Margotlog: The Smallest One Was Madeline
In the vault of The Old Citadel, my mother sits on a saggy sofa in the huge bedroom she shares with my father. She's reading to us before bedtime. It's maybe the only time of the day when she sits down. But snuggling against her isn't the only reason my sister and I relish these moments. It's her voice and the story she reads: Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmens.
We all have our expressive side, and hers was surely the reading-aloud voice, with decorating second. My father is said to have complained soon after they married that he slept on flowers, sat on flowers, ate on flowers. My mother never changed the decor.
She was the runt of her family, second born to her twin brother, and plagued with childhood ricketts, a queasy stomach, and terror of storms. She also professed to being shy as a girl though we never saw evidence of this. She plunged forward into new landscapes, leaving North Dakota for Pittsburgh after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1929, leaving Pittsburgh for Charleston after the war years--my father got a job teaching veterans at The Citadel, but she was the one who packed us up and got us there. Pioneer-grit and determination to break free (I see it now) from my father's Pittsburgh Italian tribe where she, who had no knack for languages other than English, often sat silent in the corner.
Early in their marriage, B.B. "before babies," he took her to Europe. It was 1939, and the guns of the Spanish Civil War popped red against the sky as the ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. She was seasick much of the time, except when "doing her nails" before sitting down at the captain's table. It was an Italian ship, and my father, speaking beautiful Italian, had endeared himself to the captain.
She insisted she was the "mousy" one of her two older sisters and vigorous brother, and perhaps that was the case. But by the time my sister and I came along, she commanded workmen, train porters, shop-keepers with determined efficiency. Sometimes I cringed at the harsh edge to her voice--especially in contrast to the gentle drawl of Southerners. But maybe she didn't hear how she sounded, or more likely didn't care. Getting things done was her top priority. That and making sure that we "girls," were "exposed" to the best things in life.
These included taking us to concerts of the Charleston Symphony when we were around six and eight stopping at art museums and historical sites on our summer trips north, and always and forever, visiting the Charleston Library. It was housed in a remarkable three-story town house, like many Charleston houses, with its narrow end to the street. Wide porches looked into a murky garden dominated by huge magnolia trees.
We had to take the bus: a lesson in race relations. Possibly we had to take two buses to arrive at Rutledge Avenue from The Old Citadel, but I am certain that we walked up huge grey steps to an imposing front door. Even now my eyes adjust to the cool shadowy interior of the library. Miss Janie Smith was in charge of the children's room--a small birdlike woman with wispy grey hair flying out of a knot, and a soft round body feathered in black. It seems to be, on the beak of her nose, perched round spectacles. Other than that, she is lost to me, for after pleasantly greeting Miss Janie, my mother took charge.
We brought home armloads of books, for it wasn't common to own lots of children's books, plus we were rather poor. Other than The Book House in twelve volumes which was ensconced in the upper shelf of a bookcase in the living room (the Encyclopedia Britannica on the lower shelf), our books came from the library. But since we went to the library at least once a week, it was never a hardship to borrow rather than own.
My mother herself was a librarian, but she worked at home, washing our clothes by hand, ironing my father's heavy uniforms, cleaning and cooking. Then in early afternoons, she "went down for her nap," a sacred period we dared not interrupt unless there was a real emergency. She also helped my father correct papers, but that was late into the night when we were fast asleep.
Dreaming, no doubt, of "twelve little girls in two straight lines...the smallest one was Madeline."
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Margotlog: The Death of an Old Friend
Margotlog: The Death of an Old Friend
Meaning we go back a ways. Meaning with her jaunty, gravelly voice, Janet was apparently above death. In an illness that would have put most people in a wheelchair, she gamely refused. Throughout the years, we played all sorts of games; we meant to outlive each other.
She might have been my first friend in Minnesota--next door neighbor in the first house in the first marriage with our first and only children. To my clenched-jaw solitude, she brought a red-head's charm. We sat in her kitchen booth and added cream to our coffee. At home I kept only skim milk. She said outloud the most delicious gossip about people who made headlines. That's what happens when you marry into a Minneapolis political family.
But Janet herself came of East Side, Saint Paul stock, though she actually grew up in Highland. It took me years and a move to the capitol city before I had a clue to what that meant--outsider Southerner as I was, from a place she had no trouble finding on a map, but would never visit.
She and Richard and Andrew owned a friendly dog--Elmer, named I think for a Minnesota governor. Elmer Anderson. Our family started and ended with cats with catlike names: Clarence, Wilhemina. We spread the cat-contagion next door, and later acquired a kitten from Janet and Richard and Andrew. But of course it was an offspring of a pure-bred. Even in her last days, Janet was cat proud: she'd put Louie, her huge Siamese mix, on a diet and he looked dandy, strolling across her bed. I was properly awed at their accomplishment, I who can never withhold food from anything with whiskers.
Janet and I traded books--she never wanted hers back, she was that generous, plus neat to the point of obsession. Always clearing out and putting away--other things I have trouble doing. It was nice to visit a friend with an artful touch, blending old and new, for a lived-in look. Yet her bathroom sink ornaments were as fine as the Ritz. And her scarf and sock drawers, geometric marvels.
We were artists together, in the days when "women artists" had a kind of coming out--Janet, the painter; I, the writer. She staunchly supported me, and I her. Yet I doubt that we grasped what the other was after. Perhaps because we were so new at this that we didn't know our own bent.
When I moved to Saint Paul, we saw less of each other, but lately, within the last five years, we reconnected. First she hosted yoga sessions in her Loring Park apartment--I still can't tell if the stretching and chanting were simply an excuse for the lasagna afterwards. As in our younger days, I giggled at her gossip--she was so loving and so nasty. Would I want to know what she said of me? Not until now, have I asked that question. She had the talent of making each encounter seem just the thing to make her happy.
Our last Sunday afternoon together, I knelt beside her bed, petted Louie, and asked her about people in our old Minneapolis neighborhood. For that brief time, we lived our golden age again. I brought us plates of lasagna and we ate beside each other on her bed. She knew she was going elsewhere, yet her worries were more about how her family would cope and how she could manage dying without upsetting the beautiful order of her life. I think she succeeded. Now it is up to us not to muss her arrangements too much, or hug too hard what was, in the end, both strong and fragile. I will miss her more than I can say.
Meaning we go back a ways. Meaning with her jaunty, gravelly voice, Janet was apparently above death. In an illness that would have put most people in a wheelchair, she gamely refused. Throughout the years, we played all sorts of games; we meant to outlive each other.
She might have been my first friend in Minnesota--next door neighbor in the first house in the first marriage with our first and only children. To my clenched-jaw solitude, she brought a red-head's charm. We sat in her kitchen booth and added cream to our coffee. At home I kept only skim milk. She said outloud the most delicious gossip about people who made headlines. That's what happens when you marry into a Minneapolis political family.
But Janet herself came of East Side, Saint Paul stock, though she actually grew up in Highland. It took me years and a move to the capitol city before I had a clue to what that meant--outsider Southerner as I was, from a place she had no trouble finding on a map, but would never visit.
She and Richard and Andrew owned a friendly dog--Elmer, named I think for a Minnesota governor. Elmer Anderson. Our family started and ended with cats with catlike names: Clarence, Wilhemina. We spread the cat-contagion next door, and later acquired a kitten from Janet and Richard and Andrew. But of course it was an offspring of a pure-bred. Even in her last days, Janet was cat proud: she'd put Louie, her huge Siamese mix, on a diet and he looked dandy, strolling across her bed. I was properly awed at their accomplishment, I who can never withhold food from anything with whiskers.
Janet and I traded books--she never wanted hers back, she was that generous, plus neat to the point of obsession. Always clearing out and putting away--other things I have trouble doing. It was nice to visit a friend with an artful touch, blending old and new, for a lived-in look. Yet her bathroom sink ornaments were as fine as the Ritz. And her scarf and sock drawers, geometric marvels.
We were artists together, in the days when "women artists" had a kind of coming out--Janet, the painter; I, the writer. She staunchly supported me, and I her. Yet I doubt that we grasped what the other was after. Perhaps because we were so new at this that we didn't know our own bent.
When I moved to Saint Paul, we saw less of each other, but lately, within the last five years, we reconnected. First she hosted yoga sessions in her Loring Park apartment--I still can't tell if the stretching and chanting were simply an excuse for the lasagna afterwards. As in our younger days, I giggled at her gossip--she was so loving and so nasty. Would I want to know what she said of me? Not until now, have I asked that question. She had the talent of making each encounter seem just the thing to make her happy.
Our last Sunday afternoon together, I knelt beside her bed, petted Louie, and asked her about people in our old Minneapolis neighborhood. For that brief time, we lived our golden age again. I brought us plates of lasagna and we ate beside each other on her bed. She knew she was going elsewhere, yet her worries were more about how her family would cope and how she could manage dying without upsetting the beautiful order of her life. I think she succeeded. Now it is up to us not to muss her arrangements too much, or hug too hard what was, in the end, both strong and fragile. I will miss her more than I can say.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Margotlog: Put Your Mind Where Your Mouth Is, And Other Short Directives from the Holiday Buzz
Margotlog: Put Your Mind Where Your Mouth Is, and Other Short Directives from the Holiday Buzz
He sat at the edge of holiday chat, bent forward as if he wanted to catch the drift, but talking more with his face than his voice. When the subject turned to health, he revealed that he was a nurse. We asked, "What have you noticed from your years of nursing?"
"Want to know the two hardest things?" he answered. We did. "Weight's the first. Every medical condition, every medical emergency is complicated by excessive weight. Everywhere I look, on the street, in hospitals, in fast-food parlors, there's obesity." We nodded in agreement and concern.
"The second," he went on, "is the teaching of nursing. When I was training, first as a nurse, then a nurse anesthetist, 80% of our training was clinical. Nurses learned on the floor to give sponge baths, to administer medication taking care not to over or under dose. We looked at patients' skin, pulled down their eyelids, inspected the inside of their mouths, even casually tested their reflexes as we made them comfortable." We nodded approvingly, remembering how frequently it was the nurses who soothed a fever, popped hemorrhoids back inside the rectum, kept up the regular supply of fluids--either intravenously or by mouth. Doctors would speed in and out, barely noticing the body in the bed, but the nurses felt around.
"Now, too much of nurses' training is by the book. Ph.D's have taken over the training. Too much is in the classroom, as memorization. Even at best, this is insufficiently applied in clinical situations, and once a nurse is actually working, the stuff that was crammed in the head gets confused or fuzzy."
Listening, we quietly determined never to be sick, though lately it seems we're surrounded by seriously ill friends or relatives. Breast cancer here, internal bleeding there, bone deterioration. So far, no mental breakdowns, but wait, yes there are. We tell ourselves it's normal aging, except that normal has such disturbingly individual shapes. Each sufferer tugs at our heart strings and makes our stomachs tighten with anxiety.
After some cogitation, these bits of holiday buzz coalesced toward several simple conclusions: FIRST: smaller and shorter are better. Smaller portions. My mother changed the size of her dinner plates when she and my father began to put on weight. "If you see a full plate, you think you're getting enough," she commented. She out-foxed the belly with the brain.
Add to smaller, shorter. Shorter stays with extended family (especially kids made wild by excitement--it's wearing!) Shorter WALKING distances between home and grocery store, library, work place. Smaller care facilities--as long as certain minimum standards of cleanliness, nutrition and medication monitoring are in place, the essence of good care is regular, hands-on loving kindness. That's easier to deliver in a small facility.
Of course, there are wide exceptions--friends going to the Mayo Clinic for tests, etc., report being amazed at the clinic's intelligent, careful assessment and treatment. I'd add that hospitals in the Twin Cities can also perform daily miracles of teamwork and yes, astonishingly competent nursing. Emergency Room nurses being at the top of the list.
SECOND holiday message: Training that's hands-on and personal. First-hand experience of illness for nurses and doctors. Bring back the clinical model. BUT ALSO FOR TEACHERS, since health care and education belong in one over-lapping category. If White teachers in training are truly going to understand what it means to be African-American in Minnesota, they need to work with classrooms of African-Americans. And they need to be guided by teachers who themselves have learned to walk in the shoes of this least understood community of color. Least understood in this land of the "white" meal, White Christmas and White opportunity. I tried it recently: imagined myself an aging Black woman walking down Grand Avenue, with a limited income, and grandkids to feed. All the treats had a Nordic or Gaelic flavor. Every face I passed was white. I was miles away from family in Mississippi or South Carolina. After years of living in cold country, I still pined for warm Christmases where tinsel was draped over live oaks and palmettos. Where some Santas have brown faces, and chittlins and collard greens are served at, yes, white folks' restaurants. I decided that, next year, even if I had to take the bus, I'll get myself home, really home for Christmas.
He sat at the edge of holiday chat, bent forward as if he wanted to catch the drift, but talking more with his face than his voice. When the subject turned to health, he revealed that he was a nurse. We asked, "What have you noticed from your years of nursing?"
"Want to know the two hardest things?" he answered. We did. "Weight's the first. Every medical condition, every medical emergency is complicated by excessive weight. Everywhere I look, on the street, in hospitals, in fast-food parlors, there's obesity." We nodded in agreement and concern.
"The second," he went on, "is the teaching of nursing. When I was training, first as a nurse, then a nurse anesthetist, 80% of our training was clinical. Nurses learned on the floor to give sponge baths, to administer medication taking care not to over or under dose. We looked at patients' skin, pulled down their eyelids, inspected the inside of their mouths, even casually tested their reflexes as we made them comfortable." We nodded approvingly, remembering how frequently it was the nurses who soothed a fever, popped hemorrhoids back inside the rectum, kept up the regular supply of fluids--either intravenously or by mouth. Doctors would speed in and out, barely noticing the body in the bed, but the nurses felt around.
"Now, too much of nurses' training is by the book. Ph.D's have taken over the training. Too much is in the classroom, as memorization. Even at best, this is insufficiently applied in clinical situations, and once a nurse is actually working, the stuff that was crammed in the head gets confused or fuzzy."
Listening, we quietly determined never to be sick, though lately it seems we're surrounded by seriously ill friends or relatives. Breast cancer here, internal bleeding there, bone deterioration. So far, no mental breakdowns, but wait, yes there are. We tell ourselves it's normal aging, except that normal has such disturbingly individual shapes. Each sufferer tugs at our heart strings and makes our stomachs tighten with anxiety.
After some cogitation, these bits of holiday buzz coalesced toward several simple conclusions: FIRST: smaller and shorter are better. Smaller portions. My mother changed the size of her dinner plates when she and my father began to put on weight. "If you see a full plate, you think you're getting enough," she commented. She out-foxed the belly with the brain.
Add to smaller, shorter. Shorter stays with extended family (especially kids made wild by excitement--it's wearing!) Shorter WALKING distances between home and grocery store, library, work place. Smaller care facilities--as long as certain minimum standards of cleanliness, nutrition and medication monitoring are in place, the essence of good care is regular, hands-on loving kindness. That's easier to deliver in a small facility.
Of course, there are wide exceptions--friends going to the Mayo Clinic for tests, etc., report being amazed at the clinic's intelligent, careful assessment and treatment. I'd add that hospitals in the Twin Cities can also perform daily miracles of teamwork and yes, astonishingly competent nursing. Emergency Room nurses being at the top of the list.
SECOND holiday message: Training that's hands-on and personal. First-hand experience of illness for nurses and doctors. Bring back the clinical model. BUT ALSO FOR TEACHERS, since health care and education belong in one over-lapping category. If White teachers in training are truly going to understand what it means to be African-American in Minnesota, they need to work with classrooms of African-Americans. And they need to be guided by teachers who themselves have learned to walk in the shoes of this least understood community of color. Least understood in this land of the "white" meal, White Christmas and White opportunity. I tried it recently: imagined myself an aging Black woman walking down Grand Avenue, with a limited income, and grandkids to feed. All the treats had a Nordic or Gaelic flavor. Every face I passed was white. I was miles away from family in Mississippi or South Carolina. After years of living in cold country, I still pined for warm Christmases where tinsel was draped over live oaks and palmettos. Where some Santas have brown faces, and chittlins and collard greens are served at, yes, white folks' restaurants. I decided that, next year, even if I had to take the bus, I'll get myself home, really home for Christmas.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Margotlog: The Man by the Freeway
Margotlog: The Man by the Freeway
He was carrying a sign, standing beside the inside turn before you entered the freeway. I didn't have to read the sign; I knew what he wanted. Money for food.
A few months ago someone who looked like a woman with very short hair but might have been a small man approached me while I walked in our neighborhood. Each time this person asked me if I knew somewhere she could get free food. This put me in a mild panic, I mumbled something and walked quickly away.
I never carry money with me when I walk. I don't want to give a potential drug addict money that might go to buy drugs.
As I thought over these brief encounters, in the midst of unemployment even among our friends, and news briefs about families needing food, I decided to buy three gift cards from a fast food chain not far from us. I gave one card to my husband and asked him to keep it in his car in case he passed someone asking for food.
This morning on our way to a family Christmas gift exchange and brunch across the river, we passed the man with the sign.
This season every year I feel a little sick: we have so much. As we stopped for the light before crossing the intersection and entering the freeway, I felt a strong need to give this gift card to the man standing beside the freeway.
My husband loves Christmas. He grew up poor, the son of a missionary/preacher first in China, then in small Congregational Churches in the U.S. South and Midwest. His parents were almost always more liberal in their politics than the parishioners. His father was asked to leave several churches.
My husband has spent his adulthood attempting to make up for the lack of abundance in his childhood. I don't know any other adult who is so enthralled by Christmas. He wakes up in the dark and stares at the presents under the tree, not quite believing they are there. Now that he has grandsons (they are the youngest generation in the family), he is lit by an inner fire. He was in a rush this morning, to bring Christmas to these boys. Never a placid, easy driver, he was truly ablaze to cross that river and begin the dazzle,
When I pointed out the man and said, "Let's find the food gift card," we were in the lane leading straight to the freeway. Not the turn lane where the man stood. The light was about to change, we had the gift card in hand, but at the last minute, my husband said, "No, it's too dangerous," meaning he didn't want to move left into the turn lane, take the time to pause and hand the card out the window, and then turn left. This would have taken us several blocks out of our way.
We sped through the green light onto the freeway. Immediately, I was deeply troubled. Angry at him for his haste, angry at myself for not insisting that help the man, and torn with grief at how much we have.
Christmas carols were playing on the radio: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Mary, meek and mild, brought to earth a little child," "Come, let us adore Him."
We had just been talking about his parents, not so much their missionary work, their lives of Christian goodness, but simply themselves, as they were when I met them, well past middle age, gentle but sometimes goofy spirits. The kind of people who wear clothes until then are threadbare because they would rather give money to those who have less. Such generosity can sometimes look like poverty and can embarrass grown-up children who may themselves have been ridiculed because they looked poor when they were younger.
During the twenty minutes it took for us to cross the river and reach my son-in-law's house, I wept. When I didn't speak, my husband asked me what was wrong. I couldn't believe he didn't know. "We have so much," I said. "It would have taken only a few extra minute to go out of our way and help a stranger who was hungry."
It seems to me, as I rather bleakly look back over this missed chance, that we are quite typical. We write checks to good causes, we sympathize with friends and even strangers in trouble, but we rarely approach this kind of trouble face to face. It would require a freedom and the moral courage we don't seem to have. We'd have to put aside our comforts and certainties. Risk rebuff or ostracism. I know only a few who venture into such actions alone, and they have an awkward, even childlike caste to their characters. I have rarely allowed myself to be so naked.
Yet what I kept repeating to myself this morning still echoes: "We have so much." I want the next time to have resolve and confidence. To go out of my way for what I know, instinctively, is the right thing to do. I want to give away my comfort and let myself come face to face with need. Maybe this childlikeness I've noticed in those who do so is joy, the best kind because it's given away.
He was carrying a sign, standing beside the inside turn before you entered the freeway. I didn't have to read the sign; I knew what he wanted. Money for food.
A few months ago someone who looked like a woman with very short hair but might have been a small man approached me while I walked in our neighborhood. Each time this person asked me if I knew somewhere she could get free food. This put me in a mild panic, I mumbled something and walked quickly away.
I never carry money with me when I walk. I don't want to give a potential drug addict money that might go to buy drugs.
As I thought over these brief encounters, in the midst of unemployment even among our friends, and news briefs about families needing food, I decided to buy three gift cards from a fast food chain not far from us. I gave one card to my husband and asked him to keep it in his car in case he passed someone asking for food.
This morning on our way to a family Christmas gift exchange and brunch across the river, we passed the man with the sign.
This season every year I feel a little sick: we have so much. As we stopped for the light before crossing the intersection and entering the freeway, I felt a strong need to give this gift card to the man standing beside the freeway.
My husband loves Christmas. He grew up poor, the son of a missionary/preacher first in China, then in small Congregational Churches in the U.S. South and Midwest. His parents were almost always more liberal in their politics than the parishioners. His father was asked to leave several churches.
My husband has spent his adulthood attempting to make up for the lack of abundance in his childhood. I don't know any other adult who is so enthralled by Christmas. He wakes up in the dark and stares at the presents under the tree, not quite believing they are there. Now that he has grandsons (they are the youngest generation in the family), he is lit by an inner fire. He was in a rush this morning, to bring Christmas to these boys. Never a placid, easy driver, he was truly ablaze to cross that river and begin the dazzle,
When I pointed out the man and said, "Let's find the food gift card," we were in the lane leading straight to the freeway. Not the turn lane where the man stood. The light was about to change, we had the gift card in hand, but at the last minute, my husband said, "No, it's too dangerous," meaning he didn't want to move left into the turn lane, take the time to pause and hand the card out the window, and then turn left. This would have taken us several blocks out of our way.
We sped through the green light onto the freeway. Immediately, I was deeply troubled. Angry at him for his haste, angry at myself for not insisting that help the man, and torn with grief at how much we have.
Christmas carols were playing on the radio: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "Mary, meek and mild, brought to earth a little child," "Come, let us adore Him."
We had just been talking about his parents, not so much their missionary work, their lives of Christian goodness, but simply themselves, as they were when I met them, well past middle age, gentle but sometimes goofy spirits. The kind of people who wear clothes until then are threadbare because they would rather give money to those who have less. Such generosity can sometimes look like poverty and can embarrass grown-up children who may themselves have been ridiculed because they looked poor when they were younger.
During the twenty minutes it took for us to cross the river and reach my son-in-law's house, I wept. When I didn't speak, my husband asked me what was wrong. I couldn't believe he didn't know. "We have so much," I said. "It would have taken only a few extra minute to go out of our way and help a stranger who was hungry."
It seems to me, as I rather bleakly look back over this missed chance, that we are quite typical. We write checks to good causes, we sympathize with friends and even strangers in trouble, but we rarely approach this kind of trouble face to face. It would require a freedom and the moral courage we don't seem to have. We'd have to put aside our comforts and certainties. Risk rebuff or ostracism. I know only a few who venture into such actions alone, and they have an awkward, even childlike caste to their characters. I have rarely allowed myself to be so naked.
Yet what I kept repeating to myself this morning still echoes: "We have so much." I want the next time to have resolve and confidence. To go out of my way for what I know, instinctively, is the right thing to do. I want to give away my comfort and let myself come face to face with need. Maybe this childlikeness I've noticed in those who do so is joy, the best kind because it's given away.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Margotlog: A Reluctant Environmentalist
Margotlog: A Reluctant Environmentalist
Well, not entirely reluctant. I "submit" my pre-formed letters protesting delisting this, fracking that. I contribute almost all the funds I allocate to "charity" to help hungry downtrodden people and protect global lands and seas from pollution, degradation, and ruin. Once in a while I even phone up the president of the United States, my senators and congresswoman. But I'm not usually an in-your-face environmentalist.
Except for helping trees. Somewhere in my genetic background a forest-dweller named trees as our people. Whether the huge spreading live oaks of South Carolina or Minnesota's pointed spruce and feathery white pines, pin oaks that whisper in their winter leaves and maples that turn their dresses silver in the wind--all are my family. I'm not wild about the ash the city of Saint Paul planted along our boulevard, but I tend it like a cousin, water and fertilize it, and now that its tribe are troubled with ash borers, I have it treated.
When we first moved into this typical city house, built in 1912 on a lot longer than it is wide, I almost immediately began planting trees because it was hot in the summer as we faced south and bare of green in winter. I remembered the cooling effect of Carolina live oaks shading front porches. No live oaks in Minnesota so we dug holes for a Russian olive and a honey locust. This brought up to three the number of trees in our front yard until the Arbor Day Foundation donated a spruce seedling, making four.
Filling the larger back yard was fun. My in-laws sent home with us from Tennessee three maple seedlings dug up from their rambling domain. These all went into the back yard along with more spruce seedlings, a white pine, and a flowering crab. Sometimes standing across the street and looking at our house and lot, I have to laugh: we sport a mini forest between two savannahs on either side. The Minnesota natives who bracket us want little to do with trees. Their lawns are bare of anything but summer flowers. Probably they have in their souls the "prairie effect," just as I do the forest.
On behalf of our neighborhood trees, I can become rather pushy. "Water your trees in the drought," say the handouts I stuff in neighbors' mailboxes. "Put the hose a bit away from the trunk and let a slow flow go for an hour or so." Since we moved into this neighborhood, there have been an inordinate number of dry years. This past season, we're not only had a dry summer, but a long long dry fall. Already I'm plotting my strategy, infused with Paul Douglas's support. He's the StarTribune's weatherman, and has already urged "Water your trees," in many September and October weather forecasts. "Especially evergreens."
One thing I discovered as a tree lover and preserver (this also goes for perennial plants and bushes): mulching in all seasons helps preserve moisture and prevent the worst that winter can do to roots. This "worst" isn't just deep cold, it's the freezing and thawing that happens on either side of deep. Mulching moderates soil temperature, and over the years, the leaf mulch I apply (having a passion for raking and mounding leaves), has helped keep the soil from becoming flinty. We have naturally beautiful heavy loam in our neighborhood as part of an ancient oak forest. (Think acorns decaying into richness decade after decade.) But I want to add my bit.
Consider yourself told: the reluctant environmentalist has shed her skin and turned instructor. Mind your trees, my people. Trees are the protectors of our world.
Well, not entirely reluctant. I "submit" my pre-formed letters protesting delisting this, fracking that. I contribute almost all the funds I allocate to "charity" to help hungry downtrodden people and protect global lands and seas from pollution, degradation, and ruin. Once in a while I even phone up the president of the United States, my senators and congresswoman. But I'm not usually an in-your-face environmentalist.
Except for helping trees. Somewhere in my genetic background a forest-dweller named trees as our people. Whether the huge spreading live oaks of South Carolina or Minnesota's pointed spruce and feathery white pines, pin oaks that whisper in their winter leaves and maples that turn their dresses silver in the wind--all are my family. I'm not wild about the ash the city of Saint Paul planted along our boulevard, but I tend it like a cousin, water and fertilize it, and now that its tribe are troubled with ash borers, I have it treated.
When we first moved into this typical city house, built in 1912 on a lot longer than it is wide, I almost immediately began planting trees because it was hot in the summer as we faced south and bare of green in winter. I remembered the cooling effect of Carolina live oaks shading front porches. No live oaks in Minnesota so we dug holes for a Russian olive and a honey locust. This brought up to three the number of trees in our front yard until the Arbor Day Foundation donated a spruce seedling, making four.
Filling the larger back yard was fun. My in-laws sent home with us from Tennessee three maple seedlings dug up from their rambling domain. These all went into the back yard along with more spruce seedlings, a white pine, and a flowering crab. Sometimes standing across the street and looking at our house and lot, I have to laugh: we sport a mini forest between two savannahs on either side. The Minnesota natives who bracket us want little to do with trees. Their lawns are bare of anything but summer flowers. Probably they have in their souls the "prairie effect," just as I do the forest.
On behalf of our neighborhood trees, I can become rather pushy. "Water your trees in the drought," say the handouts I stuff in neighbors' mailboxes. "Put the hose a bit away from the trunk and let a slow flow go for an hour or so." Since we moved into this neighborhood, there have been an inordinate number of dry years. This past season, we're not only had a dry summer, but a long long dry fall. Already I'm plotting my strategy, infused with Paul Douglas's support. He's the StarTribune's weatherman, and has already urged "Water your trees," in many September and October weather forecasts. "Especially evergreens."
One thing I discovered as a tree lover and preserver (this also goes for perennial plants and bushes): mulching in all seasons helps preserve moisture and prevent the worst that winter can do to roots. This "worst" isn't just deep cold, it's the freezing and thawing that happens on either side of deep. Mulching moderates soil temperature, and over the years, the leaf mulch I apply (having a passion for raking and mounding leaves), has helped keep the soil from becoming flinty. We have naturally beautiful heavy loam in our neighborhood as part of an ancient oak forest. (Think acorns decaying into richness decade after decade.) But I want to add my bit.
Consider yourself told: the reluctant environmentalist has shed her skin and turned instructor. Mind your trees, my people. Trees are the protectors of our world.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Margotlog: Mother Christmas
Margotlog: Mother Christmas
To some, such a notion might seem like heresy, but lately, I'm repositioning myself vis-a-vis the canonical figures of Christmas. I want to add a Mother Christmas. No, not in Father's sleigh. He can soar with his huge pack of toys and goodies down whatever chimney will allow. Tight spaces make me nervous. I want to give her a clam shell conveyance, drawn by sky-dolphins all harnessed with stars. If live dolphins can lift drowning mariners from the sea, their souls in heaven can easily transport Mother Christmas on her clam shell (hints of ropey-haired Venus).
She doesn't carry a pack, but a dainty purse, for her gifts are celestial, little touches of fairy dust. (I know, she's beginning to resemble Pinocchio's Blue Fairy.) She walks on transparent fur-lined slippers (Cinderella grown up) across snowy or sandy fields, into huts and mansions, to sit beside the trashy, nasty, pained and sorrowing. Listen, Christmas isn't only for good little girls and boys, but the bad and sad ones along with their grown-up selves. Think of her as the kindest, most lovely white-haired teacher you ever met, and you'll be close to her charm.
Her skin has an array of hues which change in reflections of those before her. She is brown, black, tan, pale. And her cloak is a motley of feathers and fur, leaves and grass, quartz and coal. No point in frightening those who meet her for the first time. She envelopes her visits with favorite scents--baking cinnamon and cloves, fresh sea air, a spicy barbeque, coconut milk, the fishiest of fish.
As for gifts, silence is the first. The silence necessary to hear the quiet rumblings of deepest grief and aching desire. This Christmas she hears the despair of a gypsy family in Romania whose home, lawfully built on a parcel of land, is threatened by the return of wealthy former owners ousted by an outmoded communism. She listens to the whispers of children who've walked with drought-starved families in Africa toward the mirage of plenty that retreats each time they approach it. She cradles Black children in the wealthiest White country in the world whose well-meaning teachers can't erase their own ignorance of racism.
Silence goes a long way if it's sprinkled with the fairy dust of compassion, but it only fills the toe of a stocking. So Mother Christmas must cook up a whole passle of notions and remedies which extend far across the years into hearts and minds pulled tight with refusal. She must open them to think wisely beyond their borders, to resist beliefs based on privilege, to embrace what is less but ultimately more. To reuse and remake. If you think Father Christmas has millions of lists to check for who is naughty and nice, consider Mother's undertaking. She's got the whole world in her hands, not to mention the winds and rains, the seas and lands, the critters and trees. This Christmas Eve, I'm going to set out a plate and cup for her, and under the cookies and milk, I'm going to slip the extra I might have spent on baubles. Along with that, my thanks for all she has accomplished this year, and a promise to heft part of the job myself. To write and speak and act. Given her gi-normous work, it's the least I can do.
To some, such a notion might seem like heresy, but lately, I'm repositioning myself vis-a-vis the canonical figures of Christmas. I want to add a Mother Christmas. No, not in Father's sleigh. He can soar with his huge pack of toys and goodies down whatever chimney will allow. Tight spaces make me nervous. I want to give her a clam shell conveyance, drawn by sky-dolphins all harnessed with stars. If live dolphins can lift drowning mariners from the sea, their souls in heaven can easily transport Mother Christmas on her clam shell (hints of ropey-haired Venus).
She doesn't carry a pack, but a dainty purse, for her gifts are celestial, little touches of fairy dust. (I know, she's beginning to resemble Pinocchio's Blue Fairy.) She walks on transparent fur-lined slippers (Cinderella grown up) across snowy or sandy fields, into huts and mansions, to sit beside the trashy, nasty, pained and sorrowing. Listen, Christmas isn't only for good little girls and boys, but the bad and sad ones along with their grown-up selves. Think of her as the kindest, most lovely white-haired teacher you ever met, and you'll be close to her charm.
Her skin has an array of hues which change in reflections of those before her. She is brown, black, tan, pale. And her cloak is a motley of feathers and fur, leaves and grass, quartz and coal. No point in frightening those who meet her for the first time. She envelopes her visits with favorite scents--baking cinnamon and cloves, fresh sea air, a spicy barbeque, coconut milk, the fishiest of fish.
As for gifts, silence is the first. The silence necessary to hear the quiet rumblings of deepest grief and aching desire. This Christmas she hears the despair of a gypsy family in Romania whose home, lawfully built on a parcel of land, is threatened by the return of wealthy former owners ousted by an outmoded communism. She listens to the whispers of children who've walked with drought-starved families in Africa toward the mirage of plenty that retreats each time they approach it. She cradles Black children in the wealthiest White country in the world whose well-meaning teachers can't erase their own ignorance of racism.
Silence goes a long way if it's sprinkled with the fairy dust of compassion, but it only fills the toe of a stocking. So Mother Christmas must cook up a whole passle of notions and remedies which extend far across the years into hearts and minds pulled tight with refusal. She must open them to think wisely beyond their borders, to resist beliefs based on privilege, to embrace what is less but ultimately more. To reuse and remake. If you think Father Christmas has millions of lists to check for who is naughty and nice, consider Mother's undertaking. She's got the whole world in her hands, not to mention the winds and rains, the seas and lands, the critters and trees. This Christmas Eve, I'm going to set out a plate and cup for her, and under the cookies and milk, I'm going to slip the extra I might have spent on baubles. Along with that, my thanks for all she has accomplished this year, and a promise to heft part of the job myself. To write and speak and act. Given her gi-normous work, it's the least I can do.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Star at the Top of the Tree
Margotlog: The Star at the Top of the Tree
It's very northern of us, this tree-in-the-house at Christmas. I know, there are Celtic precedents, something about mistletoe, holly and the Druids, but the Christmas tree itself came from Nordic folk around the Baltic Sea, worshipping what remained green throughout the long, dark, cold winter. Germans, my mother's family included, set their trees up on Christmas Eve, which in the Roman Catholic tradition, remains Adam and Eve's feast day. Some of the early German trees were hung with one tantalizing apple.
Ours for years was some kind of fir, usually bought from an outdoor lot beside a hardware store or even from the Boy Scouts. We hoisted it atop the car and drove home with it, our version of the hunter's prize. Early in this second marriage, we took our young kids out to a tree farm and hacked one down. It was hard work, all done by already worn-out parents. But those self-harvested trees brought into our lives empty birds' nests, which we took as wonderful symbols of fecundity and joy. They became our first communal ornaments, passed down and still displayed in our now fake tree.
It's interesting, even challenging, making a union of two quite different traditions--mine and my second husband's. His two kids, my one, and all the ornaments and associations that we'd already acquired. Now with the kids all grown, and only us aging adults to tend the tradition, I stand rather bemused before our fake tree lighted with bright blue and white LED lights. There hang floppy white plastic catfish with long whiskers and bright beads--holdovers from his parents' years as missionaries in China. From my parents' early Depression trees have come balls with much of the color worn off--now faded blue, silver, green. I couldn't bear to throw them away after my mother died. I also kept funny pipecleaner men in stripped pants and bowler hats--who knows their origin or what they signified.
There among the thick plastic branches hang small red cherries. Last evening driving down Summit Avenue, I asked my daughter if she remembered buying a living Norfolk Island pine covered with these little balls, the first year I moved out of the first marriage house. She has no recollection of those years, she says. But even now I can see the small tree bravely fronting an increasingly desperate living room, its little bright cherries twirling in the furnace heat.
Dotted up and around our current tree are expensive ornaments given by affectionate, well-heeled relatives and friends--a tum-tum-tum drum with guilded ribbon up and down its sides; a fiercely snouted hedgehog dressed in mob-cap and old lace; a tiny mouse in top hat sitting in its own white rocking chair. Oddly enough, I can't remember their givers, only the yearly sensation that they must reappear as promises of continued beneficence.
Finally up and down perch dozens of birds. Our first birds' nests fit my fascination with birds so perfectly it seemed preordained. Especially in winter, feeding and providing fresh, warmed water for outdoor birds keeps me from desperation. After all, my earliest remembered Christmases were in Charleston, South Carolina, where winters are dark, but only dampishly cold, not ever frozen, never. And my parents' last backyard drew wonderful flocks of migrants--waxwings, robins, and resident cardinals, mocking birds and jays, chickadees and nuthatches, plus an occasional hawk, not to mention in the swamp just out of sight a heron or two. For our tree the Audubon Society has kindly provided (for a yearly membership) wonderfully bright, stained-glass bird ornaments, and we have purchased tiny feathered creatures who sit so pertly at the end of twigs, I expect them to cock their heads and sing.
It is all about hope and sustenance in dark times. We've never had much of a star atop our tree, though there is one, surrounded by a bevy of wasted angels, retrieved from the dump of my parents' ornaments. With paper wings and sequined skirts, they have sustained another kind of fluttering hope for over sixty years. I can't imagine ever "doing over" the tree in decorator colors. What lives on are its associations, and the revival of winter hope from year to year.
It's very northern of us, this tree-in-the-house at Christmas. I know, there are Celtic precedents, something about mistletoe, holly and the Druids, but the Christmas tree itself came from Nordic folk around the Baltic Sea, worshipping what remained green throughout the long, dark, cold winter. Germans, my mother's family included, set their trees up on Christmas Eve, which in the Roman Catholic tradition, remains Adam and Eve's feast day. Some of the early German trees were hung with one tantalizing apple.
Ours for years was some kind of fir, usually bought from an outdoor lot beside a hardware store or even from the Boy Scouts. We hoisted it atop the car and drove home with it, our version of the hunter's prize. Early in this second marriage, we took our young kids out to a tree farm and hacked one down. It was hard work, all done by already worn-out parents. But those self-harvested trees brought into our lives empty birds' nests, which we took as wonderful symbols of fecundity and joy. They became our first communal ornaments, passed down and still displayed in our now fake tree.
It's interesting, even challenging, making a union of two quite different traditions--mine and my second husband's. His two kids, my one, and all the ornaments and associations that we'd already acquired. Now with the kids all grown, and only us aging adults to tend the tradition, I stand rather bemused before our fake tree lighted with bright blue and white LED lights. There hang floppy white plastic catfish with long whiskers and bright beads--holdovers from his parents' years as missionaries in China. From my parents' early Depression trees have come balls with much of the color worn off--now faded blue, silver, green. I couldn't bear to throw them away after my mother died. I also kept funny pipecleaner men in stripped pants and bowler hats--who knows their origin or what they signified.
There among the thick plastic branches hang small red cherries. Last evening driving down Summit Avenue, I asked my daughter if she remembered buying a living Norfolk Island pine covered with these little balls, the first year I moved out of the first marriage house. She has no recollection of those years, she says. But even now I can see the small tree bravely fronting an increasingly desperate living room, its little bright cherries twirling in the furnace heat.
Dotted up and around our current tree are expensive ornaments given by affectionate, well-heeled relatives and friends--a tum-tum-tum drum with guilded ribbon up and down its sides; a fiercely snouted hedgehog dressed in mob-cap and old lace; a tiny mouse in top hat sitting in its own white rocking chair. Oddly enough, I can't remember their givers, only the yearly sensation that they must reappear as promises of continued beneficence.
Finally up and down perch dozens of birds. Our first birds' nests fit my fascination with birds so perfectly it seemed preordained. Especially in winter, feeding and providing fresh, warmed water for outdoor birds keeps me from desperation. After all, my earliest remembered Christmases were in Charleston, South Carolina, where winters are dark, but only dampishly cold, not ever frozen, never. And my parents' last backyard drew wonderful flocks of migrants--waxwings, robins, and resident cardinals, mocking birds and jays, chickadees and nuthatches, plus an occasional hawk, not to mention in the swamp just out of sight a heron or two. For our tree the Audubon Society has kindly provided (for a yearly membership) wonderfully bright, stained-glass bird ornaments, and we have purchased tiny feathered creatures who sit so pertly at the end of twigs, I expect them to cock their heads and sing.
It is all about hope and sustenance in dark times. We've never had much of a star atop our tree, though there is one, surrounded by a bevy of wasted angels, retrieved from the dump of my parents' ornaments. With paper wings and sequined skirts, they have sustained another kind of fluttering hope for over sixty years. I can't imagine ever "doing over" the tree in decorator colors. What lives on are its associations, and the revival of winter hope from year to year.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Margotlog: Bat Attack
Margotlog: Bat Attack
I know, we are supposed to treasure our fellow creatures on this steadily shrinking planet. But there are limits. My limits start with bats. Pipistrelle from French or Italian; ours are probably myotis. From our first year in this tall old house, we have had bats in the attic. The heavily taped tiny attic door at the top of the third-floor stairs attests to my first attempts to keep them between the walls. Yesterday once again I failed.
You'd think with three cats, our problem would be solved. Not so. At the first swoosh, they're under a bed. It was early, probably 8 a.m. Husband and I groggily drinking morning coffee when lo and behold, across the living room fluttered a winged thing. "It's a bat," croaked the husband. We were slow at that hour--putting hand to broom took a minute or two. (I'm good at fetching, worthless at capturing.) By then, the creature had retreated, probably up the stairs, back toward home.
I don't want to hate them and in the abstract I realize they belong just as much as I do. They were, after all, here between the attic walls before we arrived. Lately, I'm also disturbed by the die-off of bat colonies in the eastern U.S. from a fungus called "white nose disease." A million or so bats gone, with some subspecies threatened with extinction. Recently a newspaper article mentioned the genome of the causative fungus had been deciphered, leading to hope for an cure. Evidently European bats can harbor the fungus without dying. No doubt they brought it to our shores--flew the Atlantic? Sped over in a cargo of Turkish coffee? Spanish dates? Italian olive oil?
Over the quarter century we've lived in this Saint Paul house, we've probably maimed, murdered, or simply helped escape at last a dozen bats. A few got thrown outside in winter. One was eased into a trash can in February. The next day, husband released the lid for another load of garbage. Lo and behold out flew a winged thing. OMG!
Last year we put up a bat house. I seriously doubt it has been given the once-over. The critters like our "between the walls" abode. I can hear them scratching and sometimes even peeping when I'm writing away on the third floor. Usually I just sigh and carry on, hoping no wing or snout will show itself emerging from a hole as thin as a dime.
My fear has abated from its original absolute terror--screaming, running from the room with head covered, hiding in closets until the "bat trapper" had done his job. Lately I watch to make sure I'm not in its line of flight, then hope the trapper can capture it within minutes, rather than the hours it took yesterday. Bat first sighted at 8 a.m., captured and released into the cold around 10 p.m. I haven't been outside to see what creeps. Mostly I d0n't want to know, yet am drawn in terrible fascination. I hope it died of exposure.
The cause of this fear inevitably comes back to me. Years ago, soon after arriving in Minneapolis and buying the likewise tall house of my first marriage, I awoke in early morning dark to a scratching and clawing at the headboard. Then in total consternation I realized the thing was inside my pillowcase. Leaping out of bed, I screamed for help. Husband jumped up, whacked the pillow and its case many times against the floor. Finally he dumped the contents in the toilet. The pillow slumped to one side. When we looked into the bowl, there floated the bloody little body of the family hamster.
It was flushed in a flash, but I was reduced to a voiceless crouch for many minutes. When I could finally stand, we looked at each other. No way could we admit to this rodent-a-cide. That afternoon when the kid was in nursery school, I visited the pet store and bought another hamster. Placed in its cage, it was supposed to start speeding around its wheel. Nothing doing. As I watched, I realized that the poor thing had a stump for one of its back legs.
As I write this, I'm beginning to breathe shallowly. It took the kid months to realize that "Freundlich" was wounded. We blamed it on the wheel. I have never quite recovered.
I know, we are supposed to treasure our fellow creatures on this steadily shrinking planet. But there are limits. My limits start with bats. Pipistrelle from French or Italian; ours are probably myotis. From our first year in this tall old house, we have had bats in the attic. The heavily taped tiny attic door at the top of the third-floor stairs attests to my first attempts to keep them between the walls. Yesterday once again I failed.
You'd think with three cats, our problem would be solved. Not so. At the first swoosh, they're under a bed. It was early, probably 8 a.m. Husband and I groggily drinking morning coffee when lo and behold, across the living room fluttered a winged thing. "It's a bat," croaked the husband. We were slow at that hour--putting hand to broom took a minute or two. (I'm good at fetching, worthless at capturing.) By then, the creature had retreated, probably up the stairs, back toward home.
I don't want to hate them and in the abstract I realize they belong just as much as I do. They were, after all, here between the attic walls before we arrived. Lately, I'm also disturbed by the die-off of bat colonies in the eastern U.S. from a fungus called "white nose disease." A million or so bats gone, with some subspecies threatened with extinction. Recently a newspaper article mentioned the genome of the causative fungus had been deciphered, leading to hope for an cure. Evidently European bats can harbor the fungus without dying. No doubt they brought it to our shores--flew the Atlantic? Sped over in a cargo of Turkish coffee? Spanish dates? Italian olive oil?
Over the quarter century we've lived in this Saint Paul house, we've probably maimed, murdered, or simply helped escape at last a dozen bats. A few got thrown outside in winter. One was eased into a trash can in February. The next day, husband released the lid for another load of garbage. Lo and behold out flew a winged thing. OMG!
Last year we put up a bat house. I seriously doubt it has been given the once-over. The critters like our "between the walls" abode. I can hear them scratching and sometimes even peeping when I'm writing away on the third floor. Usually I just sigh and carry on, hoping no wing or snout will show itself emerging from a hole as thin as a dime.
My fear has abated from its original absolute terror--screaming, running from the room with head covered, hiding in closets until the "bat trapper" had done his job. Lately I watch to make sure I'm not in its line of flight, then hope the trapper can capture it within minutes, rather than the hours it took yesterday. Bat first sighted at 8 a.m., captured and released into the cold around 10 p.m. I haven't been outside to see what creeps. Mostly I d0n't want to know, yet am drawn in terrible fascination. I hope it died of exposure.
The cause of this fear inevitably comes back to me. Years ago, soon after arriving in Minneapolis and buying the likewise tall house of my first marriage, I awoke in early morning dark to a scratching and clawing at the headboard. Then in total consternation I realized the thing was inside my pillowcase. Leaping out of bed, I screamed for help. Husband jumped up, whacked the pillow and its case many times against the floor. Finally he dumped the contents in the toilet. The pillow slumped to one side. When we looked into the bowl, there floated the bloody little body of the family hamster.
It was flushed in a flash, but I was reduced to a voiceless crouch for many minutes. When I could finally stand, we looked at each other. No way could we admit to this rodent-a-cide. That afternoon when the kid was in nursery school, I visited the pet store and bought another hamster. Placed in its cage, it was supposed to start speeding around its wheel. Nothing doing. As I watched, I realized that the poor thing had a stump for one of its back legs.
As I write this, I'm beginning to breathe shallowly. It took the kid months to realize that "Freundlich" was wounded. We blamed it on the wheel. I have never quite recovered.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Margotlog: Shy-Drager Dearth
Margotlog: Shy-Drager Death
It's not a Star Wars character, nor the name of a deep sea creature. It's a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the central autonomic nervous system. It's caused (as much as is known) by long exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It's a major player in Mary Rockcastle's new novel, In Caddis Wood.
Over the weekend I dipped into DuPont land, better known as Delaware. Beautiful country with flat plains and copses of trees, plus one of my favorite bird-watching spots in the country: the National Wildlife Refuge called Bombay Hook. There my adorable oldest living relative Eleonora and I watched hundreds of ducks and Canada geese paddle in tidal pools, a few great blue heron hunch at the edge of swift-flowing tidal creeks, and a weird fox, surrounded by wary Japanese bird-watchers, cross and recross the road. A sign at the beginning of the refuge warns against getting too close to the resident foxes: they may have rabies.
"If we but knew when we delve and hew..." sings Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Irish poet. Mary Rockcastle's novel is set in the Wisconsin woods and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. It's always curious and strange to read the works of friends--there are familiar names and places (such as the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus) which are lifted from their usual associations and burnished in a fictional world. The family in Rockcastle's novel is struggling with multiple accidents and diseases, yet their world is lush with artistic discovery, creature comforts, and with Rockcastle's evocation of Upper Midwest woodland plants and climate, as well as the fate of Captive Island near Fort Myers, Florida, after a hurricane.
I honor her work, subtly revealing how choices to hack and hew have long-term effects on health and happiness. Carl, the father, has torn open the woods in front of the elaborate edifice he, as an architect, has built for the family in Caddis Woods. There he's planted what could pass for an English garden, full of roses. Casually year after year he sprays the roses with pesticides and herbicides. As the novel opens, he's beginning to experience the onset of Shy-Drager, though we don't find out what's really wrong with him until the middle of the book. With consummate skill, the author takes us into his disintegrating yet fantastical world with its whisps of recurring ghosts, its strange blackouts and its sudden weakness. Before he loses sight and speech, his experience of the natural world becomes acute, beautiful, and strange. What is certainly at heart a cautionary tale becomes also an evocation of an altered state, the last gift of life to a talented artist.
When he and his wife, a poet, tear out the rose garden and resoil and seed the plot with native prairie plants, I breathe a sigh of relief. Yet, the author withholds judgment. She is a tender chronicler of their troubled yet enduring love, as well as the many attendant family lives they touch. By the end, a project of remediation--to render useful a dump named Pig's Eye on the Mississippi--becomes another reminder of human skill at curing what humans have deeply tainted.
As I drive away from Delaware and catch Highway 95 toward the Philadelphia airport, I'm reminded of efforts to initiate "fracking" in the Delaware River basin and Chesapeake Bay. Fracking is shorthand for extracting natural gas from shale buried deep in the earth. The process not only destroys the surface growth and soil--thousands of acres of boreal forest have been upended in northern Alberta, Canada--but it uses an enormous amount of water, which then becomes tainted with heavy metals and other contaminants. I'm completely and utterly opposed to this process anywhere, but especially in a rich tidal ecosystem such as the Delaware River Basin and Chesapeake Bay. I want Bombay Hook and its birds and animals to enjoy a healthy rest stop, and I want my loving Eleonore to live our her days without the threat of new environmental contaminants. Not to mention the young men and women who take care of her, and their children, and children's children.
We need a stronger, more ecologically sound energy policy, here and globally.
It's not a Star Wars character, nor the name of a deep sea creature. It's a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the central autonomic nervous system. It's caused (as much as is known) by long exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It's a major player in Mary Rockcastle's new novel, In Caddis Wood.
Over the weekend I dipped into DuPont land, better known as Delaware. Beautiful country with flat plains and copses of trees, plus one of my favorite bird-watching spots in the country: the National Wildlife Refuge called Bombay Hook. There my adorable oldest living relative Eleonora and I watched hundreds of ducks and Canada geese paddle in tidal pools, a few great blue heron hunch at the edge of swift-flowing tidal creeks, and a weird fox, surrounded by wary Japanese bird-watchers, cross and recross the road. A sign at the beginning of the refuge warns against getting too close to the resident foxes: they may have rabies.
"If we but knew when we delve and hew..." sings Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Irish poet. Mary Rockcastle's novel is set in the Wisconsin woods and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. It's always curious and strange to read the works of friends--there are familiar names and places (such as the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus) which are lifted from their usual associations and burnished in a fictional world. The family in Rockcastle's novel is struggling with multiple accidents and diseases, yet their world is lush with artistic discovery, creature comforts, and with Rockcastle's evocation of Upper Midwest woodland plants and climate, as well as the fate of Captive Island near Fort Myers, Florida, after a hurricane.
I honor her work, subtly revealing how choices to hack and hew have long-term effects on health and happiness. Carl, the father, has torn open the woods in front of the elaborate edifice he, as an architect, has built for the family in Caddis Woods. There he's planted what could pass for an English garden, full of roses. Casually year after year he sprays the roses with pesticides and herbicides. As the novel opens, he's beginning to experience the onset of Shy-Drager, though we don't find out what's really wrong with him until the middle of the book. With consummate skill, the author takes us into his disintegrating yet fantastical world with its whisps of recurring ghosts, its strange blackouts and its sudden weakness. Before he loses sight and speech, his experience of the natural world becomes acute, beautiful, and strange. What is certainly at heart a cautionary tale becomes also an evocation of an altered state, the last gift of life to a talented artist.
When he and his wife, a poet, tear out the rose garden and resoil and seed the plot with native prairie plants, I breathe a sigh of relief. Yet, the author withholds judgment. She is a tender chronicler of their troubled yet enduring love, as well as the many attendant family lives they touch. By the end, a project of remediation--to render useful a dump named Pig's Eye on the Mississippi--becomes another reminder of human skill at curing what humans have deeply tainted.
As I drive away from Delaware and catch Highway 95 toward the Philadelphia airport, I'm reminded of efforts to initiate "fracking" in the Delaware River basin and Chesapeake Bay. Fracking is shorthand for extracting natural gas from shale buried deep in the earth. The process not only destroys the surface growth and soil--thousands of acres of boreal forest have been upended in northern Alberta, Canada--but it uses an enormous amount of water, which then becomes tainted with heavy metals and other contaminants. I'm completely and utterly opposed to this process anywhere, but especially in a rich tidal ecosystem such as the Delaware River Basin and Chesapeake Bay. I want Bombay Hook and its birds and animals to enjoy a healthy rest stop, and I want my loving Eleonore to live our her days without the threat of new environmental contaminants. Not to mention the young men and women who take care of her, and their children, and children's children.
We need a stronger, more ecologically sound energy policy, here and globally.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Margotlog: Parent Substitutes
Margotlog: Parent Substitutes
When the primary ones are gone, those lucky of us find subsitutes. Mine is a 94-year-old second cousin which means she is my father's first cousin, younger than he by eight years, and much much longer lived. Eleanora has been Eleanor to her lifetime American friends, but since she's reached her "maturity," she's allowed the final Italian "a" to reappear as it was on her birth certificate in 1917. Born to my great aunt Josephine, my grandmother's youngest sister, Eleanora was the oldest of three sisters (the girls) who lived down the street from my father and his three brothers (the boys). In fact, Eleanora's earliest memory is of sitting on the curb in front of her house with the youngest of the "boys," Frankie, and telling him, "I have another sister." Since my earliest memory is of staying with her and her mother, Aunt Josephine to me, when my sister was born, I count us as linked by the strange convolutions of family memory as well as blood.
Eleanora is one of the most "with it" people I know partly because she was a nurse and retains the savvy that comes from staring down doctors, admirals, generals. Working in various governmental agencies in Washington, she did indeed treat these higher ups, while her youngest sister Sadie typed documents in the Office of the President through four administrations: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Eleanora and Sadie lived together for more than fifty years, moving from the center of our nation's capitol, to Arlington, Virginia, then to Silver Spring, Maryland, and finally to Dover, Delaware, where Sadie died in January of 2009. Typically, their fortunes peaked when they were in their fifties, and their huge apartment of 3 bedrooms in Arlington used to amaze me with its two bathrooms and living room/dining room you could almost roller skate across. It was there that I brought my first husband and young daughter to meet the "cousins and Aunt Jo."
They never had to discipline me, but their models of generous and rollicking adulthood (including their tiny mother Aunt Jo who had a smile as broad as a ball field) helped subdue my distress over my own father's wildness when I saw that they also rolled their eyes at his racist comments, and held hands in the back of his car when his driving threatened to send the car into the drink. (Here I'm remembering driving with him over the old Cooper River Bridge connecting downtown Charleston, South Carolina, with the suburb of Mount Pleasant. My parents moved to Charleston when I was four and never left its environs.)
Talking to Eleanora has also taught me a fair amount about forgiveness and facing the inevitable, but I think the biggest influence she's had on me, she who never had children, is as a model of adult guidance. She connects me to an era without television or cell phones, with only one family car driven to work daily by the father of the family, leaving the others to take the bus. When there was a huge snow fall in Pittsburgh one year and electricity and water service went out in the city, her parents dug a hole in an enormous snowbank and put their perishables there in a covered container. "We also made nightly visits to another part of the yard and hid our 'waste,'" by which she means the contents of the slop jar. "Everyone on the block tried to do that when no one else was looking."
I've also had my share of emergency situations when lights and water are knocked out, but for some reason, Eleanora's examples stick with me. Not to mention her intense desire to find a calling, thwarted by the Depression and the War. She wanted to become a doctor, quite unusual in the post World War I era, but the family couldn't afford to keep her in college and she had to find a job, which wasn't easy. She married in the late 1930s, but her first child died soon after a very difficult birth. Then her husband Dick was killed at the tail end of World War II. How she recovered her self-possession after these losses and talked her way into nurses training as a student ten years younger than all the others, is another story of a desire to serve tempered with an awareness of her differences. She requested a private room through her training, and unless a fellow nurse came to her in confidence, her classmates always called her Mrs. B.
Now when I teach young teachers, some of whose students are immigrant or African-American migrants from the south (with several stops along the way), I remember Eleanora and her "tribal" family, with its close intertwining of two large families, and the way they were raised not just by their own parents (her father was a tyrant) but also by the two model parents of Aunt Rose and Uncle John (my grandparents) down the block. We like to think we all have nuclear families, but it ain't necessarily so, now or then. Often relatives are as important to our lives as our own parents. Especially when they're the only ones left.
When the primary ones are gone, those lucky of us find subsitutes. Mine is a 94-year-old second cousin which means she is my father's first cousin, younger than he by eight years, and much much longer lived. Eleanora has been Eleanor to her lifetime American friends, but since she's reached her "maturity," she's allowed the final Italian "a" to reappear as it was on her birth certificate in 1917. Born to my great aunt Josephine, my grandmother's youngest sister, Eleanora was the oldest of three sisters (the girls) who lived down the street from my father and his three brothers (the boys). In fact, Eleanora's earliest memory is of sitting on the curb in front of her house with the youngest of the "boys," Frankie, and telling him, "I have another sister." Since my earliest memory is of staying with her and her mother, Aunt Josephine to me, when my sister was born, I count us as linked by the strange convolutions of family memory as well as blood.
Eleanora is one of the most "with it" people I know partly because she was a nurse and retains the savvy that comes from staring down doctors, admirals, generals. Working in various governmental agencies in Washington, she did indeed treat these higher ups, while her youngest sister Sadie typed documents in the Office of the President through four administrations: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Eleanora and Sadie lived together for more than fifty years, moving from the center of our nation's capitol, to Arlington, Virginia, then to Silver Spring, Maryland, and finally to Dover, Delaware, where Sadie died in January of 2009. Typically, their fortunes peaked when they were in their fifties, and their huge apartment of 3 bedrooms in Arlington used to amaze me with its two bathrooms and living room/dining room you could almost roller skate across. It was there that I brought my first husband and young daughter to meet the "cousins and Aunt Jo."
They never had to discipline me, but their models of generous and rollicking adulthood (including their tiny mother Aunt Jo who had a smile as broad as a ball field) helped subdue my distress over my own father's wildness when I saw that they also rolled their eyes at his racist comments, and held hands in the back of his car when his driving threatened to send the car into the drink. (Here I'm remembering driving with him over the old Cooper River Bridge connecting downtown Charleston, South Carolina, with the suburb of Mount Pleasant. My parents moved to Charleston when I was four and never left its environs.)
Talking to Eleanora has also taught me a fair amount about forgiveness and facing the inevitable, but I think the biggest influence she's had on me, she who never had children, is as a model of adult guidance. She connects me to an era without television or cell phones, with only one family car driven to work daily by the father of the family, leaving the others to take the bus. When there was a huge snow fall in Pittsburgh one year and electricity and water service went out in the city, her parents dug a hole in an enormous snowbank and put their perishables there in a covered container. "We also made nightly visits to another part of the yard and hid our 'waste,'" by which she means the contents of the slop jar. "Everyone on the block tried to do that when no one else was looking."
I've also had my share of emergency situations when lights and water are knocked out, but for some reason, Eleanora's examples stick with me. Not to mention her intense desire to find a calling, thwarted by the Depression and the War. She wanted to become a doctor, quite unusual in the post World War I era, but the family couldn't afford to keep her in college and she had to find a job, which wasn't easy. She married in the late 1930s, but her first child died soon after a very difficult birth. Then her husband Dick was killed at the tail end of World War II. How she recovered her self-possession after these losses and talked her way into nurses training as a student ten years younger than all the others, is another story of a desire to serve tempered with an awareness of her differences. She requested a private room through her training, and unless a fellow nurse came to her in confidence, her classmates always called her Mrs. B.
Now when I teach young teachers, some of whose students are immigrant or African-American migrants from the south (with several stops along the way), I remember Eleanora and her "tribal" family, with its close intertwining of two large families, and the way they were raised not just by their own parents (her father was a tyrant) but also by the two model parents of Aunt Rose and Uncle John (my grandparents) down the block. We like to think we all have nuclear families, but it ain't necessarily so, now or then. Often relatives are as important to our lives as our own parents. Especially when they're the only ones left.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Margotlog: Life at Its Most Lush
Margotlog: Life at Its Most Lush
The magazine, I mean. Life Magazine as a large weekly magazine, with glossy paper and often full-page ads, came into existence in 1936 when Henry Luce bought the name from a smaller-scale humor "rag." Throughout World War II and the 1950s, Life brought images of war and peacetime prosperity into millions of American homes.
Why do we care? The ads! Better than any photograph (and the legion of outstanding photographers working for Life includes Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa), Life ads show the United States undergoing an enormous transition. Pages 2 and 3 from June 22, 1942: on the right a full-page ad for the Bell Telephone System with a drawing of a lovely young lady with cameo pin and soft curls at the back of her neck, speaking into a receiver of an telephone with a "cradle." "When war needs delay your call...let's put the blame right where it belongs--on the war." The subtext is that beauty and romance in its old-fashioned guise will be delayed, but accepted with a smile because of the war.
On the adjacent page, a young man rises in pencil drawings from a sailor to a chief petty officer. Though often at sea, his Arrow Collar make him so irresistible that Genevieve believes him when he boasts:
it won't be planes, ships or cannon
that will win the war, he'll do it
single-handed.
Note: Davy drags home knocked-out German, Italian, and Japanese, each caricatured so deftly they're unmistakable. His puss is ready for Gen to kiss.
By June 14,1943, Graduation graces the front cover of Life, but inside it's very much war business: Pages 44-45, Western Electric sends an "Uncle Sam-clothed" arm pointing to a plane flying above the clouds: "Radar puts its finger on our enemies," while on the facing page "Romance begins when Five O'Clock Shadow Ends," and the sailor with a cute snub-nose grins as he's surrounded by a bevy of pretty girls. It's an ad for Gem razor blades.
Is there any text on these pages: Yup. A thin column of pretty girls in backless dresses, the newest summer fashion. Begins the article: "Since many women will not be getting to the country or shore this summer, country fashions are going to the city." The implication is that everyone makes sacrifices for the war, but there are dandy compensations.
Finally from April 30, 1945, in the last year of the war, "Life's War Artists" are on the cover Inside there are pages of vivid images from war artists: note Bruce Mitchell's drawings from Iran where American soldiers and sailors off-load a ship with supplies for Russia, and trucks deliver Lend-Lease supplies over 750 miles of "frying desert and brutal mountains" to Karzin. But for my money, it's still the ads that tell the truest story: on the back cover, "Just like old times...Have a Coca-Cola," and in the midst of a soda fountain scene, with pretty girls in pageboy hairdos, the pipe-smoking father points over his soldier's shoulder to the two bars of ribbon. A footnote says, Our fighting men meet up with Coca-Cola many places overseas where it's bottled on the spot."
From this sampling, here's what strikes me: the "can-do" hearty goodwill and success of U.S. troops; the "can-do" and willing sacrifice of folks back home. This is commercial propaganda at its best. I'm serious. World War was brutal; hundreds of thousands of Americans died or were injured. But the war boosted the United States out of the Depression, gave it humming industry and purpose, united the country (at least on the surface), and pushed into existence social changes, like allowing African-Americans and Japanese-Americans into the military, which would have been hard to win otherwise. Not only that, it put women to work in industries where before they would not have been welcome. To incorporate these changes fully into peacetime society would take decades. I can't help but thrill to the sloughing of prejudice and willingness to work together for a truly momentous purpose which these issues of Life recognize.
Do we still have such energy and focused purpose? I won't answer that except to say, I pray that some galvanizing event will rouse us from our contentious lethargy and selfishness to create an all-out determined assault on the energy crisis which burns just below the surface. It's our war of the worlds today.
The magazine, I mean. Life Magazine as a large weekly magazine, with glossy paper and often full-page ads, came into existence in 1936 when Henry Luce bought the name from a smaller-scale humor "rag." Throughout World War II and the 1950s, Life brought images of war and peacetime prosperity into millions of American homes.
Why do we care? The ads! Better than any photograph (and the legion of outstanding photographers working for Life includes Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa), Life ads show the United States undergoing an enormous transition. Pages 2 and 3 from June 22, 1942: on the right a full-page ad for the Bell Telephone System with a drawing of a lovely young lady with cameo pin and soft curls at the back of her neck, speaking into a receiver of an telephone with a "cradle." "When war needs delay your call...let's put the blame right where it belongs--on the war." The subtext is that beauty and romance in its old-fashioned guise will be delayed, but accepted with a smile because of the war.
On the adjacent page, a young man rises in pencil drawings from a sailor to a chief petty officer. Though often at sea, his Arrow Collar make him so irresistible that Genevieve believes him when he boasts:
it won't be planes, ships or cannon
that will win the war, he'll do it
single-handed.
Note: Davy drags home knocked-out German, Italian, and Japanese, each caricatured so deftly they're unmistakable. His puss is ready for Gen to kiss.
By June 14,1943, Graduation graces the front cover of Life, but inside it's very much war business: Pages 44-45, Western Electric sends an "Uncle Sam-clothed" arm pointing to a plane flying above the clouds: "Radar puts its finger on our enemies," while on the facing page "Romance begins when Five O'Clock Shadow Ends," and the sailor with a cute snub-nose grins as he's surrounded by a bevy of pretty girls. It's an ad for Gem razor blades.
Is there any text on these pages: Yup. A thin column of pretty girls in backless dresses, the newest summer fashion. Begins the article: "Since many women will not be getting to the country or shore this summer, country fashions are going to the city." The implication is that everyone makes sacrifices for the war, but there are dandy compensations.
Finally from April 30, 1945, in the last year of the war, "Life's War Artists" are on the cover Inside there are pages of vivid images from war artists: note Bruce Mitchell's drawings from Iran where American soldiers and sailors off-load a ship with supplies for Russia, and trucks deliver Lend-Lease supplies over 750 miles of "frying desert and brutal mountains" to Karzin. But for my money, it's still the ads that tell the truest story: on the back cover, "Just like old times...Have a Coca-Cola," and in the midst of a soda fountain scene, with pretty girls in pageboy hairdos, the pipe-smoking father points over his soldier's shoulder to the two bars of ribbon. A footnote says, Our fighting men meet up with Coca-Cola many places overseas where it's bottled on the spot."
From this sampling, here's what strikes me: the "can-do" hearty goodwill and success of U.S. troops; the "can-do" and willing sacrifice of folks back home. This is commercial propaganda at its best. I'm serious. World War was brutal; hundreds of thousands of Americans died or were injured. But the war boosted the United States out of the Depression, gave it humming industry and purpose, united the country (at least on the surface), and pushed into existence social changes, like allowing African-Americans and Japanese-Americans into the military, which would have been hard to win otherwise. Not only that, it put women to work in industries where before they would not have been welcome. To incorporate these changes fully into peacetime society would take decades. I can't help but thrill to the sloughing of prejudice and willingness to work together for a truly momentous purpose which these issues of Life recognize.
Do we still have such energy and focused purpose? I won't answer that except to say, I pray that some galvanizing event will rouse us from our contentious lethargy and selfishness to create an all-out determined assault on the energy crisis which burns just below the surface. It's our war of the worlds today.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz
Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz
The first that belonged to me was a small tiger cat who probably wandered into the courtyard at The Old Citadel and was adopted. I remember this tiger car more in losing it than in its care. But lost, it haunted my walks to school. I must have been in the second grade.
My calls echoed down narrow Charleston streets--Vanderhorst, was the one I remember, notable as much for its long and non-English name, as for what it took me past--the side of a large white church whose front had stout white columns; many ramshackled "narrow end to the street" Charleston houses, which hadn't been painted in almost a century.
All kinds of stray dogs and cats wandered that long street to the "lower school" of Ashley Hall. I called and called over many days, until one morning a little tiger cat, barely grown from a kitten, came bounding up to me. Though, even then, I sensed it was not the same cat, I scooped it up and carried it to Mrs. Watkins, my beautiful second-grade teacher with the white pageboy. She like my mother was a "Citadel professor's wife." I couldn't keep the kitten in the classroom, she said, but we could take it to the principal's house and the principal would call my mother. When I came home that afternoon, there it was in our huge Old Citadel kitchen with the dark brown painted floor, waiting and mewing its little pink mouth.
Only now do I imagine what my mother had to do to retrieve it: first, leave my younger sister with the neighbor across the hall, then walk herself down long Vanderhorst street, across the playing fields of Ashley Hall behind the row of two-story little houses where the "lower school" classes met, then stepping up onto a raised copse of trees, she entered the principal's little house. What was her name, this formidable woman with the iron grey hair pulled back in a bun, and the steel spectacles? Maybe it will come back to me. Whether she actually lived in that little house--dark green with white trim--or merely had her office there, I don't know. Only one other time did I take notice of it. That was in sixth grade. By then I had moved upstairs to the second small house and become one of the "big girls" in the lower school. For some reason my teacher then, Mrs. McCrae, sent me and another girl across the playing fields to the principal's house. I couldn't help myself: there on her desk (in her absence) stood stacks of achievement tests.
This was way before the years of No Child Left Behind--that Bush-era mandate for frequent standardized testing which so bedevils educators today. But Ashley Hall did test its students toward the end of every year, and I, one of the known "smart girls," had a yen to achieve so strong that I overstepped the boundaries between what was right and what was wrong: I looked at the ranking of the girls in my grade. There was my name, right at the top. As far as I can remember, it was the only strictly illegal thing I did until much much later.
The Catz kept coming, though not after a doggie period when we moved to Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River Bridge, and owned first a red hound named Rover, and then a stray pooch my sister named Missy. Missy was sweet, with a round belly, and black ears and tail; her body tan like a Siamese. One afternoon I shashayed home in my starched crinolines and there in the shed, my sister sat with Missy and four puppies. My sister, with her soft heart, was weeping: she had seen the birth. I WAS way too far gone into teen posturing to pay much attention.
The first that belonged to me was a small tiger cat who probably wandered into the courtyard at The Old Citadel and was adopted. I remember this tiger car more in losing it than in its care. But lost, it haunted my walks to school. I must have been in the second grade.
My calls echoed down narrow Charleston streets--Vanderhorst, was the one I remember, notable as much for its long and non-English name, as for what it took me past--the side of a large white church whose front had stout white columns; many ramshackled "narrow end to the street" Charleston houses, which hadn't been painted in almost a century.
All kinds of stray dogs and cats wandered that long street to the "lower school" of Ashley Hall. I called and called over many days, until one morning a little tiger cat, barely grown from a kitten, came bounding up to me. Though, even then, I sensed it was not the same cat, I scooped it up and carried it to Mrs. Watkins, my beautiful second-grade teacher with the white pageboy. She like my mother was a "Citadel professor's wife." I couldn't keep the kitten in the classroom, she said, but we could take it to the principal's house and the principal would call my mother. When I came home that afternoon, there it was in our huge Old Citadel kitchen with the dark brown painted floor, waiting and mewing its little pink mouth.
Only now do I imagine what my mother had to do to retrieve it: first, leave my younger sister with the neighbor across the hall, then walk herself down long Vanderhorst street, across the playing fields of Ashley Hall behind the row of two-story little houses where the "lower school" classes met, then stepping up onto a raised copse of trees, she entered the principal's little house. What was her name, this formidable woman with the iron grey hair pulled back in a bun, and the steel spectacles? Maybe it will come back to me. Whether she actually lived in that little house--dark green with white trim--or merely had her office there, I don't know. Only one other time did I take notice of it. That was in sixth grade. By then I had moved upstairs to the second small house and become one of the "big girls" in the lower school. For some reason my teacher then, Mrs. McCrae, sent me and another girl across the playing fields to the principal's house. I couldn't help myself: there on her desk (in her absence) stood stacks of achievement tests.
This was way before the years of No Child Left Behind--that Bush-era mandate for frequent standardized testing which so bedevils educators today. But Ashley Hall did test its students toward the end of every year, and I, one of the known "smart girls," had a yen to achieve so strong that I overstepped the boundaries between what was right and what was wrong: I looked at the ranking of the girls in my grade. There was my name, right at the top. As far as I can remember, it was the only strictly illegal thing I did until much much later.
The Catz kept coming, though not after a doggie period when we moved to Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River Bridge, and owned first a red hound named Rover, and then a stray pooch my sister named Missy. Missy was sweet, with a round belly, and black ears and tail; her body tan like a Siamese. One afternoon I shashayed home in my starched crinolines and there in the shed, my sister sat with Missy and four puppies. My sister, with her soft heart, was weeping: she had seen the birth. I WAS way too far gone into teen posturing to pay much attention.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky
Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky
I thought I'd never forget my outrage at Richard Nixon in the presidency (1969-74), but so I have, until now, when listening to Barbara Tuchman's occasional pieces brings his astonishing depredations roiling back. Yet, he was in office when some of the cornerstones of our contemporary era were put in place: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, even abolishing the draft and putting in place an all-civilian army. He also visited China and shook Mao's hand, the first American President to do so, which signaled to Russia that we were cultivating another Communist power, and may have furthered the rounds of talks to limit American and Russian nuclear arms proliferation.
Two things stand out in Tuchman's incisive considerations: that the U.S. as a whole was just emerging from its Communist "witch-hunt"--she cites such activity as a recurring strain in the American character--all the way back to the Massachusetts witch trials in 1690. Nixon had risen to prominence in the House Un-American Activities Committee which helped finger Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He also created a "pink sheet" against his opponent in the 1949 California Senate campaign. This kind of suspicious sniffing around, along with a taste for undercover politics helped fuel the three major mistakes that led to his forced resignation (rather than impeachment). First as president, his tape-recording daily notes about his "agents," and then these agents' dirty tricks: bugging political opponents, harrassing activist groups, and breaking into Democratic party headquarters to steal supposedly incriminating papers--the Watergate affair. Finally his undercover bombing of Cambodia and Laos, once it was exposed, not only enraged the legions of anti-war activists but also added to Nixon's reputation for going underground to proceed outside legal channels.
I remember loathing him. But it was more for the man's weasel looks and his sneaky "smile-in-your-face" while stabbing you in the back behavior that I remember. We shouldn't blame the weasel, after all, who is no more than a small predator trying to sustain itself in a narrow environmental niche. Barbara Tuchman, writing in the 1980s, suggests that the American presidency under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had risen above its supposed limitations to act outside the checks and balances forged in the constitution. Now, when our various heads of state--Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton or our country's president Barack Obama--are so mightily opposed and stymied by gridlock in Congress or state legislature, when the legislative branches of government seem unable to reach consensus and pass necessary measures to reduce a mountain of national debt--I muse back on this era when presidents operated with sweeping powers, and wonder what the heck we can expect next. For all-out brawls, just this side of civil war, it's hard to imagine anymore more wild than the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 or the various occupation of capitol grounds and flight of legislators in contemporary Wisconsin. Political theater at its wild and wooliest. I guess I'd rather have the conflict out in the open rather than, as Nixon tried, secretive and illegal. But when it means an obstruction of necessary government, I'd like to dispense with both.
I thought I'd never forget my outrage at Richard Nixon in the presidency (1969-74), but so I have, until now, when listening to Barbara Tuchman's occasional pieces brings his astonishing depredations roiling back. Yet, he was in office when some of the cornerstones of our contemporary era were put in place: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, even abolishing the draft and putting in place an all-civilian army. He also visited China and shook Mao's hand, the first American President to do so, which signaled to Russia that we were cultivating another Communist power, and may have furthered the rounds of talks to limit American and Russian nuclear arms proliferation.
Two things stand out in Tuchman's incisive considerations: that the U.S. as a whole was just emerging from its Communist "witch-hunt"--she cites such activity as a recurring strain in the American character--all the way back to the Massachusetts witch trials in 1690. Nixon had risen to prominence in the House Un-American Activities Committee which helped finger Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He also created a "pink sheet" against his opponent in the 1949 California Senate campaign. This kind of suspicious sniffing around, along with a taste for undercover politics helped fuel the three major mistakes that led to his forced resignation (rather than impeachment). First as president, his tape-recording daily notes about his "agents," and then these agents' dirty tricks: bugging political opponents, harrassing activist groups, and breaking into Democratic party headquarters to steal supposedly incriminating papers--the Watergate affair. Finally his undercover bombing of Cambodia and Laos, once it was exposed, not only enraged the legions of anti-war activists but also added to Nixon's reputation for going underground to proceed outside legal channels.
I remember loathing him. But it was more for the man's weasel looks and his sneaky "smile-in-your-face" while stabbing you in the back behavior that I remember. We shouldn't blame the weasel, after all, who is no more than a small predator trying to sustain itself in a narrow environmental niche. Barbara Tuchman, writing in the 1980s, suggests that the American presidency under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had risen above its supposed limitations to act outside the checks and balances forged in the constitution. Now, when our various heads of state--Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton or our country's president Barack Obama--are so mightily opposed and stymied by gridlock in Congress or state legislature, when the legislative branches of government seem unable to reach consensus and pass necessary measures to reduce a mountain of national debt--I muse back on this era when presidents operated with sweeping powers, and wonder what the heck we can expect next. For all-out brawls, just this side of civil war, it's hard to imagine anymore more wild than the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 or the various occupation of capitol grounds and flight of legislators in contemporary Wisconsin. Political theater at its wild and wooliest. I guess I'd rather have the conflict out in the open rather than, as Nixon tried, secretive and illegal. But when it means an obstruction of necessary government, I'd like to dispense with both.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Margotlog: Cultural Suffering
Margotlog: Cultural Suffering
With my students, I'm reading a touching novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981) Set in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada before, during and after World War II, Obasan portrays the suffering of Japanese "relocated" by the Canadian government. It's actually far more complex than that because two members of this extended Japanese family returned to Japan in the 1930s. They are the child Naomi's mother and grandmother. She never sees them again.
Shifting between several perspectives--Naomi's experience as a child of five through high school, and then leaping ahead to herself as an adult, a teacher in an Alberta school--the novel also infiltrates personal memory with documents which gradually shed light on her Aunt Emily's search for information about the "lost" relatives and justice for her extended family, separated and tossed about by the Canadian government.
In the United States, we usually find about about the Japanese internment camps during 7th grade history. The title that stays with me from my years working as a writer in the schools is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston, 1979. Told from the perspective of a 7-year-old child, the story of dislocation and internment is harsh but not unrelieved--children adjust. In comparison Obasan is a much more probing account, with adult perceptions of loss, injustice and hardship interspersed with Naomi's childhood awareness. After the war ended, she and her family--brother and aunt and uncle--were uprooted again. This horror included not only the loss of the lively community the internees had created in a former ghost town, complete with the Japanese communal bath, but a resettlement to what was little more than a hut, amid the beet fields of Alberta. Unheated, cramped, the hut enforced a hatred that was doubled as all the family worked in the beet fields--heavy, hot labor--the only work offered to them. When they finally could afford to move to a small house in town, it's a relief the reader shares.
Through all this suffering runs the cultural manners of Japanese people themselves--their quiet, restrained acceptance, their sturdy continuation despite extreme loss and hardship. their lack of voiced complaint. I find all this remarkable and unforgettable. But I also spy amid the quietude, the defeat that quells and forces submission, the defeat that was visited upon the Jews in Germany, who went quiet to their own slaughter. I know that sounds like a harsh judgment but reading Obasan reminds me that when whole communities recognize the futility of revolt, many simply cave in. Not the Warsaw ghetto, however, nor countless individual resisters. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night proclaims just this resistance. It remains perhaps my most treasured document of an individual soul, helped quietly by others, to survive the most determined attempt at extermination.
With my students, I'm reading a touching novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981) Set in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada before, during and after World War II, Obasan portrays the suffering of Japanese "relocated" by the Canadian government. It's actually far more complex than that because two members of this extended Japanese family returned to Japan in the 1930s. They are the child Naomi's mother and grandmother. She never sees them again.
Shifting between several perspectives--Naomi's experience as a child of five through high school, and then leaping ahead to herself as an adult, a teacher in an Alberta school--the novel also infiltrates personal memory with documents which gradually shed light on her Aunt Emily's search for information about the "lost" relatives and justice for her extended family, separated and tossed about by the Canadian government.
In the United States, we usually find about about the Japanese internment camps during 7th grade history. The title that stays with me from my years working as a writer in the schools is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston, 1979. Told from the perspective of a 7-year-old child, the story of dislocation and internment is harsh but not unrelieved--children adjust. In comparison Obasan is a much more probing account, with adult perceptions of loss, injustice and hardship interspersed with Naomi's childhood awareness. After the war ended, she and her family--brother and aunt and uncle--were uprooted again. This horror included not only the loss of the lively community the internees had created in a former ghost town, complete with the Japanese communal bath, but a resettlement to what was little more than a hut, amid the beet fields of Alberta. Unheated, cramped, the hut enforced a hatred that was doubled as all the family worked in the beet fields--heavy, hot labor--the only work offered to them. When they finally could afford to move to a small house in town, it's a relief the reader shares.
Through all this suffering runs the cultural manners of Japanese people themselves--their quiet, restrained acceptance, their sturdy continuation despite extreme loss and hardship. their lack of voiced complaint. I find all this remarkable and unforgettable. But I also spy amid the quietude, the defeat that quells and forces submission, the defeat that was visited upon the Jews in Germany, who went quiet to their own slaughter. I know that sounds like a harsh judgment but reading Obasan reminds me that when whole communities recognize the futility of revolt, many simply cave in. Not the Warsaw ghetto, however, nor countless individual resisters. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night proclaims just this resistance. It remains perhaps my most treasured document of an individual soul, helped quietly by others, to survive the most determined attempt at extermination.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything
Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything
Though I didn't realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history--Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman died in 1989.
What distinguishes them from other writers of history whom I've read is their astonishing ability to dramatize yet propell a narrative forward with periodic assessments that plunge right to the heart of significance. Take Tuchman's book review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which I'm reading now, long after its initial publication, collected in her book called Practicing History (1981).
Kissinger, as head of President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisors and as Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, contributed enormously to the lengthy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As Tuchman argues, his council should have urged U.S. withdrawal far sooner than it occurred in 1975. The U.S. should have withdrawn in the early 1970s when it was clear that the U.S. could not assure that Saigon, i.e. South Vietnam could sustain itself independently. Instead Kissinger and the presidents he served opted for continued U.S. troop and bombing incursions eventually pushing the war into Cambodia with an additional 40,000 Cambodian and 19,000 American lives lost. Tuchman astutely summarizes that the U.S. stayed because its government wanted to withdraw with honor. Instead, she argues, we should have made the case that we'd done all we could for the South Vietnamese and now they needed to stand or fall on their own strength. Which she goes on to remark, is exactly what happened when North Vietnam invaded the South and Saigon fell in 1975.
Getting out when winning is clearly impossible, chosing compromise and life-saving alteration, rather than a "fight to the finish"--that I'd like to see more of. For instance, how wonderful if the various legislatures, national and state, could put down their insistence on "winning" and agree that there must be a two-pronged approach to combating the budget deficit--raising taxes on the wealthy and altering "entitlement programs" like Medicare and Social Security. Just as the U.S. government fighting in Vietnam could not "imagine" withdrawal with anything short of "honor," meaning victory, so now we are brought to our knees by a refusal to take items from each side of the political divide and recognize that they both have an important place in addressing the inevitable: unless we make significant changes in both tax and entitlement structures, our economy will suffer short-term and long-term. Suffer so significantly that our political position may well become weakened, our vaunted ability to "rule the world" may well pass to others.
Ditto our blind, headlong path toward doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to bring a halt to fracking (which tears up forest and grassland, uses huge amounts of water, and then pumps this natural gas across sensitive acquifers--mine and your drinking water). No, no, no. We must admit we've exhausted this kind of energy. We must do two difficult but possible things--conserve far more than we do, and buy in big time to energy production that does not sprew CO2 into the environment.
How much longer, I muse, as I listen to Barbara Tuchman's clear and incisive indictment of Henry Kissinger and the governments he served--how much longer before we can make the sane but difficult choices?
Though I didn't realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history--Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman died in 1989.
What distinguishes them from other writers of history whom I've read is their astonishing ability to dramatize yet propell a narrative forward with periodic assessments that plunge right to the heart of significance. Take Tuchman's book review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which I'm reading now, long after its initial publication, collected in her book called Practicing History (1981).
Kissinger, as head of President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisors and as Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, contributed enormously to the lengthy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As Tuchman argues, his council should have urged U.S. withdrawal far sooner than it occurred in 1975. The U.S. should have withdrawn in the early 1970s when it was clear that the U.S. could not assure that Saigon, i.e. South Vietnam could sustain itself independently. Instead Kissinger and the presidents he served opted for continued U.S. troop and bombing incursions eventually pushing the war into Cambodia with an additional 40,000 Cambodian and 19,000 American lives lost. Tuchman astutely summarizes that the U.S. stayed because its government wanted to withdraw with honor. Instead, she argues, we should have made the case that we'd done all we could for the South Vietnamese and now they needed to stand or fall on their own strength. Which she goes on to remark, is exactly what happened when North Vietnam invaded the South and Saigon fell in 1975.
Getting out when winning is clearly impossible, chosing compromise and life-saving alteration, rather than a "fight to the finish"--that I'd like to see more of. For instance, how wonderful if the various legislatures, national and state, could put down their insistence on "winning" and agree that there must be a two-pronged approach to combating the budget deficit--raising taxes on the wealthy and altering "entitlement programs" like Medicare and Social Security. Just as the U.S. government fighting in Vietnam could not "imagine" withdrawal with anything short of "honor," meaning victory, so now we are brought to our knees by a refusal to take items from each side of the political divide and recognize that they both have an important place in addressing the inevitable: unless we make significant changes in both tax and entitlement structures, our economy will suffer short-term and long-term. Suffer so significantly that our political position may well become weakened, our vaunted ability to "rule the world" may well pass to others.
Ditto our blind, headlong path toward doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to bring a halt to fracking (which tears up forest and grassland, uses huge amounts of water, and then pumps this natural gas across sensitive acquifers--mine and your drinking water). No, no, no. We must admit we've exhausted this kind of energy. We must do two difficult but possible things--conserve far more than we do, and buy in big time to energy production that does not sprew CO2 into the environment.
How much longer, I muse, as I listen to Barbara Tuchman's clear and incisive indictment of Henry Kissinger and the governments he served--how much longer before we can make the sane but difficult choices?
Friday, November 25, 2011
Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother
Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother
We get so fixated on the nuclear family in the United States with its portability, privacy, and freedom to reinvent itself that we forget, except on Thanksgiving, how rich and supportive it can be to have several generations around the table. A few days ago, in this wonderful interregnum between frantic work-weeks called Thanksgiving break, I had lunch with two friends who had never met before, but who both grew up in Chicago. "She's my sister," cried the younger African-American friend. That lovely "soul sister" idea. Then when they were face to face, she asked, "Are you from the city?" As opposed, I found out, to the many suburban communities spreading in all directions except directly east, where of course lies great Lake Michigan. Yes, they both grew up in inner city Chicago. One with an immigrant Polish family, the other with African-American grandparents who came up from Mississippi.
I never knew my grandmothers, a lack I've often mourned. Word has it they were both good women, though not strong enough to withstand cancer in their early 60s. "Your grandmother could make us four boys stop fighting just be coming into the room," that's my father's voice in my memory. His mother Rose was a tiny Sicilian woman, probably no more than four feet, ten inches tall. When she was dying of ovarian cancer in Florida (where she and my grandfather moved to escape the Pittsburgh winters), my father's first cousin Eleanora, then newly trained as a nurse, took the train south to care for her. "When I looked in her jewelry box," Eleanora remembers, "I found a note from your grandfather, a love note telling Rose how much he adored her. He did that--left her little charms in her pockets or in her hymnal or behind the spices."
Let's call my two Chicago friends Adele and Roxy. Adele's Polish family lived not far from Lake Michigan in a duplex, the grandmother on the bottom, her daughter's family on top. After school, Adele immediately stopped at her grandmother's kitchen. "She wasn't a great cook," Adele confesses, "In fact, I can't remember what she gave me to eat, but it was quiet downstairs with Grandma. Upstairs, my mother would be sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee with her friends and criticizing their relatives. I didn't like that."
Roxy's African-American single mother had four children before she was much over twenty. Roxy spent the first and second grades in Southside Chicago schools--"all the schools were neighborhood schools," Roxy tells us. "We had an entirely African-American class." When she was in third grade, her mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The change was enormous. The four kids were the only black children in their grades. They quickly learned to speak "white English." Then every summer for five years, Roxy and her brother went back to Chicago and stayed with Gramma. "She was a witchy old lady," Roxy laughs, "saying things like, 'Don' you go leavin that purse on de floor."
"How come?" Roxy would challenge her. "Purse on floo, you be poor."
Hands on her hips, little Roxy sassed, "Then how come you be poor? Yo purse neber on de floo?" Roxy laughs at her sassy kid-self, then shakes her head at Gramma. "That lady brought all these notions from Mississippi. She was strict with us, but we'd laugh at her, not mean, just enjoying all being sassy together. Later she was proud of me. She kept saying, 'Law, chile, you be so smart. Don' you stop that studyin!'"
Adele picked up sewing from her Polish grandmother. This woman was so skilled that she made her daughter's entire graduating class of girls fancy "stepping out" gowns. She would take the bus downtown to the big department stores and shop for fabric. She knew the names of all sorts of linens, wools, silks, cottons, and later synthetics. Then arthritis stopped her, and she became simply a haven from Adele's sharp-tongued mother. Now Adele creates masterful needlework herself, knitting, needlepoint, crocheting, even that old-fashioned edging on pillow "slips" and sheets called "tatting."
I, who grew up so far from any grandparents that I saw them only in the presence of my parents, I wonder how my young-life might have been different if the older generation had taken part in it. I imagine they might have buffered me from my parents' excesses which became more and more pronounced as we lived longer in South Carolina--my father's ranting against civil rights, his finickiness about clothing and housekeeping and food, and my mother's rigid attempts to control his outbursts, her fearful whispering at me to behave, "because if you don't your father will never forgive me...."
There's a truism among immigration historians that the first generation arrives with grit, determination, and an unexpected sense of who they are and where they came from. It's the second generation that flounders. That fits my father, determined though he was to escape the Italian immigrant community and marry "a real American." Yet that "real American," my mother, constantly failed to create a milieu that comforted him, plus by moving to South Carolina, he had lifted himself out of the larger associations that defined his identity. It was sweet, though pathetic, how he sought out Italian ships docking in Charleston harbor, and occasionally brought home sailors from Genoa or Naples who could speak to his heart.
Lucky indeed are my friends whose childhoods were enriched by extended families. Their hearts beat close by, and still help to measure and regulate their own.
We get so fixated on the nuclear family in the United States with its portability, privacy, and freedom to reinvent itself that we forget, except on Thanksgiving, how rich and supportive it can be to have several generations around the table. A few days ago, in this wonderful interregnum between frantic work-weeks called Thanksgiving break, I had lunch with two friends who had never met before, but who both grew up in Chicago. "She's my sister," cried the younger African-American friend. That lovely "soul sister" idea. Then when they were face to face, she asked, "Are you from the city?" As opposed, I found out, to the many suburban communities spreading in all directions except directly east, where of course lies great Lake Michigan. Yes, they both grew up in inner city Chicago. One with an immigrant Polish family, the other with African-American grandparents who came up from Mississippi.
I never knew my grandmothers, a lack I've often mourned. Word has it they were both good women, though not strong enough to withstand cancer in their early 60s. "Your grandmother could make us four boys stop fighting just be coming into the room," that's my father's voice in my memory. His mother Rose was a tiny Sicilian woman, probably no more than four feet, ten inches tall. When she was dying of ovarian cancer in Florida (where she and my grandfather moved to escape the Pittsburgh winters), my father's first cousin Eleanora, then newly trained as a nurse, took the train south to care for her. "When I looked in her jewelry box," Eleanora remembers, "I found a note from your grandfather, a love note telling Rose how much he adored her. He did that--left her little charms in her pockets or in her hymnal or behind the spices."
Let's call my two Chicago friends Adele and Roxy. Adele's Polish family lived not far from Lake Michigan in a duplex, the grandmother on the bottom, her daughter's family on top. After school, Adele immediately stopped at her grandmother's kitchen. "She wasn't a great cook," Adele confesses, "In fact, I can't remember what she gave me to eat, but it was quiet downstairs with Grandma. Upstairs, my mother would be sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee with her friends and criticizing their relatives. I didn't like that."
Roxy's African-American single mother had four children before she was much over twenty. Roxy spent the first and second grades in Southside Chicago schools--"all the schools were neighborhood schools," Roxy tells us. "We had an entirely African-American class." When she was in third grade, her mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The change was enormous. The four kids were the only black children in their grades. They quickly learned to speak "white English." Then every summer for five years, Roxy and her brother went back to Chicago and stayed with Gramma. "She was a witchy old lady," Roxy laughs, "saying things like, 'Don' you go leavin that purse on de floor."
"How come?" Roxy would challenge her. "Purse on floo, you be poor."
Hands on her hips, little Roxy sassed, "Then how come you be poor? Yo purse neber on de floo?" Roxy laughs at her sassy kid-self, then shakes her head at Gramma. "That lady brought all these notions from Mississippi. She was strict with us, but we'd laugh at her, not mean, just enjoying all being sassy together. Later she was proud of me. She kept saying, 'Law, chile, you be so smart. Don' you stop that studyin!'"
Adele picked up sewing from her Polish grandmother. This woman was so skilled that she made her daughter's entire graduating class of girls fancy "stepping out" gowns. She would take the bus downtown to the big department stores and shop for fabric. She knew the names of all sorts of linens, wools, silks, cottons, and later synthetics. Then arthritis stopped her, and she became simply a haven from Adele's sharp-tongued mother. Now Adele creates masterful needlework herself, knitting, needlepoint, crocheting, even that old-fashioned edging on pillow "slips" and sheets called "tatting."
I, who grew up so far from any grandparents that I saw them only in the presence of my parents, I wonder how my young-life might have been different if the older generation had taken part in it. I imagine they might have buffered me from my parents' excesses which became more and more pronounced as we lived longer in South Carolina--my father's ranting against civil rights, his finickiness about clothing and housekeeping and food, and my mother's rigid attempts to control his outbursts, her fearful whispering at me to behave, "because if you don't your father will never forgive me...."
There's a truism among immigration historians that the first generation arrives with grit, determination, and an unexpected sense of who they are and where they came from. It's the second generation that flounders. That fits my father, determined though he was to escape the Italian immigrant community and marry "a real American." Yet that "real American," my mother, constantly failed to create a milieu that comforted him, plus by moving to South Carolina, he had lifted himself out of the larger associations that defined his identity. It was sweet, though pathetic, how he sought out Italian ships docking in Charleston harbor, and occasionally brought home sailors from Genoa or Naples who could speak to his heart.
Lucky indeed are my friends whose childhoods were enriched by extended families. Their hearts beat close by, and still help to measure and regulate their own.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Margotlog: My Father and the Bird
Margotlog: My Father and the Bird
And I don't mean Charlie Parker, the reknown jazzman. No, the bird in this case was the annual Thanksgiving Turkey.
My father grew up thinking very little of birds. He and his brothers (one of whom became a hunting guide in Nova Scotia) shot rabbits occasionally. Not in their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Lebanon, heaven forbid! That was a relatively upscale and thoroughly civilized neighborhood. No guns. His father, the minister and lawyer for the Italian people, the tribal leader, never would have countenanced shot guns stacked beside the door. Maybe in the garage, but never in the sanctuary of the home.
But there are photos of my father and one of his younger brothers at their prep school, Gettysburg Academy, with rabbits strewn at their feet and shot guns upended as staffs of honor. Then when he visited my mother's North Dakota family for Thanksgiving, he shot rabbits and draped them over the front of a mean-looking sedan. Snow on the ground, lace-up boots on his feet, and a smirk on his face. Mighty Hunter!
In fact, he was finicky beyond belief. I can laugh now, but his precautions and admonitions about cleanliness and right behavior used to send my mother, sister and me into spasms of frustration. When it came time to bring home the turkey, the grocery store was the source and my mother the conveyor. She upended the bird in the sink, made sure all the pin feathers had been removed, cleaned out the cavity, put the gibblets to boil on the stove,and set the carcass in the roaster ready for the oven. "Maxine, are you sure you've thoroughly washed that bird?" my father would caution, as if it hadn't already passed through several stages of denaturing, as if it still carried barnyard dirt between its toes.
When we leafed through Ideals Magazine during summer visits to Papa Max in North Dakota, images of Thanksgiving always showed Father at the head of a snow-white table studded with family and relatives, while Mother lowered the bird in front of him. At our family Thanksgivings in Charleston, South Carolina, our Midwestern mother acted this role to perfection, her arms reaching around my father with the platter and the beautifully browned bird. At that point, however, he did not take up the carving tools and ask us to pass our plates. In fact, she stepped to one side of him and commenced to loosen the drumsticks, slice open the breast, and excavate stuffing to mound in a bowl. "Your father has no sense of anatomy," she would explain later with a touch of self-satisfied superiority. "He can never find the joints."
Then, after this ritual they'd silently worked out (unlike many other alterations of expected male/female roles which invoked loud protests on my father's part), she took her place at the foot of the table, and my father did indeed ask us to pass our plates. Often we were entertaining Citadel cadets or faculty members, stranded without family for the holiday. My father's joviality increased. He was truly thankful for bounty that could be shared, for evidence that many of the flock had gathered, and for what, as he would say, "the Lord has provided." Then we would bow our heads, and afterwards raise a glass in Thanksgiving.
I can see him now, light from the candles glinting on his glasses, his wide Italian mouth open in a grin, while we all follow his direction and lifted our tumblers of milk or water or wine, saluting with appreciation the flame around which we congregate. At the other end of the table, my mother is smiling her soft, girlish smile, reserved for moments like these, when all her work is done, when she can retreat into shy reserve, and enjoy the gregarious, slightly deranged bird she has married.
Whatever other configuration my own Thanksgivings take, this is the model against which they all are measured.
And I don't mean Charlie Parker, the reknown jazzman. No, the bird in this case was the annual Thanksgiving Turkey.
My father grew up thinking very little of birds. He and his brothers (one of whom became a hunting guide in Nova Scotia) shot rabbits occasionally. Not in their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Lebanon, heaven forbid! That was a relatively upscale and thoroughly civilized neighborhood. No guns. His father, the minister and lawyer for the Italian people, the tribal leader, never would have countenanced shot guns stacked beside the door. Maybe in the garage, but never in the sanctuary of the home.
But there are photos of my father and one of his younger brothers at their prep school, Gettysburg Academy, with rabbits strewn at their feet and shot guns upended as staffs of honor. Then when he visited my mother's North Dakota family for Thanksgiving, he shot rabbits and draped them over the front of a mean-looking sedan. Snow on the ground, lace-up boots on his feet, and a smirk on his face. Mighty Hunter!
In fact, he was finicky beyond belief. I can laugh now, but his precautions and admonitions about cleanliness and right behavior used to send my mother, sister and me into spasms of frustration. When it came time to bring home the turkey, the grocery store was the source and my mother the conveyor. She upended the bird in the sink, made sure all the pin feathers had been removed, cleaned out the cavity, put the gibblets to boil on the stove,and set the carcass in the roaster ready for the oven. "Maxine, are you sure you've thoroughly washed that bird?" my father would caution, as if it hadn't already passed through several stages of denaturing, as if it still carried barnyard dirt between its toes.
When we leafed through Ideals Magazine during summer visits to Papa Max in North Dakota, images of Thanksgiving always showed Father at the head of a snow-white table studded with family and relatives, while Mother lowered the bird in front of him. At our family Thanksgivings in Charleston, South Carolina, our Midwestern mother acted this role to perfection, her arms reaching around my father with the platter and the beautifully browned bird. At that point, however, he did not take up the carving tools and ask us to pass our plates. In fact, she stepped to one side of him and commenced to loosen the drumsticks, slice open the breast, and excavate stuffing to mound in a bowl. "Your father has no sense of anatomy," she would explain later with a touch of self-satisfied superiority. "He can never find the joints."
Then, after this ritual they'd silently worked out (unlike many other alterations of expected male/female roles which invoked loud protests on my father's part), she took her place at the foot of the table, and my father did indeed ask us to pass our plates. Often we were entertaining Citadel cadets or faculty members, stranded without family for the holiday. My father's joviality increased. He was truly thankful for bounty that could be shared, for evidence that many of the flock had gathered, and for what, as he would say, "the Lord has provided." Then we would bow our heads, and afterwards raise a glass in Thanksgiving.
I can see him now, light from the candles glinting on his glasses, his wide Italian mouth open in a grin, while we all follow his direction and lifted our tumblers of milk or water or wine, saluting with appreciation the flame around which we congregate. At the other end of the table, my mother is smiling her soft, girlish smile, reserved for moments like these, when all her work is done, when she can retreat into shy reserve, and enjoy the gregarious, slightly deranged bird she has married.
Whatever other configuration my own Thanksgivings take, this is the model against which they all are measured.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood
Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood
"The FBI in Peace and War"--was that the title of the radio drama? I never listened, but the music from a companion show, "Dragnet," even now plays its "bum-bum-bum-bum-bumbumbum" through my head. As historical movies go, or "bio-pics" if you prefer, Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is a marvel. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio morph before your eyes from the smooth-faced young agent-on-the-make to the crinkly-haired, hunched, jowly J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is, in my book, a marvel of acting. Include his accent, which reminds me of someone eating a mouthful of peanuts without the crunch--all stiff jaw and chew in the hopes of not choking.
Or is the film so powerful because of its lightning-fast shifts from J. Edgar's home with Judy Dench as Mama (who flirtatiously compliments her son on his new suit) to the Bureau of Investigation line-up of prospective agents--J. Edgar tweaks their ties and warns them against facial hair (presumably to render each sleuth as neutral and unrecognizeable as possible). We shift from glimpses of a pale heroic Lindberg to J. Edgar's hiring of a beautiful young man who stands on the other side of his desk with a dreamy expression in his dark-lashed blue eyes. Surely the relationship that develops between Hoover and this agent Clyde Tolson, his life-long friend, is homosexual. But was it consummated? The movie teases us with this--they reach for each other's hands in a cab, with Mama up front who will be dropped off first. As J. Edgar mentions taking up with actress Dorothy Lamour and asks, "Is it time for a Mrs. J. Edgar," Tolson attacks him in their side-by-side hotel rooms. After that brawl, a kiss must follow. Their bruised bloody lips say a lot--without anyone having to fess-up.
DiCaprio's acting is superb. Ditto Mama and Tolson and long-time secretary Helen who refuses to marry Hoover early in their young rise to power, but agrees instead to become his private secretary. She outlives him, and in the end, true to her promise, empties the files and starts shredding. Did shredders exist in the Nixon administration? My husband and I decide probably so for government offices, if not for private homes. It is this kernel of intense secrecy played against Hoover's many sleuthing innovations that we now take for granted--like fingerprinting or analysis of crime scenes like a science lab--that support his importance in the story of fighting crime. His importance and his weakness--he wanted the glory, and in the thread that recurs throughout the film, he dictates many lies to young agents writing his memoirs. Hoover claims more for himself than he deserved, for instance that he arrested the kidnapper of the Lindberg baby (whose pathetic little skeleton was found near the Lindberg mansion). A lie, but Hoover did push for the analysis of the wood used to build the ladder which the kidnapper climbed to steal the baby from a second -floor bedroom. Throughout the shifts back and forth in time and between public and private realms, we see Hoover become more aggressive in publishing and burnishing his own valor. Was it the rise of a monomania or the necessary P.R. to keep Congressional approval of funds? There is no easy answer.
I've admired Clint Eastwood in films (The Good, Bad and the Ugly), but I think this might be the first film he'd directed that completely mesmerized me. Cudos to the screenplay as well, written by Dustin Lance Black, but from my small experience with film-making, the magic is often in the editing. This I credit to Eastwood. Not a through-story like the wonderful "King's Speech" from last year (which we thought of here because of the astonishing casts in each), "J. Edgar" emphasizes the clip and dissolve possibilities of movie-editing--quick shifts in time, place, age of main character, etc. I found it riveting, and a good choice for portraying a man who hid a lot, whose public persona was not the most loveable, and yet in the films end by being largely sympathetic if humanly fallible.
Final comment: the music was composed by director Eastwood and one of his seven children, Kyle, performed in the movie combo.
"The FBI in Peace and War"--was that the title of the radio drama? I never listened, but the music from a companion show, "Dragnet," even now plays its "bum-bum-bum-bum-bumbumbum" through my head. As historical movies go, or "bio-pics" if you prefer, Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is a marvel. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio morph before your eyes from the smooth-faced young agent-on-the-make to the crinkly-haired, hunched, jowly J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is, in my book, a marvel of acting. Include his accent, which reminds me of someone eating a mouthful of peanuts without the crunch--all stiff jaw and chew in the hopes of not choking.
Or is the film so powerful because of its lightning-fast shifts from J. Edgar's home with Judy Dench as Mama (who flirtatiously compliments her son on his new suit) to the Bureau of Investigation line-up of prospective agents--J. Edgar tweaks their ties and warns them against facial hair (presumably to render each sleuth as neutral and unrecognizeable as possible). We shift from glimpses of a pale heroic Lindberg to J. Edgar's hiring of a beautiful young man who stands on the other side of his desk with a dreamy expression in his dark-lashed blue eyes. Surely the relationship that develops between Hoover and this agent Clyde Tolson, his life-long friend, is homosexual. But was it consummated? The movie teases us with this--they reach for each other's hands in a cab, with Mama up front who will be dropped off first. As J. Edgar mentions taking up with actress Dorothy Lamour and asks, "Is it time for a Mrs. J. Edgar," Tolson attacks him in their side-by-side hotel rooms. After that brawl, a kiss must follow. Their bruised bloody lips say a lot--without anyone having to fess-up.
DiCaprio's acting is superb. Ditto Mama and Tolson and long-time secretary Helen who refuses to marry Hoover early in their young rise to power, but agrees instead to become his private secretary. She outlives him, and in the end, true to her promise, empties the files and starts shredding. Did shredders exist in the Nixon administration? My husband and I decide probably so for government offices, if not for private homes. It is this kernel of intense secrecy played against Hoover's many sleuthing innovations that we now take for granted--like fingerprinting or analysis of crime scenes like a science lab--that support his importance in the story of fighting crime. His importance and his weakness--he wanted the glory, and in the thread that recurs throughout the film, he dictates many lies to young agents writing his memoirs. Hoover claims more for himself than he deserved, for instance that he arrested the kidnapper of the Lindberg baby (whose pathetic little skeleton was found near the Lindberg mansion). A lie, but Hoover did push for the analysis of the wood used to build the ladder which the kidnapper climbed to steal the baby from a second -floor bedroom. Throughout the shifts back and forth in time and between public and private realms, we see Hoover become more aggressive in publishing and burnishing his own valor. Was it the rise of a monomania or the necessary P.R. to keep Congressional approval of funds? There is no easy answer.
I've admired Clint Eastwood in films (The Good, Bad and the Ugly), but I think this might be the first film he'd directed that completely mesmerized me. Cudos to the screenplay as well, written by Dustin Lance Black, but from my small experience with film-making, the magic is often in the editing. This I credit to Eastwood. Not a through-story like the wonderful "King's Speech" from last year (which we thought of here because of the astonishing casts in each), "J. Edgar" emphasizes the clip and dissolve possibilities of movie-editing--quick shifts in time, place, age of main character, etc. I found it riveting, and a good choice for portraying a man who hid a lot, whose public persona was not the most loveable, and yet in the films end by being largely sympathetic if humanly fallible.
Final comment: the music was composed by director Eastwood and one of his seven children, Kyle, performed in the movie combo.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice
Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice
All the bridges in Venice are pedestrian--it's a city without cars. Yet, the map shows only a few--the Rialto and the huge bridge crossing the Grand Canal before the railroad station. But how do people get across? I asked myself, studying the map in the months before I arrived. Donna Leon's mystery novels suggest all kinds of sprinting, sauntering, skulking. Surely there must be bridges.
The approach to the city over water from the Marco Polo airport is the most romantic I've ever experienced--misty, flat and watery--with the Alilaguna "motoscaffo" (great Italian word suggesting the motor part and escape) twisting around striped poles to avoid the shallows. Cormorants and gulls bobbed or soared overhead. I could have been a teen again, speeding down the Inland Waterway between wild green barrier islands south of home, Charleston, South Carolina. The same excitement of entering a watery world at a speed to put wind in your face.
The same anticipation of discovery that could plunge deep and lift into the air. Then we slowed for Murano, the huge glass-factory island, a village in itself; passed the cemetery island girded with its retrained necklace of pink and white walls below a colony of tall green cypress, and found the city itself.
I was tired and excited and a bit unsteady on my feet. With my insistent map-gazing, I'd determined that my little hotel Boccassini lay close to this northern rim of the city, but which direction from the dock? Someone pointed and said in Italian, "over two bridges." Each bridge was like an arched hand over a narrow strip of water; each had thin "steps" which required me to lift my little suitcase on its rollers, trudge to the next and lift. Many of the wider and steeper bridges did the same, but by then, I'd ditched my suitcase and taken a nap.
Here are somethings I discovered about canals and bridges. For good walking, choose a long sidewalk beside a canal. My favorite was Fondamenta dei Mendicanti, which I found by crossing another bridge along the rim of the lagoon and turning into the heart of the city. For the Venetians, "Fondamenta" means a wide paved "front" or foundation to the water. It's not the same as a "Riva," which is a much wider paved space, such as the Riva degli Schiavoni, along the Grand Canal leading toward San Marco. When I left my little hotel in its warren of crazy-making narrow streets, and found myself again on the Fondamenta Nova along the lagoon, then turned onto Fondamenta dei Mendicanti (that last word refers to beggars) I soon felt as if I might not get lost for quite a while.
This was true in part because I soon walked into what in other Italian cities would be called a piazza, but which in Venice is a campo or field. This one, Campo Santi Giavanni e Paolo (Saints John and Paul) shared its name with a wonderful building, once a church, now a huge hospital. When Napoleon deconsecrated enormous numbers of churches in the early 1800s, many immediately took on other uses. In the campo before this truly unusual building, with two half-moon atop its facade, I discovered amazing bas reliefs arranged beside the door. The image at the start of this blog is the second image. It's of men in turbans--Venice was after all linked closely with what we'd call the near east. It's no doubt an image from the Bible, though I'd be the last to guess, well ok I'll guess Joseph and his brothers.
In any case, passing the ospedale, pausing each time I passed to and fro toward the innards of Venice and more twists and turns and dead ends against walls and bridges that ended in private doors, each time passing, I would pay homage to the former church, its elegant facade opening into the campo and the astonishing images. In my next entry on Venice, I'll give you the other image, a lion forward of a long colonnade into the background. Another mystery of this amazing city.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Margotlog: Prison Diaries
Margotlog: Prison Diaries
When I met my husband, he had been out of prison nearly 20 years--the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was sent as a pacifist during the early days of the Vietnam War. Soon after he was freed in 1968, after serving 17 months, he wrote a series of prison sketches for a college class. Writing about being in prison wasn't unique to Fran. Last night I heard him and two other peacenik ex-cons read their poetry and prose about prison. The occasion was Carol Connolly's third-Tuesday reading series at Saint Paul's University Club. "I think about prison every day," said poet Jim Moore. Dramatist Frank Kroncke would agree. I don't know about Fran.
Their musings, dramatizations, rants could not have been more different. Fran transformed prison into brief, dramatic sketches of other inmates, mostly African-American bank robbers and murderers. Fran had spent time in Mississippi helping with voter registration; he'd attended the March on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I have a dream speech." For Fran, prison became (in part) a school of "blackness." With Richard B. he was "able to really discuss blackness," Fran wrote. "I thought...being in prison, in a recognized uniform, unable to escape, degraded, deprived of even the simplest respect, subjugated to another breed of man--the hacks in their uniforms--[was] not unlike being black in a ghetto, and I supposed that my emotional responses--hostility, fear, anger, resentment, inadequacy--paralleled those of men in that more permanent situation." When Fran mentioned this idea to Richard, a successful "poet, pianist, playwright" before drugs turned him into a "junkie, prisoner, lunatic," Richard seemed to agree. Yet the more Fran thought about it, the more he realized that there was a deeper, underlying aspect: his "utter inability to describe to anyone outside, the full horrors of prison, the true depths of despair and anguish, I knew that...this was the truest, perhaps the only, parallel to being black." Richard agreed: "That's it, Man."
Jump forward to Liberia's horrendous disintegration under waves of child-soldiers led by outraged tribal people who had been dispossessed for centuries. Between 1980 and the restoration of a semblance of calm under various international peace-keeping forces, Liberia was one of the bloodiest and craziest war zones in the world. Children as young as 5 were snatched from their tribal parents and given alcohol and guns. Some insurgent groups targeted women, raping, wounding and removing them miles from their families. Often these insurgents trotted around in women's high heels and frilly wedding dresses, carrying huge purses.
Helene Cooper's memoir The House on Sugar Beach describes this period from the distance of her own rise as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Her father had died in Liberia, her mother had finally given up and come to the U.S. permanently, joining Helene and her younger sister. The descendant of early American ex-slaves who founded the ruling "Congo" class in Liberia was now working in an American nursing home, emptying bedpans, saving money for her daughter's college education.
After joining American forces entering Iraq, journalist Helene Cooper decided she had to return to Liberia, and search for her adopted sister Eunice. Can any of us in the U.S. (except Southerners after the Civil War, except black ghetto dwellers after race riots in the North, except perhaps black ghetto dwellers at any time) truly grasp what frantic, deadly chaos is really like? No more than Fran could cross over the racial divide, even wearing the prison uniform. But Helene Cooper's memoir comes close to bringing the reader inside Liberia, decimated by over twenty years of conflict. Interestingly it was Liberian women and their political clout, their refusal to be victims anymore, who fostered resolution of the tribal conflict and the eventual election in 2006 of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia's first woman president.
American women certainly played a role in the American peace movement, but here in the U.S. young men, willing to trade months of their youth to protest the Vietnam war, received the most attention. Did their actions make any difference? Was going to prison worth the loss of hope, activity, belief in a future? In the book I wrote about Fran and the peace movement in general, "Stop This War: Americans Protest the Conflict in Vietnam," he concludes in the negative. Now I imagine that the choice was made in a flush of youthful passion, a commitment to peace so intense that the young rebel could not imagine any other act. Though I could not take up a gun except in self-defense, though I understand deep down the impossibility of becoming a uniformed agent of death, I also see that for Fran, prison deadened what had been his youth. Though he certainly lived a productive life thereafter, as a librarian, father, friend, he might have served himself better as a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a hospital. There he would not have been branded, incarcerated (that word that calls up incineration), forced into subjugation. He might have been able to feel the changes in himself as he helped heal those in his care.
When I met my husband, he had been out of prison nearly 20 years--the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, where he was sent as a pacifist during the early days of the Vietnam War. Soon after he was freed in 1968, after serving 17 months, he wrote a series of prison sketches for a college class. Writing about being in prison wasn't unique to Fran. Last night I heard him and two other peacenik ex-cons read their poetry and prose about prison. The occasion was Carol Connolly's third-Tuesday reading series at Saint Paul's University Club. "I think about prison every day," said poet Jim Moore. Dramatist Frank Kroncke would agree. I don't know about Fran.
Their musings, dramatizations, rants could not have been more different. Fran transformed prison into brief, dramatic sketches of other inmates, mostly African-American bank robbers and murderers. Fran had spent time in Mississippi helping with voter registration; he'd attended the March on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I have a dream speech." For Fran, prison became (in part) a school of "blackness." With Richard B. he was "able to really discuss blackness," Fran wrote. "I thought...being in prison, in a recognized uniform, unable to escape, degraded, deprived of even the simplest respect, subjugated to another breed of man--the hacks in their uniforms--[was] not unlike being black in a ghetto, and I supposed that my emotional responses--hostility, fear, anger, resentment, inadequacy--paralleled those of men in that more permanent situation." When Fran mentioned this idea to Richard, a successful "poet, pianist, playwright" before drugs turned him into a "junkie, prisoner, lunatic," Richard seemed to agree. Yet the more Fran thought about it, the more he realized that there was a deeper, underlying aspect: his "utter inability to describe to anyone outside, the full horrors of prison, the true depths of despair and anguish, I knew that...this was the truest, perhaps the only, parallel to being black." Richard agreed: "That's it, Man."
Jump forward to Liberia's horrendous disintegration under waves of child-soldiers led by outraged tribal people who had been dispossessed for centuries. Between 1980 and the restoration of a semblance of calm under various international peace-keeping forces, Liberia was one of the bloodiest and craziest war zones in the world. Children as young as 5 were snatched from their tribal parents and given alcohol and guns. Some insurgent groups targeted women, raping, wounding and removing them miles from their families. Often these insurgents trotted around in women's high heels and frilly wedding dresses, carrying huge purses.
Helene Cooper's memoir The House on Sugar Beach describes this period from the distance of her own rise as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Her father had died in Liberia, her mother had finally given up and come to the U.S. permanently, joining Helene and her younger sister. The descendant of early American ex-slaves who founded the ruling "Congo" class in Liberia was now working in an American nursing home, emptying bedpans, saving money for her daughter's college education.
After joining American forces entering Iraq, journalist Helene Cooper decided she had to return to Liberia, and search for her adopted sister Eunice. Can any of us in the U.S. (except Southerners after the Civil War, except black ghetto dwellers after race riots in the North, except perhaps black ghetto dwellers at any time) truly grasp what frantic, deadly chaos is really like? No more than Fran could cross over the racial divide, even wearing the prison uniform. But Helene Cooper's memoir comes close to bringing the reader inside Liberia, decimated by over twenty years of conflict. Interestingly it was Liberian women and their political clout, their refusal to be victims anymore, who fostered resolution of the tribal conflict and the eventual election in 2006 of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Liberia's first woman president.
American women certainly played a role in the American peace movement, but here in the U.S. young men, willing to trade months of their youth to protest the Vietnam war, received the most attention. Did their actions make any difference? Was going to prison worth the loss of hope, activity, belief in a future? In the book I wrote about Fran and the peace movement in general, "Stop This War: Americans Protest the Conflict in Vietnam," he concludes in the negative. Now I imagine that the choice was made in a flush of youthful passion, a commitment to peace so intense that the young rebel could not imagine any other act. Though I could not take up a gun except in self-defense, though I understand deep down the impossibility of becoming a uniformed agent of death, I also see that for Fran, prison deadened what had been his youth. Though he certainly lived a productive life thereafter, as a librarian, father, friend, he might have served himself better as a conscientious objector doing alternative service in a hospital. There he would not have been branded, incarcerated (that word that calls up incineration), forced into subjugation. He might have been able to feel the changes in himself as he helped heal those in his care.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Margotlog: Those Pesky Sexy Details
Margotlog: Those Pesky Sexy Details
I, who had only a single pregnancy and never wanted another, am far from one to talk. But there was a girl in my college class who went to New York for an abortion. In the details I heard, it had all the hallmarks of a classic case: a climb up a dark stairway, entry into what looked like an apartment, a meeting with a doctor (was he weary, leering, efficient?), the passing of hundreds of dollars, the procedure which inevitably left her bleeding and cramping--almost unable to walk. And her halting return down the stairs and onto the street.
She survived. It was the right decision--she was a college student with a fine mind and even in the 1960s, opportunities ahead of her. She wasn't ready for motherhood, nor was the boy who impregnated her ready for fatherhood. But it was not easy. She had the abortion alone, sneaking away from our college in Baltimore, afraid as she climbed those dark steps. The referral had come from a college friend, a native of New York. My friend took the train back to Baltimore, in pain and fear.
One of the most compelling essays in an anthology I often use with college students is an excerpt from Margaret Sanger's 1938 autobiography: lifting a line from Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," the excerpt is titled "The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Human Misery." It is set in 1912 among the immigrant tenements of New York's lower East Side. As a public health nurse, Sanger was often called to treat impoverished immigrant women who'd had abortions. She recounts one case, "a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight...of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression." Up three flights of stairs, with no running water or toilet facilities, the apartment was crammed with children and boarders. After three weeks of nursing, the tiny woman recovered, looked into Mrs. Sanger's face and said,"Another baby will finish me, I suppose."
She begs for the secret: how to prevent pregnancy. The doctor in attendance looks at her and shakes his finger: "Any more capers, young woman, and they'll be no need to send for me....Tell [your husband] to sleep on the roof." This response touches the root of the problem: it is the woman's fault, and she is amusing herself, plus husbands are difficult to "put off."
These days, we know better, don't we? Yet, unwanted pregnancy is surely at its root a woman's problem--hers the body that carries the child; hers the health which suffers from uncontrolled pregnancies or abortions. But the family as a whole and society at large can be weighted to the ground by huge numbers of children whose nurturing a family can't provide. Margaret Sanger devoted the rest of her career to championing the need for birth control. Through her efforts, laws legalizing the dissemination (notice the word) of birth control information were passed around the country. She herself opened in 1916 the nation's the first family-planning clinic, in Brooklyn.
I have few friends left from my highschool class in South Carolina. The only one I've recently renewed came to my father's funeral, which touched me quite a bit. We met a few times and enjoyed laughing over our high school selves. Then there began to appear email messages from her: she had a huge list to whom she sent political tracts. I deleted the first, but I read the second: it claimed that the Kinsey reports were responsible for rampant sexuality among young people. It deplored sex outside of marriage and castigated family planning clinics. I drew a long breath: the Kinsey reports, Sexuality in the Human Male (1948) and Sexuality in the Human Female (1953) shocked the nation, especially the second book, based on interviews with 6000 women. Their sexual behavior surprised many readers who supposed that women were prim, proper, and devoid of sexual urges.
We're beyond that now, right? How else to view TV and magazine ads that display so much of women's flesh? Far from Victorian prudery. And those are not mannikins, either. Yet, yet, there was my high school friend denouncing teenage sexuality, championing sex only within marriage. I didn't want to find out she would say about birth control or abortions.
We are truly a culture in love with paradox. Not the only one, worldwide, surely, but with our own loveable, deplorable brand of excess and shoot-from-the-hip passions. (Hmm, interesting metaphor, given the subject.) I have decided that fascination with repression is the flip side of fascination with expression. That behind every die-hard anti-abortionist lies a woman who has somehow suffered vis-a-vis her own sexuality, childbirth, family life. No one who's ever experienced an abortion suggests that it is easy: not an easy choice, an easy procedure to undergo, or an easy aftermath to live with. Prevention is far, far preferable. I practiced prevention with an assiduity I have reserved for almost nothing else. According to statistics I read recently, Planned Parenthood's work is a little less than 95% devoted to helping poor women find workable alternatives to abortion. Their clients include college students or teens who are afraid to see their family doctor.
After two pregnancy scares, one when I was a senior in high school and one as a freshman in college, I asked my somewhat older roommate for a referral to a doctor in Baltimore. I went by myself, taking the bus into downtown Baltimore from my suburban campus. The doctor looked at me sternly: "Do your parents know you are doing this?" When I remember now how I quaked under his stern, unfamiliar gaze, I am appalled at his invasion of my privacy. But this was the early 1960s! I took the only choice open to me: I lied: "Oh yes," I assured him. "I'm engaged to be married." I wasn't. In fact, I would break up with my young man within a month. He was six years older than I and not willing to "wait" for me. "Oh yes," I repeated. "We're getting married in a month."
I never looked back. That diaphragm became one of my best friends.
I, who had only a single pregnancy and never wanted another, am far from one to talk. But there was a girl in my college class who went to New York for an abortion. In the details I heard, it had all the hallmarks of a classic case: a climb up a dark stairway, entry into what looked like an apartment, a meeting with a doctor (was he weary, leering, efficient?), the passing of hundreds of dollars, the procedure which inevitably left her bleeding and cramping--almost unable to walk. And her halting return down the stairs and onto the street.
She survived. It was the right decision--she was a college student with a fine mind and even in the 1960s, opportunities ahead of her. She wasn't ready for motherhood, nor was the boy who impregnated her ready for fatherhood. But it was not easy. She had the abortion alone, sneaking away from our college in Baltimore, afraid as she climbed those dark steps. The referral had come from a college friend, a native of New York. My friend took the train back to Baltimore, in pain and fear.
One of the most compelling essays in an anthology I often use with college students is an excerpt from Margaret Sanger's 1938 autobiography: lifting a line from Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," the excerpt is titled "The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Human Misery." It is set in 1912 among the immigrant tenements of New York's lower East Side. As a public health nurse, Sanger was often called to treat impoverished immigrant women who'd had abortions. She recounts one case, "a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight...of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression." Up three flights of stairs, with no running water or toilet facilities, the apartment was crammed with children and boarders. After three weeks of nursing, the tiny woman recovered, looked into Mrs. Sanger's face and said,"Another baby will finish me, I suppose."
She begs for the secret: how to prevent pregnancy. The doctor in attendance looks at her and shakes his finger: "Any more capers, young woman, and they'll be no need to send for me....Tell [your husband] to sleep on the roof." This response touches the root of the problem: it is the woman's fault, and she is amusing herself, plus husbands are difficult to "put off."
These days, we know better, don't we? Yet, unwanted pregnancy is surely at its root a woman's problem--hers the body that carries the child; hers the health which suffers from uncontrolled pregnancies or abortions. But the family as a whole and society at large can be weighted to the ground by huge numbers of children whose nurturing a family can't provide. Margaret Sanger devoted the rest of her career to championing the need for birth control. Through her efforts, laws legalizing the dissemination (notice the word) of birth control information were passed around the country. She herself opened in 1916 the nation's the first family-planning clinic, in Brooklyn.
I have few friends left from my highschool class in South Carolina. The only one I've recently renewed came to my father's funeral, which touched me quite a bit. We met a few times and enjoyed laughing over our high school selves. Then there began to appear email messages from her: she had a huge list to whom she sent political tracts. I deleted the first, but I read the second: it claimed that the Kinsey reports were responsible for rampant sexuality among young people. It deplored sex outside of marriage and castigated family planning clinics. I drew a long breath: the Kinsey reports, Sexuality in the Human Male (1948) and Sexuality in the Human Female (1953) shocked the nation, especially the second book, based on interviews with 6000 women. Their sexual behavior surprised many readers who supposed that women were prim, proper, and devoid of sexual urges.
We're beyond that now, right? How else to view TV and magazine ads that display so much of women's flesh? Far from Victorian prudery. And those are not mannikins, either. Yet, yet, there was my high school friend denouncing teenage sexuality, championing sex only within marriage. I didn't want to find out she would say about birth control or abortions.
We are truly a culture in love with paradox. Not the only one, worldwide, surely, but with our own loveable, deplorable brand of excess and shoot-from-the-hip passions. (Hmm, interesting metaphor, given the subject.) I have decided that fascination with repression is the flip side of fascination with expression. That behind every die-hard anti-abortionist lies a woman who has somehow suffered vis-a-vis her own sexuality, childbirth, family life. No one who's ever experienced an abortion suggests that it is easy: not an easy choice, an easy procedure to undergo, or an easy aftermath to live with. Prevention is far, far preferable. I practiced prevention with an assiduity I have reserved for almost nothing else. According to statistics I read recently, Planned Parenthood's work is a little less than 95% devoted to helping poor women find workable alternatives to abortion. Their clients include college students or teens who are afraid to see their family doctor.
After two pregnancy scares, one when I was a senior in high school and one as a freshman in college, I asked my somewhat older roommate for a referral to a doctor in Baltimore. I went by myself, taking the bus into downtown Baltimore from my suburban campus. The doctor looked at me sternly: "Do your parents know you are doing this?" When I remember now how I quaked under his stern, unfamiliar gaze, I am appalled at his invasion of my privacy. But this was the early 1960s! I took the only choice open to me: I lied: "Oh yes," I assured him. "I'm engaged to be married." I wasn't. In fact, I would break up with my young man within a month. He was six years older than I and not willing to "wait" for me. "Oh yes," I repeated. "We're getting married in a month."
I never looked back. That diaphragm became one of my best friends.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Margotlog: Into the Woods
Margotlog: Into the Woods
While northern Minnesota is straining for a flash of white, ready to send a shot into the woods, I'm driving east and south into rolling farm country around Afton where glimpses of the St. Croix River shine through the trees. The woods in this longest of falls have lost most of their color and a haze hangs over the trees. It's as if we dream deep into something ancient and immoveable, some living being that settles into rest.
At eleven this morning, we will congregate, my lovely daughter and I, with long-time friends of the family to sing Frank into the ground. He was the father of my daughter's first lasting love, a tall supple man with a '50s crew cut and a slow smile. I saw him only twice. Were it not for her continuing affection for his son and her diffidence in appearing among this family whom she has not seen for a long time, I would not be accompanying her. But I am happy to leave my city routine behind, to drive into another landscape, and step out of the car beside a small cemetery adorned with enormous spruce and slender cedars twined together over graves.
It is a modern church, but it has simplicity and the warmth of wood beams. Since we know so few and feel a bit awkward, we slide into a pew to the side and somewhat back. A woman is playing hymns at a piano, familiar in their overall effect, the best part of Protestantism I often think, these songs with their hint of folk melodies and quirky inner verses. Suddenly tears prick my eyes, and my daughter puts her arm around me. I am weeping with an inexpressible sadness that lies most days far below the surface, sadness that swoops far south to my parents' last years in South Carolina, where fifteen years apart, they also went into the ground.
I didn't see my mother buried, but both my daughter and I remember my father's funeral, when my mother was still feisty and resistant to any effort on our part to contribute what she had not vetted. It almost makes me smile, how she went at my daughter's and sister's desire to sing at the funeral, her fury mixed with whatever anguish and struggle she'd suffered but would never express.
Who knows what family torment has gone into the making of this slowly unfolding celebration of Frank's life.
Two things stand out: the first is the exquisite eulogy offered by the son who is now my daughter's dear friend. It's years since I have spent time with this son, who is now at least forty-five. Like his father, his demeanor has always been extremely quiet. Thus I have had no reason to expect the story-telling eloquence, the quiet humor and clear, abiding affection of his tribute. As he speaks, I sense that since I saw him last--was it ten years ago?--he has matured enormously. During his father's slow decline, he acted as his mother's right-hand, negotiating the shift to various care centers, and now with restrained grace giving him to us before he is truly gone. I sense that as he honors his father, he is also ushering himself into greater freedom and the possibility of accomplishment beyond what has been possible before. This was certainly true of me, I tell my daughter later. I flowered after my father's death, as if freed to present myself to the world as I wished, not hampered by his many fears and prohibitions.
The other thing I notice and dislike deeply in the ensuing service are the Bible readings. Though there is nothing inherently offensive about them, they are rendered in a modern translation. The beloved King James version has been put aside. "Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," becomes something like "though I walk through a dark valley." And "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies," becomes something like "you feed me even in difficult times." No, no, no, my heart and mind object. No! You are tampering not only with memories that go far back into childhood, but you have robbed of memorable music some of the most beautifully rendered passages of the Bible.
As my daughter and I drive away after the service, she comments about the liturgical elements in the funeral, "They have such iconic power, yet at the same time they felt null and void." I agree, then I add that the glorious language of the King James Version resonates across time and space, linking us in the English-speaking world to virtually the earliest Protestant English versions of the Bible. No modern translation can do this. Its language is too contemporary; it might just as well have been lifted from the pages of the newspaper. Frank, whose steadfastness will endure among those who knew him, deserved better. As do we who came to celebrate his life.
While northern Minnesota is straining for a flash of white, ready to send a shot into the woods, I'm driving east and south into rolling farm country around Afton where glimpses of the St. Croix River shine through the trees. The woods in this longest of falls have lost most of their color and a haze hangs over the trees. It's as if we dream deep into something ancient and immoveable, some living being that settles into rest.
At eleven this morning, we will congregate, my lovely daughter and I, with long-time friends of the family to sing Frank into the ground. He was the father of my daughter's first lasting love, a tall supple man with a '50s crew cut and a slow smile. I saw him only twice. Were it not for her continuing affection for his son and her diffidence in appearing among this family whom she has not seen for a long time, I would not be accompanying her. But I am happy to leave my city routine behind, to drive into another landscape, and step out of the car beside a small cemetery adorned with enormous spruce and slender cedars twined together over graves.
It is a modern church, but it has simplicity and the warmth of wood beams. Since we know so few and feel a bit awkward, we slide into a pew to the side and somewhat back. A woman is playing hymns at a piano, familiar in their overall effect, the best part of Protestantism I often think, these songs with their hint of folk melodies and quirky inner verses. Suddenly tears prick my eyes, and my daughter puts her arm around me. I am weeping with an inexpressible sadness that lies most days far below the surface, sadness that swoops far south to my parents' last years in South Carolina, where fifteen years apart, they also went into the ground.
I didn't see my mother buried, but both my daughter and I remember my father's funeral, when my mother was still feisty and resistant to any effort on our part to contribute what she had not vetted. It almost makes me smile, how she went at my daughter's and sister's desire to sing at the funeral, her fury mixed with whatever anguish and struggle she'd suffered but would never express.
Who knows what family torment has gone into the making of this slowly unfolding celebration of Frank's life.
Two things stand out: the first is the exquisite eulogy offered by the son who is now my daughter's dear friend. It's years since I have spent time with this son, who is now at least forty-five. Like his father, his demeanor has always been extremely quiet. Thus I have had no reason to expect the story-telling eloquence, the quiet humor and clear, abiding affection of his tribute. As he speaks, I sense that since I saw him last--was it ten years ago?--he has matured enormously. During his father's slow decline, he acted as his mother's right-hand, negotiating the shift to various care centers, and now with restrained grace giving him to us before he is truly gone. I sense that as he honors his father, he is also ushering himself into greater freedom and the possibility of accomplishment beyond what has been possible before. This was certainly true of me, I tell my daughter later. I flowered after my father's death, as if freed to present myself to the world as I wished, not hampered by his many fears and prohibitions.
The other thing I notice and dislike deeply in the ensuing service are the Bible readings. Though there is nothing inherently offensive about them, they are rendered in a modern translation. The beloved King James version has been put aside. "Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," becomes something like "though I walk through a dark valley." And "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies," becomes something like "you feed me even in difficult times." No, no, no, my heart and mind object. No! You are tampering not only with memories that go far back into childhood, but you have robbed of memorable music some of the most beautifully rendered passages of the Bible.
As my daughter and I drive away after the service, she comments about the liturgical elements in the funeral, "They have such iconic power, yet at the same time they felt null and void." I agree, then I add that the glorious language of the King James Version resonates across time and space, linking us in the English-speaking world to virtually the earliest Protestant English versions of the Bible. No modern translation can do this. Its language is too contemporary; it might just as well have been lifted from the pages of the newspaper. Frank, whose steadfastness will endure among those who knew him, deserved better. As do we who came to celebrate his life.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Margotlog: What Use Is Oral History?
Margotlog: What Use Is Oral History?
Oral History came of age for the general reader in the United States with Studs Terkel's various volumes--Working, Hard Times (about the Great Depression) and The Good War (World War II). Published between 1974 and 1985, these works of oral history bought to the page and national sales the voices of common people, whether they be down-and-out (to borrow a phrase from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) or wealthy unknowns. Now I'm trying to convince a newer generation of the value in oral history.
We've been reading two Native American works--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, the book I wrote with Ojibway artist George Morrison (probably the premier Minnesota Native artist, whose work was accorded one of two solo exhibits when the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004) and N. Scott Momaday's The Names. Though they rely heavily on oral history and on memory, these are rather different books. In part because Momaday's Kiowa, Oklahoma ancestry was made real and vivid to him in his childhood by family storytelling; whereas, George Morrison's history was slowly eroding, being replaced by the English language and life of Grand Marais, the small Lake Superior town near his childhood home.
Momaday's lyrical work of memory and coming of age is suffused with family stories which entered his consciousness at so early an age that they became mingled with his own growing perceptions. Several students in my class object to his willingness to report these many-times remembered events, though he certainly indicates the uncertainties that inhere in them. My students consider them "tainted." I, on the other hand, find these account of frayed remembrances both believable and compelling, like an ancient shield painted with figures which are in some places are worn away. But I have spent years considering how some groups find their way into written and print accounts, while others do not. It is largely a function of power--museums, publishing houses, even the use of a particular favored language, like English, all have to do with power and the control of various destinies.
Let me tack another published work onto these musings: The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper's lively and vivid account of growing up wealthy on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, not a place many residents of the United States think much about. Cooper, a journalist, draws us back into her childhood in this huge house on the beach. Here, her wealthy parents, one descended from the first free African-Americans who settled in Liberia, have made a leisurely life for themselves. In the process, she relates quite a bit about the 1820 arrival of a shipload of African-Americans from the United States, their decimation by disease, the few remaining leaders' war against the native inhabitants, and eventual establishment of Monrovia and subjugation of the locals. Over the years I've heard about the American Colonization Society's attempt to solve the U.S. "slavery question" by repatriating freed slaves to Liberia. But until Cooper's book, I had no idea the process was so filled with drama and strife. Some of the history Cooper relates is no doubt written down, but what she tells, as passed down from her ancient ancestor through other family, has a gritty, believable quality that I suspect most history books avoid.
Not to mention that in her rendition of her own work, she slides delightfully from the native Liberian patois (a lively version of English) into standard English and back again. How much would be lost without the spoken word! How empty and hollow would be our lives without memory and family stories! I think I'll wait until my unconvinced students spend another decade on the planet before I query them again. As I look back over my own and now my daughter's life, it seems to me that not until we cross into our late 30s and early 40s do we begin to realize how valuable are these memories and family histories. Then we begin gathering them for ourselves.
Oral History came of age for the general reader in the United States with Studs Terkel's various volumes--Working, Hard Times (about the Great Depression) and The Good War (World War II). Published between 1974 and 1985, these works of oral history bought to the page and national sales the voices of common people, whether they be down-and-out (to borrow a phrase from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) or wealthy unknowns. Now I'm trying to convince a newer generation of the value in oral history.
We've been reading two Native American works--Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, the book I wrote with Ojibway artist George Morrison (probably the premier Minnesota Native artist, whose work was accorded one of two solo exhibits when the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004) and N. Scott Momaday's The Names. Though they rely heavily on oral history and on memory, these are rather different books. In part because Momaday's Kiowa, Oklahoma ancestry was made real and vivid to him in his childhood by family storytelling; whereas, George Morrison's history was slowly eroding, being replaced by the English language and life of Grand Marais, the small Lake Superior town near his childhood home.
Momaday's lyrical work of memory and coming of age is suffused with family stories which entered his consciousness at so early an age that they became mingled with his own growing perceptions. Several students in my class object to his willingness to report these many-times remembered events, though he certainly indicates the uncertainties that inhere in them. My students consider them "tainted." I, on the other hand, find these account of frayed remembrances both believable and compelling, like an ancient shield painted with figures which are in some places are worn away. But I have spent years considering how some groups find their way into written and print accounts, while others do not. It is largely a function of power--museums, publishing houses, even the use of a particular favored language, like English, all have to do with power and the control of various destinies.
Let me tack another published work onto these musings: The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper's lively and vivid account of growing up wealthy on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, not a place many residents of the United States think much about. Cooper, a journalist, draws us back into her childhood in this huge house on the beach. Here, her wealthy parents, one descended from the first free African-Americans who settled in Liberia, have made a leisurely life for themselves. In the process, she relates quite a bit about the 1820 arrival of a shipload of African-Americans from the United States, their decimation by disease, the few remaining leaders' war against the native inhabitants, and eventual establishment of Monrovia and subjugation of the locals. Over the years I've heard about the American Colonization Society's attempt to solve the U.S. "slavery question" by repatriating freed slaves to Liberia. But until Cooper's book, I had no idea the process was so filled with drama and strife. Some of the history Cooper relates is no doubt written down, but what she tells, as passed down from her ancient ancestor through other family, has a gritty, believable quality that I suspect most history books avoid.
Not to mention that in her rendition of her own work, she slides delightfully from the native Liberian patois (a lively version of English) into standard English and back again. How much would be lost without the spoken word! How empty and hollow would be our lives without memory and family stories! I think I'll wait until my unconvinced students spend another decade on the planet before I query them again. As I look back over my own and now my daughter's life, it seems to me that not until we cross into our late 30s and early 40s do we begin to realize how valuable are these memories and family histories. Then we begin gathering them for ourselves.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Margotlog: Say After Me: Global, Local, Global, Local
Margotlog: Say After Me: Global, Local, Global, Local
We've just turned our clocks back. I never can remember which we acquire with each spring/fall maneuver--more or less light, morning or evening. But waking in the dark as I usually do, winter or summer, I send filaments of light far and wee, to borrow a phrase from one of America's most wonder-filled poets, e.e.cummings.
As I lie in the dark of morning, polar bears enter frigid Artic waters with fewer and fewer ice floes to rest on; displaced Somali herdsmen wander south, their herds having died of thirst and lack of food. Bangkok and the east coast of the U.S. are pummeled with various forms of wet--typhoons, hurricane, snowfall. Texas experiences drought and high temperatures greater than ever recorded.
This sends me looping back to the "little Ice Age" which has been identified by all kinds of measures to have occurred off and on from 1315 to the end of the 19th century. Rivers in England and the Netherlands, not to mention New York Harbor and the Baltic Sea froze during this period. Crops failed from cold and wet, with great famines being recorded in 1315-17. Colonies in Greenland starved and were abandoned. Ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. And the great violin maker Stradivari created his world-reknown violins out of wood made denser by the shorter growing seasons. Finally, two crashes in world population occurred first in Europe during the Black Death and then in the Americas following European contact and the scourges of measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases against which Native Americans had no immunity. With the drop in agriculture, more trees grew back. As we should know by now, reforestation soaks up warming gases, cooling the atmosphere.
According to weather scientists, we should be in the middle of a 4000 year cooling period, but instead because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases--created by human burning of fossil fuels--we are experiencing global warming. A few days ago, this up-tic in greenhouse gas was measured as much higher than predicted. We may have passed that point of no quick return identified by climate expert James Hansen. According to Hansen (see his book Storms of My Grandchildren) the largest culprit in the greenhouse production which the US can control is coal. His "Declaration of Stewardship" urges a moratorium on coal burning because much of the world's oil and gas comes from other countries whose politics cannot be controlled. Whereas, the US has large deposits of coal still to be retrieved and burned. He opposes a cap and trade format and urges a carbon tax on oil, gas, coal with 100% dividend (meaning, I think, that the tax would be 100% returned to the users).
As I ready my trees and perennials for this very dry onset of our harshest Minnesota season--the BIG W!--I rake and carry all the leaves from my silver maples (one of the most hardy native trees) and my boulevard ash (unfortunately targeted by the ash borer, though I've had my tree treated twice). I mound these leaves around the base of trees including evergreens, shrubs, perennials. And of course I have watered them all very well before doing so. We live in an urban heat island. The state is planning to position devices through the Twin Cities to test just how much warmer, and yes drier, we are. I personally find drought much more problematic than wet. Seems to me I read that we have not had a full complement of 20-22 inches of rain for around 5 years. Yes we have a large river that runs through us. We have many lakes. And our huge snowfall last year and wet spring may well have replenished our underground acquifers. But I still count on my trees to cool my house, to "eat" greenhouse gas, and spread that life-giving oxygen around the neighborhood.
Remember, my dear friends and neighbors, far and wee, trees are our best hope against global warming, especially in this neanderthal political period when our politicos are butting heads and refusing to take what seem the most obvious steps toward protecting our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which increasingly means taking major steps to control our contribution (huge!) to global warming.
We've just turned our clocks back. I never can remember which we acquire with each spring/fall maneuver--more or less light, morning or evening. But waking in the dark as I usually do, winter or summer, I send filaments of light far and wee, to borrow a phrase from one of America's most wonder-filled poets, e.e.cummings.
As I lie in the dark of morning, polar bears enter frigid Artic waters with fewer and fewer ice floes to rest on; displaced Somali herdsmen wander south, their herds having died of thirst and lack of food. Bangkok and the east coast of the U.S. are pummeled with various forms of wet--typhoons, hurricane, snowfall. Texas experiences drought and high temperatures greater than ever recorded.
This sends me looping back to the "little Ice Age" which has been identified by all kinds of measures to have occurred off and on from 1315 to the end of the 19th century. Rivers in England and the Netherlands, not to mention New York Harbor and the Baltic Sea froze during this period. Crops failed from cold and wet, with great famines being recorded in 1315-17. Colonies in Greenland starved and were abandoned. Ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. And the great violin maker Stradivari created his world-reknown violins out of wood made denser by the shorter growing seasons. Finally, two crashes in world population occurred first in Europe during the Black Death and then in the Americas following European contact and the scourges of measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases against which Native Americans had no immunity. With the drop in agriculture, more trees grew back. As we should know by now, reforestation soaks up warming gases, cooling the atmosphere.
According to weather scientists, we should be in the middle of a 4000 year cooling period, but instead because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases--created by human burning of fossil fuels--we are experiencing global warming. A few days ago, this up-tic in greenhouse gas was measured as much higher than predicted. We may have passed that point of no quick return identified by climate expert James Hansen. According to Hansen (see his book Storms of My Grandchildren) the largest culprit in the greenhouse production which the US can control is coal. His "Declaration of Stewardship" urges a moratorium on coal burning because much of the world's oil and gas comes from other countries whose politics cannot be controlled. Whereas, the US has large deposits of coal still to be retrieved and burned. He opposes a cap and trade format and urges a carbon tax on oil, gas, coal with 100% dividend (meaning, I think, that the tax would be 100% returned to the users).
As I ready my trees and perennials for this very dry onset of our harshest Minnesota season--the BIG W!--I rake and carry all the leaves from my silver maples (one of the most hardy native trees) and my boulevard ash (unfortunately targeted by the ash borer, though I've had my tree treated twice). I mound these leaves around the base of trees including evergreens, shrubs, perennials. And of course I have watered them all very well before doing so. We live in an urban heat island. The state is planning to position devices through the Twin Cities to test just how much warmer, and yes drier, we are. I personally find drought much more problematic than wet. Seems to me I read that we have not had a full complement of 20-22 inches of rain for around 5 years. Yes we have a large river that runs through us. We have many lakes. And our huge snowfall last year and wet spring may well have replenished our underground acquifers. But I still count on my trees to cool my house, to "eat" greenhouse gas, and spread that life-giving oxygen around the neighborhood.
Remember, my dear friends and neighbors, far and wee, trees are our best hope against global warming, especially in this neanderthal political period when our politicos are butting heads and refusing to take what seem the most obvious steps toward protecting our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which increasingly means taking major steps to control our contribution (huge!) to global warming.
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