surely include prayers that directed our thanks to God.

 

Postprandial walk

Like Thanksgiving, weddings and funerals bring families together.  Thanksgiving usually includes somebody aggravating somebody. click  Weddings primarily glorify the bride while providing plenty of material for gossip. In my happily limited experience, funerals focus on love and grief. They are a time for family to be kind, to take care of each other. Hearts are open, faces are naked. We remember the dead and dwell on what we loved about them.

I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving this year. I celebrated and mourned my brother, surrounded and supported by the family I love.

 

Richard Eder  image:washingtonpost.com -upi

 

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NEXT POST: JANUARY 2

 

 

In the Garden - Halloween

Lipstick plant, tibouchina, and salvia

 

The chrysanthemum is almost open.

The mushrooms are cool, but I wish they weren't all over the yard.

The weird phallic Victorian plant I showed you in Garden in August has detumesced, and bloomed.

Look how they've grown since August!

Old Woman

I began calling myself old at about sixty-five, but I wanted to claim the title even earlier than that.

My friends in their eighties laugh at the notion that I’m old at sixty-seven. Still, how long can one go on being middle-aged? Middle-aged carries all sorts of responsibilities and burdens - working for a living, saving for retirement, caring for teenagers and parents. Old brings freedom and power.

image:usatoday.com

As an old woman, I’m free from hoping that men will find me sexually attractive. When I was younger  I was on an everlasting honey-hunt. I  dressed and walked and talked to entice the male of the species. 

the honey-hunt  image:businessinsider.com

I’m free from trying to be what other people expect me to be. I can’t say I’m free from worrying what other people think - ‘How can she let her daughter dress like that?’ ‘She only reads bits and pieces of the Times’ ‘She doesn’t compost’- but I no longer expect perfection of myself, having long since stopped expecting it of anyone else.

I don't let her dress like THIS.  image: amazon.com

I am aware that when I simply act like myself - blunt, profane, opinionated - some people enjoy it because I don’t fit their notion of sweet old grandma. But as I have told Amanda, who is in middle school and at the painful peak of self-consciousness, the only person who pays much attention to me is me. Everyone else is far too busy worrying about themselves.

As an old woman, I feel powerful despite the crumbling - the whiny joints, hole-y memory and various other ailments. When my hair began to go gray, it was a tweedy pepper and salt. I died it purple for a couple of years, and when I let it  grow out it had become a lovely puffy white.  Irrationally, I gained confidence from my white hair. I walk into a meeting and believe people think I know what I’m talking about and am worth listening to. This may be delusional; it is  contrary to the common notion that old women become invisible.

 
worth listening to  image:nydailynews.com

The world doesn’t want me to call myself old (insofar as it’s paying attention, having rather more pressing matters to attend to.). Huge amounts of internet verbiage are dedicated to avoiding the word. As soon as people find out that one or another synonym means old, and refers to them, they apparently get pissed off and the word becomes verboten in its turn.

I believe people shy away from the word out of fear. Along with freedom and power, aging brings loss. Regardless of what you call it,  the last twenty years or so of the journey will have challenges and growth that we never imagined when we were younger.  

One of the lesser challenges is how to respond to young people who insist on denying we are old. A waiter recently asked, “And what will the young lady have?” Finally fed up with this sort of thing, I said, “I’m sure you don’t mean to offend, but I’m not a young lady. I’m old.” He actually began to argue. I insisted, “I’m proud to be old,” and he retreated, looking very uncomfortable. I left a good tip to make up for it.

 
image: huffingtonpost.com

A group of journalists interested in aging issues surveyed 100 journalists about appropriate ways to refer to old people. (They didn’t say whether any of these 100 were nearing 100.) In Words to Age by: a Brief Glossary and Tips on Usage, they came up with guidelines “intended to help journalists represent midlife and older people in socially neutral language that respects their individuality without appending presumptuous labels to them, either directly or indirectly.”

The favorite term was “older.” Than whom, I have to ask?  They also approved, with much discussion and many cautions: elder, middle-aged, midlife, boomers, senior.  They disapproved of: baby boomers, senior citizen, elderly. After a while of reading all this I stood up and yelled “OLD, OLD, OLD.”

So if I’m rejecting synonyms and euphemisms, and insist on old, is it old lady or old woman?

Hip young men used to refer to a lover as “my old lady.” Though the phrase has a nice musical sound, ‘lady’ belongs to a class system and a set of rules. The concept puts women on a pedestal. It's a great place to be if you want to be revered, but it restricts travel. I never heard those hip young men call themselves gentlemen.

old lady  image:enchantedserenityperiodfilms.blogspot.com

As a young feminist I rejected the sense of ownership, the elitism, and all the strictures that come with the name. My father used to tell me to sit like a lady - ie legs down and closed. A lady doesn’t admit to having  genitals, or if she does, she calls them private parts. She doesn’t ever use bad language. Now, as an old feminist, I can’t possibly call myself a lady, since I’ve taken to dressing inappropriately, in warm weather wearing nothing but a caftan all over town, letting my body take the air.

Just half the collection
 

 Old woman. The words come to a full stop. The sound is forceful, not flowery. Woman is strong, generative, sexual. Since I stopped being a girl I’ve been a young woman, middle-aged woman, and now I’m happy to call myself old woman.

Old is a proud title. By the time we are old most of us have walked many miles and climbed many mountains. We have survived our own mistakes. We’ve had lots of sorrow and lots of joy, some triumphs and accomplishments. We may have the wisdom to keep regret and pride in proper proportion. We have a lot to think about: our past is a multi-volume novel, and our future looms close with some of the biggest challenges of our life. I am awed, and yes, scared. I know I may have a very hard journey toward the big End. It will be no easier if I try to deny it.

 

 

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NEXT POST: NOVEMBER 28