Margotlog: From Trabbia to Pittsburgh, Somalia to Saint Paul

Margotlog: From Trabbia to Pittsburgh, Somalia to Saint Paul

My oldest living relative Eleanora links me to her grandmother, also named Eleanora, who came from Sicily to New York, then Scranton, then Pittsburgh to marry the husband left with a small boy when her older sister died. Of course I never knew this first Eleanora, though I treasure and often visit her namesake and granddaughter, the 93-year-old marvel who still enjoys chocolate, teasing family gossip, television, and medical breakthroughs, all dispensed from her Lazy-Boy chair, in Dover, Delaware.

This family immigrant story, circa 1880, must have been common. That's one of the reasons it resonates with me today, when I have taught Hmong and Somali immigrants in Saint Paul. Italy invaded Ethiopia and Somalia in the 19th century, and many adults still speak Italian; some older Somali were even educated by Italian priests in Somalia, then went to Padova or other Italian universities for advanced degrees. One remarkable Somali gentleman with the equivalent of a Ph.D. in microbiology was a classroom aide when I met him in Saint Paul. Everyone referred to him as "Doctor." We exchanged greetings and a few sentences in Italian, then it became clear that his fluency exceeded mine and we switched to English.

Reading and writing in another language require many skill-sets (in clunky current educationese) not required of speaking. It's true that those blessed with a good ear, the right "mouth," and the best teacher of all--need--can pick up the rudiments of another spoken language fairly quickly. That doesn't mean they'll sound like a native, though sometimes even that is possible. Being born with the right "mouth" and ear will aid the acquisition of a spoken language tremendously. All through my childhood, I heard my father carry on in Italian--not paragraphs, of course, since he was the only one in our nuclear and isolated family of four who spoke it. "Eh, paisan!" he'd tease, tweaking my cheek between index and pointer fingers in a "pizzichille." Or starting the rhyming chant brought, I suspect, from Sicily, he'd raise his finger like a warning statue and intone: "Uno, due, tre cancello, suona, suona, suona bello, ecco si, ecco no," and after that the language spilled over itself to end with a mock beating. This "one, two, three" introduced something about cancelling and a bell ringing, and may have mimicked the "one, two, three, you're dead" of an actual Sicilian vendetta.

His mouth and ear now belong to me, and I'm proud to report that in Italy, natives sometimes mistake me for one of them. Of course, I look Italian, which helps. I'm pretty sure I'd have a much harder time acquiring spoken German or Swedish, my mother's countries of origin. Not only did I never hear her speak either language (I don't think she could, nor was she given to verbal play), but I also find the sound of German, at least, rather harsh and off-putting. Likewise the German practice of putting a verb at the end of a sentence sends me over the edge--English teacher, that I am. Contemporary American English is largely a language of incredible efficiency and directness: subject - verb- object, the trajectory of force moving straight from start to finish.

The first Eleanora had known her sister's husband in Trabbia; in fact, he who became the Reverend Leonardo D'Anna, started a renegade Protestant church--in that time and place quite a radical act. He'd been converted to Protestantism as a soldier in the Valdese mountains between France and Italy. Returning to Trabbia, he married an eldest daughter Giuseppina, they had a son, and when neighbors burned the little church, they swiftly removed to New York. There Leonardo he entered a Protestant seminary, and Giuseppina practiced the art of baking learned from her family in Sicily. The story goes that she followed the family custom of giving day-old bread to the poor, and waking the January streets of New York, she caught a terrible cold and died of pneumonia, thus leaving her husband and small son alone.

When Reverend D'Anna wrote to Sicily asking if his sister-in-law Eleanora would consent to come to America and marry him, he thus was requesting the hand of a young woman he already knew him and adored the little boy. Eleanora could not be allowed to sail all the way to America alone, however; so her father accompanied her. She never returned. The first voyage was so unnerving that she refused ever to set foot on a ship again. Thus her ties to her family in Sicily were severed completely. Well, not completely, because she and her minister husband, stepson and their three daughters--all lived within an immigrant Italian community, first in New York, then in Scranton, and finally in Pittsburgh. She did acquire spoken English, though many immigrant wives did not. Why would they need English if all their activities outside the home were among immigrants like themselves? It was their husbands and of course their children who made the leap into becoming American.

In the era when Eleanora's three daughters went to school in Scranton, there were no mandated state and national competency tests. Chances are that all three girls spoke both Italian and English, but maybe not. Certainly by the next generation, that is, my father (born in 1909) and his three cousins (born from 1919-25), all the children were bi-lingual because they were raised that way. My father's father, also a Protestant Italian minister, made it his business to establish schools to help immigrants acquire English and other skills necessary to become citizens. I don't remember anyone among my older Italian relatives ever weighing in on the problems of learning to speak, read, and write English.

Now I'm helping masters students in education struggle through the initial drafting of their thesis questions. Many are employed in charter schools established to educate various immigrant and migrant groups, for whom English is not their first language. These young teachers are often stymied by what's called the "achievement gap." Without going into the complicated differences among groups, I can say, simply and directly, that state and national mandates for achievement seem true impediments to the education taking place, especially among immigrants.

The few things I've picked up, during years of being a writer-in-the-schools teaching native-born and immigrant students include an awareness that learning two major skills at once is far more difficult than acquiring one, then building on that to acquire another. Expecting children who have a poor spoken knowledge of English to learn to read in that language, especially when they don't already know how to read in their own language--well it's like burdening a poor donkey with so many parcels that he can't possibly make it up a steep and rocky slope. At least not as fast as a donkey with no burdens at all.

As I listen to these dedicated young teachers describe the methods they employ to close the "achievement gap," I wonder about our thinking about equity and achievement. It seems to have gone awry in regards to immigrant students. It's a truism that it takes a student without spoken English twice or three times as long to master skills necessary to graduate high school as it does a native English speaker. Such a gap seems the obvious and simple difference in the many more things an immigrant must master. That we can't tailor programs to guide immigrant students steadily and surely, and at a reasonable pace through their learning challenges without gnashing our teeth and twisting the learning process into unnatural distortions, tells me that crazy ideology has taken hold. Our standards are no longer reasonable measures; they have become whips.

Margotlog: The Great Generals

Margotlog: The Great Generals

In our house we dislike war. My husband Fran spent seventeen months in federal prison during the Vietnam War for refusing to accept even alternate service. A thorough-going pacifist, he virtually insisted that his Iowa draft board send him to prison. Curiously, his older brother hadn't been touched in North Dakota. There, in the state's sparse population, the family was known: the Galts, the minister's family who lived on a reservation where Reverend Galt led a tiny church for the combined Hidatsa, Arrikara, Mandan. The Reverend himself had been imprisoned during World War II as a pacifist. Now when I ( the outsider) look back at this history, I wonder if Fran didn't follow suit simply because the family required it--one of those silent imperatives that may be harder to resist that the heavily voiced ones.

Prison introduced him to thieves, murderers, and scoundrels; he played chess with one. He worked in the prison office, administering "tree, house, person" tests to incoming prisoners. He got the job because he could type. He read voluminous 19th-century novels available in the prison library, and every now and then, he had a visitor: his mother, once; his newly married wife, perhaps every six months. Is it any surprise that a few years after he was released, the marriage began to unravel? Now, decades later, as a complete outsider to this period of his life, I recognize that had we met when Fran was well known at the University of Minnesota as an orator against the war, picketing, leafleting, protesting with other students and faculty--as I say, had we met then, when I was pursuing the "safe" existence of middle-class marriage with all the china, silver and assurance that went with it, I'd have run from what he represented. Not that I supported the war. I simply was capable of responding only to its horrendous sensations delivered into our homes for the first time, by TV. (Later, compelled to make his story public, I wrote it in the book: Stop This War! Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict, available from Amazon.)

Yet, growing up in South Carolina, with a father who put on a military uniform to teach at The Citadel, having Civil War history served up with the peas and carrots and baked chicken every Sunday dinner, I couldn't avoid learning that wars changed lives. Drastically. The South was "beaten" to a pulp; Sherman's northern army burned its way through Georgia and only spared Charleston, so I dimly remember hearing, because somebody in Sherman's army had a sweetheart in the city. There on the battery, the cannons which had started the contest pointed across the harbor to Fort Sumter. And a huge marble figure with flowing robes dominated the headland, in honor of the valiant defenders.

But war from a strategic, tactical point of view was absolutely foreign to me. Whatever my father, the history professor, might have said about such things, passed right over me. That's why, listening recently to a recorded reading of "Grant" by John Mosier, has been a revelation. I've known for years that Grant was a U.S. president whose term of office was rife with corruption. I vaguely knew that Grant was an important Northern general during the Civil War. But that military historians now deem Grant one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the old-fashioned generals in Western history, up there with Wellington, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Montgomery and Dwight Eisenhower, took me completely by surprise.

Grant had none of the commanding presence of the great Southern general Robert E. Lee, nor the "dash" of Lee's compatriots, Longstreet, Sheridan, Bragg. Mosier emphasizes that when the Confederacy split from the Union, many of the finest US generals went with it. In fact, the North was plagued by totally incompetent military leadership, losing the first dozen major encounters, starting with first Bull Run, until Grant began to win in the west, Tennessee, Shiloh, Vicksburg--making a reality his strategy of securing the Mississippi Valley and as many railroad heads as possible for the Union.

Maybe I'm riveted by this history because directing an army bears some resemblance to teaching a class. "All plans are worthless after the first shot"--Grant's maxim--is also true of teaching. Improvisation, determination, and forward motion shape what will happen. "Strike hard and fast"--another maxim which Grant proved true time and again on the battlefield, also holds with students: a petulant or truculent attitude, left to fester, only gets worse. Tell it like it is, immediately and straight. "Write clearly and concisely"--Grant's written orders told his subordinate generals exactly where and what to do, and left the details up to intelligence and circumstance.

Grant also had two other signal characteristics which made him an outstanding general: with a painter's eye (he had studied painting at West Point), he could envision terrain and act accordingly, an extremely important skill in the period before aerial reconnaissance. The other was his imperturbable personality--the man could carry on a leisurely conversation on the night of a major battle. He rarely showed disappointment or anger; he did not lose heart. He held fast to the certainty that, despite the carnage and set-backs, the Union would prevail. I'll be mulling these lessons for a long time.

Margotlog: Rats, Lice, and History

Margotlog: Rats. Lice, and History

Growing up in The Old Citadel, during the 1950s, we could very well have been inhabiting a medieval fortress, with its foot-thick walls, sixteen-foot ceilings, deep window wells, tall windows, and dark cavernous halls. My friend from across the courtyard grew sick with a disease the doctors couldn't diagnose for the longest time, until they hit on the idea of typhus, one of the scourges of densely packed port cities like London or Naples. Rats would swarm off ships from the Levant or Orient, my mother said, and I'd picture a ground-level tide of dark bodies, long tails held out behind them, as they searched for houses to invade. As my friend lay quarantined in her second-floor apartment, I stared across the courtyard in her direction, caught by the silent drama of fear and salvation, suffering and attention. Especially once a dead rat was discovered decomposing in the wall beside her bed, her condition commanded my daily curiosity. Lice had found their way through the wall and bitten her as she slept. I had no idea what lice looked like, nor was I particularly worried that these creatures would bite me, though my sister and I sported all kinds of mosquito bites.

What became imbedded in my psyche was the drama of the ill, sequestered to a dim room and quiet bed, over which hung a ministering angel, mother or doctor or both. In those days, doctors still made house calls. A doctor never visited us in the Old Citadel that I remember, but our doctor in Mount Pleasant, where we moved when I was thirteen, often climbed the stairs to my second-floor bedroom. I would turn a feverish face toward the door and find his handsome form silhouetted against the light, then feel the cold stethoscope against my chest and his fingers feeling for swollen glands under my jaw and down my neck. This encounter in my pubescent years no doubt carried some sexual charge, though I was too weak and bleery to take note of it. Rather, it was the swoosh of outside air that accompanied his entrance, his bulk and promise of a cure that I associated with his visit.

My mother was also a crucial player. Her energetic efficiency contained a perpetual promise that life would continue. My father, the "emotional Italian," to use her words, could convey none of this. He would sigh and rub his forehead, let out a slight moan as he sat down, Saturday morning, at the kitchen table. We were still living in the Old Citadel, and as I ate my Rice Krispies, listening for the "snap, crackle, and pop," I'd catch his voice bemoaning the loss of "la bella Rosalia," his mother, who had died recently, aged only 58 or was it 62? Death drew from my father and transferred to me a sorrowful melody, even tears. He taught me that after death, life was charged for the survivors by a drama of mourning. That deep, melancholy sigh.

That illness and death could inhabit drama and literature I also learned, early on. With my parents, we walked down King Street to the Gloria Theater for a filming of "La Traviata," Verdi's intensely beautiful and dramatic opera about the high-class prostitute Violetta, her reform through love for Alfredo, but then, with the connivance of his father, her abandoning of Alfredo for the brilliance and danger of high living. Eventually, of course, she lies dying of tuberculosis, the quintessential 19th-century illness, and in glorious voice, is reunited for one last duet with Alfredo.

My younger sister and I were entirely smitten with Violetta's dying. Camping out in our parents big bed, we played Violetta dying and her maid attending over and over. I think it was Violetta's languor, coupled with her power over the maid about, that appealed to us, too young to recognize or attempt an entry for the penitent Alfredo and the ecstasy of their last embrace.

Now, decades later, halfway across the country from Charleston and almost as far north, I return to that childhood fascination with the drama of illness. And I remember Dickens' Bleak House. Perhaps I'm the only reader who finds the core of the book in Esther Summerson's long illness. Esther is half-narrator of the book, orphaned and taken up by the kindly landowner John Jarndyce. She has had numerous adventures and encounters, come to love Jarndyce's other wards, cousins also bedeviled by a Chancery Court case which will not be settled. Then, almost dead center in the highly convoluted, crowded world of Dickens' book, Esther becomes gravely ill and lies for many days almost lifeless in Mr. Jarndyce's country house.

The cause is her goodness: she has befriended Poor Tom, a street-sweeper/beggar who has followed her from London into the country where she finds him gravely ill. Perhaps he has smallbox, yes now that I remember, it is smallpox, because even in her modesty and submission to the welfare of others, Esther will worry, once she begins to recover, that she will be disfigured by the pox. But before she is capable of such anxiety, her goodness guides her to bring Poor Tom into the lower reaches of Mr. Jarndyce's house, and soon to be herself infected. For days, weeks, she lies almost insensible while cared for by another young person she's befriended. Mr. Jarndyce who has come to love and adore her is disconsolate. All who hear of her illness mourn her fate. Except she begins to recover. Eventually able to sit up in bed and study herself in the mirror.

There we are again: the gravely ill young woman who has won our hearts, and her devoted maid, the threat of death and the prolonged uncertainty, mixed with beauty, of her care. In Esther's case, a miraculous recovery occurs, allowing me to revert to girlhood, trade places with my sister, and let her play the sleeping beauty, the caring and admiring "second sister," and the bliss of lying back, exploring the options of slipping away or rousing oneself to carry on.

Margotlog: Story! Story!

Margotlog: Story! Story

The first book I published, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative 1992), demonstrates to students and writers--would-be and already accomplished poets, novelists, dramatists, memoirists--how to go beneath the statistics and dates of history to vivify what happened. I present forms--letter poems, poems in two voices, radio dramas, messages scratched on prison stones, Native American "Winter Counts," battle dispatches, laboring songs and harvest recipes--into which writers can pour the voices and drama of events, great or small, real and enlivened, to recount what happened as we crossed the terrain, suffered the weather, mastered the technology, strife, nourishment of the past.

Now I'm trying to convince writers in science and education to do the same thing. I think they fear two things: losing authority and the appearance of hard-and-fast objectivity.

Let me convince with a real-life example. Saturday night, after a fine turkey dinner and before Sunday's blizzard knocked the stuffing out of us, some friends sat in our living room. After a lengthy debate about ways to build community support for solar energy, another topic presented itself. "What do you say to this?" asked a communications expert who works for one of the biggest hospital complexes in the Twin Cities. "I was given the job of rewriting a final documentation of changes made within various departments over the past year. Departments had already submitted their accounts, but many of them were so compressed and "jargonized" that even I, who know a lot about medicine and hospital procedures, even I had only a glimmer of what they were talking about. The more I thought about the problem--because this document had to communicate to many people inside and out of the hospital--the more I realized that these hard-working, dedicated medical professionals had no idea how to tell a story. Instead of the jargonized compressed version of the solution, we needed a narrative--the story of the problems they'd encountered, the solutions they'd tried, where they'd failed and how they'd arrived at solutions (even if only temporary).

"What I did," he continued, "was to sketch out what I thought was the story. Then I took my sketchy version and showed it to them. A few acknowledged that, yes, they'd felt the need of some such account, but didn't know how to go about writing it. Others simply looked at me as if I were looney. 'But, we know all that,' they said in essence, a little suspicious that I, an outsider, had been able to penetrate their one line of jargon to write this elaborated history.

"'You certainly do know that,' I countered, 'but the rest of the world doesn't. The rest of the world hasn't experienced the difficulties you encountered, the CAUSE of your search for a new solution, nor can they guess what makes your solution either the brilliant conclusion it is or the interim stop-gap, holding things in place until a better solution is devised. We have to show them. We have to tell the story of how adversity taught you that something must be done, and how, through trial and error, you crafted a solution."

We listeners laughed and applauded his achievement. We agreed that often, too much of any history is skipped over, and once those who lived it are gone or have forgotten, the essence of the discovery/achievement is lost. The solution becomes codified, immortal, while the trial and error, the lucky mistake, the suggestions and discussion around the struggle--all crumble into nothingness. How is it possible to teach the next generations of doctors, lawyers, architects, farmers, cooks, teachers, business owners, and so on? How is it possible to teach the process of discovery, that gathering of apparently disparate talents and approaches, plus thoughtful planning and careful revision, plus the spark of intuition and lucky happenstance--how to suggest and demonstrate this very human process unless it's written down?

Well, the answer is simple: it isn't possible. Such a process can't be merely suggested. It needs to be told, as a story. Moreover, and this occurred to me after our friends had gone, and I lay on the floor surrounded by cats, while I did my midnight yoga: the credibility, the authenticity of the solution is impressed on the listener precisely by learning who created it. This "who" includes all honors and glory already bestowed, but they are not enough. The makers win our respect when we witness what disaster they encountered, how they struggled and attempted, failed and finally succeeded in solving the difficulty. The story becomes their accreditation.

Plus our stories expand our sense of what's possible. We're not left simply holding a keypad and 17 characters (or whatever Twitter allows) to tell the tale. We wade deep, out of our depths to practice patience, perseverence, defeat and accomplishment. We can crow with Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

Margotlog:: Racism on the Train

Margotlog: Racism on the Train

Growing up as an outsider in Charleston, South Carolina, cut two ways: into myself when I recognized how divergent I was, how odd, how embarrassing, how ultimately unrecognizable. But also outward, toward the movers and shakers, toward the society that couldn't exactly place me except by my father's Citadel uniform. As I grew older and ranged beyond the Old Citadel, I began to recognize ironies and tiny rebellions; catch rueful resistance from the back of the bus; spy the loneliness of a doctor's wife in her splendid house, "South of Broad."

Charleston was one of the oldest cities in North America, founded in 1680 by English planters who'd originally stopped in Bermuda, then moved up the Atlantic coast, bringing their slaves. But they weren't the only settlers: French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, Jews with ancient Sephardic Spanish history; Scotch-Irish and Germans from Catholic/Protestant wars, and plain unadulterated Puritans, with their stiff uprightness going soft in the Southern heat. One of my best friends from grade school at Ashley Hall could trace her mother's family back to early planters: she was as blond and willowy as a sea nymph. She proudly sported four names.

My awareness of the fissures and ironies in Charleston life began when I started walking to school. Accompanied by an older girl and her sister, my age, we left the Old Citadel on King Street and took perpendicular Vanderhorst (Dutch, I'm guessing), past the lovely columned Baptist Church (I think that's right), into a broken-down neighborhood of formerly fine, three-story dwellings now inhabited by impoverished black people. Our voices hushed as I eaves-dropped on a dialect I couldn't understand. Under a huge tree in one grassless yard sat a turbaned old black woman in a over-stuffed chair. The ground around her was littered with orange peels. From the third-floor porch of another house--picture these houses with their narrow ends to the street, so that as we approached along the cracked and up-heaving sidewalk and glanced into the side yards, the three stories of porches faced us. As I say, over the railing of a third-floor porch hung a row of small black children, some wearing torn undershirts, and some without diapers of any kind. They stared at us, and for a few moments, we stared back. Even now I catch my young amazement that they were allowed to appear in public so unclothed, so untended. But the porch was relatively safe, like a playpen high in the air, and if they peed, it would drip off onto the ground. The conclusion I soon drew from these encounters wasn't stamped with ideas of race and social class so much as with a prickling discomfort at the difference between us walking to school and these apparently idle black people. Somehow I felt they offered a criticism of my existence; somehow because of them, I was able to be what I was. I was too young to understand racism, and my father hadn't begun his relentless rant against giving African-Americans equal rights. But walking through these neighborhoods, and later drinking the water from the "Whites Only" fountain in Sears made the effects of racism pretty plain.

Until later, racism didn't seem to belong to us, since we were outsiders. It was part of the Southern landscape into which we'd moved, and I was starting to intuit. That was all. Then, probably when I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mother, sister, and I took one of our frequent summer trips across country by train to North Dakota. We had spent six weeks in the quiet streets and fields around Papa Max's large, shadowing home in Hankinson. Now we were coming home. Probably we'd accomplished the first two legs of the journey--from Wapeton to Saint Paul, then Saint Paul to Chicago. On our way into Cincinnati, an altercation developed between my mother and the black porter. They stood in the aisle, all eyes (I imagined in my embarrassment) boring into them. She with her up-flipped side hair and trim traveling suit, her blue eyes flashing; he with the uniform hat with a narrow bill and white jacket. I have no idea what started the argument, but her voice rose and sharpened from its usual quiet modulation into nagging, dismissive tones. Under its "lash," he became ever more placating, shoulders drooping slightly, with his "Yes, Ma'am, yes Ma'am" bowing toward the floor. Her behavior deeply troubled me. She was so clearly abusing him with her voice, while his obsequious demeanor attempted to soothe and quiet her. That she took advantage of his subservient position, treated him not with dignity and kindness but with scorn and humiliation shocked me, and I intuited, though couldn't have put words to this, that racism could coarsen those in power, even someone like my mother who hadn't been born to the system. It was a profound and life-long lesson.

Margotlog: Poetry OUT LOUD

Margotlog: Poetry OUT LOUD

Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, and "Invictus" by Ernest Henley--all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p'try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us poems by Langston Hughes, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Dudley Randall. Over the last ten years, Poetry Out Loud has become a national "night out" for spoken word. No longer do we declaim solely from a school stage, though this is where each school starts the selection of its contestants. We carry our voices all the way to Washington.

I couldn't be more for it. Not only did I get to enjoy Khadro (I'm guessing of Somali origin) in a voice like milky silk present Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly" with the simpering irony perfect for this lightly ironic enchantment, but I welcomed stout-hearted Hassan turn Benjamin Alire Saenz's "To the Desert" into a celebration of one who "taught me how to live without the rain." Now after a few minutes with Google, I've read Saenz's website biography and understand that his desert is the American Southwest, its vivid complicated border history, his own peregrinations through priesthood, service in Tanzania, graduate school in Iowa and California, and the publication of many books of poetry and fiction.

Our Poetry Out Loud presenters in what's called the Metro Central area couldn't have been more varied--some quiet and intense; others flamboyant and visceral. "You should have been in Winona," commented the coordinator of Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud: "Almost everyone spoke in subdued tones." In part she referred to the wide variety of origins and ethnicities present on our stage. Though I'm guessing, I'd place our students' recent origins on a world map with an emphasis on Africa, either directly or via their parents. Whereas Poetry Out Loud in southeastern Minnesota undoubtedly was performed almost entirely by third or fourth generation German/Scandinavians with a few Irish thrown in.

The guidelines for judging Poetry Out Loud emphatically support presenting a poem in what I'd call the "inside-out" style, meaning that the presenter absorbs each poem's complicated means--rhyme and rhythm, tone and color of language, sound and sense--and subdues declamation and theatrical gestures in favor of intense, subtle delivery. In fact, many of our Metro Central participants did NOT follow these strictures. The Africans among them come from a tradition of oral declamation. In Somalia, for instance, the history of poetry has been, until very recently, entirely oral, and poets are renown for the long sagas they have by heart, and for their ability to rivet an audience with a full-bodied, richly declaimed presentation. When you live a nomadic life, with no film or TV to mesmerize you with drama on demand, a poet must kindle all kinesthetic, oral and literary organs, dramatizing against a wide empty sky. American notions of poetry oral presentation come from a very different tradition, one in which poetry has developed internal castles of complicated associations and shades of meaning which can easily be missed in excessive dramatization.

More recently, too, we poets have been forced to find a niche separate from film and TV's often empty excesses. We tone down in order to be heard. The winner of the Metro Central competition did exactly that. She went deep inside the poems; she subdued herself to let the poems speak through her. Her voice had resonance and subtlety; her gestures were minimal. She gave a memorable performance, well within the guidelines established for the competition. But hers was not the only excellence. The second-place winner gave a vibrant performance. In her hijab and head scarf, with a vocal range more like singing than reading aloud, she breathed warmth into her chosen poems.

I'd say it's time to reconsider the guidelines, to recognize the widening experience of American poets and their student presenters. This is a change-in-the-making. I'll be watching to see what the poets-in-power make of it.

Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water

Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water

We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the "Office" at Posada del Mar had brought a message up to our room. The assisted living, where we had transferred my mother six months before, had called: she was in the hospital. Trembling and terrified, I gathered as many Mexican pesos as I could and returned toward town to a pay phone.

It was strange to stand with sea breezes ruffling my hair and a sandy street under my feet, while the faint voice of the assisted-living administrator told the story. My mother (three months shy of turning 95) had not been well for a number of days, pale and weak and eventually passing blood in her urine. They'd taken her to her doctor where the nurse hadn't been able to "raise a pulse." This should have been an immediate sign to send my mother directly to the hospital. But no, the nurses and soon the doctor proceeded. Here, Reader, you must forgive my anger and bitterness: these medical professionals, who professed to be skilled in geriatric care, insisted against her wishes on inserting a catheter into her bladder. What other enormities of medical interference they perpetrated I'll probably never know. But I do know what happened eventually: they sent her back to the assisted living facility, where, appalled at her weakened, almost lifeless condition, the facility called an ambulance and had her taken to Roper General Hospital.

During the five hours that she slowly expired, the two women who had taken care of her, first at home, then in assisted living, took turns sitting beside her. She died with a familiar hand stroking her hair. And she died quietly, after the intrusions of the doctor's office. The hospital had enough sense not to try and resusitate a body so clearly shutting down. When I phoned again, several hours later, I was able to talk to my sister who had tried valiantly to reach her side from Boston, but been held up by a connecting flight in Charlotte.

During that second call, I decided, without any agonizing soul-searching, that I would leave the funeral to my sister. Though we'd done a fine job of sharing our mother's care during the five years of her slow decline, we had quite different ideas about how to put her in the ground.

I had already said good-bye to Mother three weeks before, at the end of January, when I'd spent a long weekend with her. As I'd entered her room in the late afternoon, she was still lying asleep in her long afternoon nap. Sitting at the end of the bed, with light filtering through closed blinds, I saw death in her face. Her pallor matched her white hair; her features were somewhat sunken. It was as if an invisible, but palpable arm was gently reaching through the closed blinds and drawing her away. I was attentive, noting the awareness that transferred itself to me in that shrouded room. My intuition hadn't been prefigured by any "rational" thought, yet it was as clear as an certainty, framed into words, could be.

I decided not to put myself through the rigors of changing my flight and attempting to fly from Cancun, probably via Miami, to Charleston. My sister could arrange the funeral as she wished. Our mother, with her intensely practical attention to detail, had planned it all in advance.

Yet, I had to pause and attend her passage. Make some homage formed of Isla's beauty and my own sorrow. Later that initial sorrow would mount into true mourning, when for months, I would sit in the sunlit front rooms of our second floor and weep. That kind of grief whose agony cleanses our souls, that kind of grief doesn't come immediately. What I needed immediately was a pageant I'd remember through the years to follow. A ceremony of sorts when I could gather sky and sea, flowers and birds to help commemorate her life and waft her on her way.

Putting on my swimsuit, though I rarely swam on the "bikini" beach just beyond Posada del Mar, I passed through the lush green of the Posada grounds. Many hibiscus had dropped their blossoms as new ones appeared. The green grass was littered with red hibiscus. Gathering up the fallen flowers, I headed toward the beach which faced north, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic, toward Charleston.

It was, as always in late February on Isla, a beautiful day, with billowing white clouds spiraling into brilliant blue. The water, shallow for a long ways beyond the white sand, was warm and friendly as a big dog, lapping my ankles, then knees, then thighs. Still carrying the blossoms, I lowered myself into the green depths and slowly drifted toward the north. Whether sun-bathers watched me, I do not know. I kept my eyes on the northern strip of land on the Cancun mainland, and let the water carry me. Slowly the flowers left my hands and bobbed on little and bigger waves. Some were caught and went further out toward the channel until I lost sight of them. Others like friendly stewards of my grief stayed close, bobbing and reappearing, their fuzzy stamens pointing toward the sky, their petals catching drops of water and sometimes submerging.

I was aware only of sending my love with the flowers toward her, as if an invisible stream flowed through the warm green water north directly to where she was. Overhead almost as high as the clouds, the zig-zag shapes of frigate birds elevated my thoughts. Gulls flew over, lazily flapping closer to the water. Gradually some of the flowers, further out in the channel, completely submerged and were gone. Others remained close, still rising and falling with the gentle waves, still keeping me company.

I must have made some sort of pact with myself--that I would swim and loll, weep and remember as long as the red tips of flowers still accompanied me. Who knows how long it took as the north tugged at my desire to communicate across the miles to the watery coast where she would be buried. Each red flower was like a small boat, an emissary, bobbing with me, moving with the gentle force of wind and waves, finally losing its contact with me and going on its own way.

Eventually the flowers had wafted too far north for me to track and it was time to return. It seems to me now, looking back, that I scooped up one or two still floating around me and carried them back to our second floor room where I lay them on the balcony rail, my last flowery homage. It seems the perfect gesture, the perfect goodbye to a woman who loved flowers to the very end of her life, who grew camellia bushes far taller than herself, which at this time of year in her beloved Charleston yard were covered with wide, waxy red blossoms, with gold crowns in their centers.

Margotlog: The Last Survivor

Margotlog: The Last Survivor

Sounds like a shipwreck, but in fact, the last survivor of my parents' generation, Eleanora, rides comfortably in assisted living, Dover, Delaware. She's 93, the only one in her generation with blue eyes, a rarety in Southern Italian stock, though her mother Josephine also had blue eyes and reddish hair. Ditto my sister, though her blue-green eyes don't really count since our mother added German/Swedish blueness to the family mix.

My mother, the German-Swedish snob from North Dakota, used to opine that Charles of Anjou conquored the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This would account for the occasional blue-green eyes and blondish hair in my father's Sicilian relatives. Ditto their family name: D'Anna. The "D - apostrophe" meant, according to my mother, noble birth: my father's Sicilian relatives were part of the ancient conquering tribe. We used to laugh at her behind her back. She'd clutch at straws, even flimsy historical straws, to burnish her marriage into the "boot" of Italy.

At 93, Eleanora has outlived all that sillyness as well as all the relatives in her generation: my father and his three brothers (her first cousins), her two sisters, and my mother who married into the family. Not surprisingly she's also outlived her adorable, tiny, blue-eyed mother Josephine, who took the unprecedented step of leaving her husband and coming to live with her two daughters in Washington, D.C. Women like Josephine, born toward the end of the 19th century, especially Italian, family-clad women, didn't usually walk out on their husbands, but Josephine had grit. She transferred her clothes in small packages to her middle daughter near Pittsburgh, then one day bought a train ticket to Washington and never returned. All this happened when I was growing up in South Carolina, so removed from my father's relatives in Pittsburgh, New Jersey and Washington, that I didn't quite grasp what was going on. Talky Italians though they all were, they kept quiet about family troubles. Only now, when I sit opposite Eleanora in her little apartment or chat on the phone, do I hear the details.

If the choice were left to me, I'd nominate Eleanora herself as having the saddest, most vexxing yet the most jolly life. She was happy enough as a girl, growing up a few blocks from my father and his raucous, well-managed family. She enjoyed vigorous teen years as a jock before such a word was ever used for a girl. "You'll find Eleanora on the basketball court or behind the candy counter," teased her high-school principal. She loved chocolate then and now. She also told the family doctor who delivered her youngest sister (this means Eleanora must have been all of five years old) that no, thank you, she did not want to be a nurse. She planned to be a doctor just like him.

It's just possible this might have transpired--her family had money enough to send the oldest daughter to college--but Eleanora met Dick from a Pennsylvania Dutch family when she had a summer job in Harrisburg. They married, Eleanora became pregnant shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Dick was drafted. Her baby, born a few weeks after I was, died within a month. In the difficult delivery, the obstetrician had used forceps which crushed the baby's head.

With Dick drafted and sent to Okinawa, Eleanora moved back to Pittsburgh to live with her parents and took a part-time job in a department store. Dick's letters came infrequently: he didn't know if he could kill anyone, he wrote; then after many battles, he confessed that he had: the cries of buddies dying in the jungle drove him to mad revenge. He hoped she would forgive him. Eleanora and Dick were deeply Christian people: "Thou Shall Not Kill," said one of God's ten commandments. It wounded them both that war had forced them into such horrors.

One day in May 1945, shortly after the war in Europe was over, Eleanora took a streetcar across Pittsburgh to visit a friend whose husband was also still fighting like Dick in the Pacific. While she was gone, a stranger drove back and forth in front of the family home. As Josephine looked out the window, a stranger in a fedora got out and rang the bell. He had a telegram for "Mrs. Blumenstine." Josephine looked the man in the eyes: "Is he dead, or pray God, only wounded?" The man shook his head. "Don't leave her alone," he advised. "Make sure someone is with her until you're sure she's through the worst."

"When I came home near 11, I was surprised to find my sister and her husband and little boy there," Eleanora recalls, "as well as the neighbors from next door. My mother opened the door. All she had to do was look at me and hand me the telegram. I didn't have to read it. She put her arm around me, but I didn't cry, not immediately. Instead I went straight into the living room and turned a photo of Dick and me to the wall. My mother stood beside me: 'No,' she said. 'You have to get used to it.' And she turned the photo around. For an hour I walked up and down outside with the neighbor, a friend of mine. Who knows what I said or did. I guess I was in shock."

There was no body to bury, no evidence of Dick's death. Only the report that his ship had been hit, and many on board were killed. It took her years to fully acknowledge that he was never coming back.

A few years later, friends urged her to find work in a hospital. "You wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps you'd feel comforted by hospital work?" Though a generation older than most other nursing students, Eleanora applied to a nursing program in Pittsburgh. The admitting matron was very impressed with her. And so, with the promise of a single room--"I'm not a girl anymore," Eleanora explained--she began studying, graduated at the top of her class, and so took up what became her adult profession: health education, working for the American Cancer Society among other organizations. When her youngest sister Sadie and she moved in together and Josephine joined them, they created a family unit that sustained them until Josephine died at 94 and Sadie recently at 85. They all welcomed visitors from South Carolina. My father and mother who'd been their friends in Pittsburgh brought my sister and me to visit Cousins Eleanor and Sadie and Aunt Jo. With these loving, teasing women, my father relaxed into his best self; the talk was loud, silly, and continuous. A little wearing for those of us used to my mother's Nordic quiet. But we all loved Aunt Jo, Sadie and Eleanor. They were our closest relatives on my father's side.

Now, talking to Eleanora, recounting the old stories again and again, the sad and the silly, the deeply troubling and the highly political--Washington got in their blood; Sadie worked for years in the Office of the President--I feel embraced and welcomed into the fold. Not a lost sheep or a black sheep, but fully part of the woolly, sometimes blue-eyed, but mostly dark-eyed herd. Eleanora's power of speech carries us along: she has the Italian gift of gab. And for many, a gift of longevity. To look at her, you'd never guess she was edging toward 100.

Margotlog: Female Flesh

Margotlog: Female Flesh

It's a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow an opening from Jane Austen), that female flesh is used to sell the work and sometimes even the reputation of an artist. Case in point: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a show opened yesterday called "Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting." The keystone works, two companion pieces by Titian , 1488-1576, based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." At the height of his career Titian was given a commission by King Philip II of Spain to paint whatever subjects he wanted; for this, the artist would receive a yearly stipend. The arrangements were unprecedented: a mark of Titian's preeminence and the king's appreciation of his work.

Perhaps the best known of Titian's canvasses for the king is "The Rape of Europa," in Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. I remember it from dim-dark college art history, when the bull (Zeus in one of his many seductive guises) yearns back at Europe flung across his back, as he hoofs it off through the foam to Crete. This was one of Zeus's more gentle seductions: hiding among her father's herds, he became the object of her affection, his horns twined with flowers, her hand caressing his flank. What I love about Titian's depiction of this "rape" is its diagonal composition--bull and dame speed off across the lower right, while a huge swath of canvas is given over to luscious seascape with two nymphs hovering above.

Titian's Europe is fully clad in diaphanous gauze. Not so Diana and her nymphs in the two works at the MIA. They sit, lounge, bend, stand completely nude, hardly idealized, heavy-bottomed, round-tummied, small-breasted northern Italian women. No doubt art historians would applaud this tendency toward physical realism. In both paintings--Actaeon surprising Diana and her nymphs in their bath, and Diana banishing her nymph Callisto for becoming impregnated by Zeus in one of his many disguises. In both canvases, the huntress Diana and her nymphs provide a frieze, shot with light and shade, motion and sensuality, of female flesh. Reportedly, Mark Twain is supposed to have quipped, too salacious for any setting but a museum.

Why do they make me squeamish? I'm not at all put off by Titian's "Venus of Urbino" in the Uffizzi, or by Manet's 19th-century French take off--"Olympia"-- both women with cool, poised and looking right atcha gazes. Both self-aware, in command of their nudity. In fact, they are regal. "Tamper with me if you dare." But there's something in the two Diana works that disquiets me. Perhaps the veil of incident is too obviously a ploy, a scrim of myth over what is in reality a display of female meat for the private delectation of the "male gaze." But I think there's more to it. In both, Diana will render harsh judgment on Actaeon and Callisto for challenging her supposed chastity. She'll turn Actaeon into a stag who will be hunted down and killed by his own hunting dogs. "Aw, Mom, I didn't mean to stumble on your female revels. Gimme a break! It was all a mistake." But Mom is cruel and relentless.

Ditto even more pathetic Callisto, whose vow of chastity in the service of the hunting queen is breached by Zeus's even more powerful wiles. In this painting, Diane is draped across the right side of the picture in frontal display, while poor Callisto, writhing in the rather smirking grip of other nymphs, goes down to banishment. Her pregnant belly with its huge umbilical depression sags like a sack of grain. Titian has made her ugly, her tortured face cast in agonizing shadow. Those of us who identify with women, their history and fate, find this reprehensible. There's a terrible and rather disgusting double message here: the nudity for male delectation; the cruelty of the queen, a tease to male viewers, suggesting other life-moments when they, too, have suffered from female rejection. It's a classical version of sado-masochism.

Many artists in their old age reach deep into the human dilemma for some of their greatest works. Rembrandt's "Lucretia" in the MIA permanent collection is, for me, the most potent example. Creating these Diana canvases in the few decades before his death, Titian may also have intended to plumb the human psyche and its murky depths. Apart from their superficial lusciousness, these two works roil up questions and disgust. And admiration of a kind.

Margotlog: Hawaii, Dreaming

Margotlog: Hawaii, Dreaming

After more years in snow country than I care to count, I'm not surprised that, mid-February, green rises at the back of my mind like an ancient ship coming over the horizon. In fact, I've never approached Hawaii by ship, only by air. Then huge cloud castles plant themselves over the islands, and from the airplane window, the shadow of our tiny plane, reflected on billowing white, promises that we've left all grounded white behind.

Lihue airport, on Kauai, the most north-western of the Hawaiian islands, greets with open arms--scarcely a wall to be found. In open-air, we exit the plane to waiting areas fringed with hibiscus and flowering trees. The air is moist and dark, for we almost always arrive in the evening after changing planes in Honolulu. Just as the smell of wet earth used to greet me in Charleston, the first sign of home, so stepping off the plane in Lihue is a gift to the cold-starved nostrils. Finally we can breathe deeply and sweetly again.

We've stayed several times in Honolulu, in high-rise hotels not far from bikini beaches and a huge mall almost as imposing as the Mall of America. Once we ventured as far south as possible to the leeward side of the "big island," where bed bugs bit Fran our first night. We had arrived again in the dark; the hotel, a huge monster on the water, barely remembered us. Stuck in a room with filthy windows and scum on the woodwork, we should have been warned. But Fran was exhausted. Slipping between the sheets, he drifted off, scratching as he went. Still awake, I looked over at his sleeping form. There crawling across the sheets were flat, almost translucent bugs. I high-tailed it off that bed, tried to rouse him, couldn't, and spent the rest of the night draped over a few chairs. The hotel management wasn't nearly so contrite as they should have been, but eventually capitulated and moved us upstairs to a very clean room with a view of the Kona harbor. No wonder we keep returning to Kauai.

What is there not to love about this beautiful, rather lazy island? Here is my list of favorite locations and events:

* the eucalyptus canopy descending toward Poipu. Even in the dark, the huge trunks and interlaced branches create a tunnel of leafy splendor

* chickens everywhere, or as history dubs them: "Red Jungle Fowl." One of the immigrants attached to the Polynesian settlement centuries ago, the Polynesian rooster struts with incredible aplomb, its iridescent dark green tail feathers shaking like a pompom from its reddish arched back; and a huge red comb crowning its head . The hens and chicks scuttle across the highway. Cars stop. It's the Hawaiian version of "Make Way for Ducklings." Visiting Spouting Horn, where a jet of spray is forced through a hole in the volcanic rock, we patrol the parking lot and find five chicken nests scattered under the shrubbery. The little "peeps" are beautifully and almost universally mottled cream, soft orange and white. Of course I have to crumble saltines left over from lunch to watch them race over and greedily peck, peck, while Mama Hen keeps watch. Just as there are chickens galore, so too cats.

* sunsets. Staying as we do in the southern Poipu area, the sun sets to our right across a placid or roiling ocean. We don't have far to walk to the shore from a little cabin rented from Ellie, a transplant from California. Splendid rays pierce thin clouds and shed a persimmon and pink glow over the waves. "Red sails in the morning, sailors take warning. Red sails at night, sailors delight." This ditty from childhood proves relatively true: we bask in the glow which like all tropical sunsets ends quickly. Then there are stars.

* history. I have more interest and tolerance for historical minutia than Fran; he has a better memory. We visit the history museum in Lihue each time we come to Kauai. Our first time, a retired geography teacher led a tour. Thin, gentle and Chinese-Hawaiian, he recounted his family's story as part of the Hawaiian pageant--they had arrived to work the Dole pineapple fields. Later strolling about Poipu after pizza at a favorite almost-outdoor restaurant, we located the little town's version of a history site: outdoor sheds open on one side, where we traced various enterprises from Chinese barber shop to sugar-cane processing plant to missionary settlement whose original church from the 1850s still holds services. A huge monkeypod tree leaned its enormous branches over a stream: the site of an early mill and company store for quasi-indentured Chinese workers.
My own research placed an early silk-growing plantation nearby where Libby and James Jackson Jarves, the subjects of my on-going novel (right now called Fire Around the Moon) were exiled from Honolulu in the late 1830s. They built a straw hut, she furnished it with packing boxes, a cast-off sofa and pots and pans borrowed from various missionary families. After the birth of their first child, a son named Horatio, the couple took a tour of the island and spent considerable time with former Queen Deborah Kapule, whose checkered history included having the higher royalty in Honolulu "steal" two of her husbands, reduce her to prison, and eventually reinstate her on Kauai as a check against revolt from other, disaffected royalty. The Jarves silk plantation failed spectacularly--drought, cold, and leaf-eating spiders killed the mulberry trees. Thousands of cocoons, with no leaves to eat, had to be destroyed. It was the beginning of genteel poverty for the Jarveses.

The list of Kauai's charms could go on: birds from huge albatross to tiny indigenous honey creepers, hard to find because they live high in the mountains and feed off scrubby ohia trees. Waterfalls and canyons to rival the Grand Canyon. Vistas out to sea that include sometimes whales. Beautiful Hanalea Valley, where "Puff, the Magic Dragon" hangs out, green as green can be. That's the green that still beckons across the ocean. I'll go again. But not this year.

Margotlog: From Shoulder Pads to Crinolines and Cinched Waists

Margotlog: From Shoulder Pads to Suburbs and Beyond - Part II

World War II, and the enormous expansion of transportation and manufacturing necessary for the United States to "tool up," brought the country out of the "Great Depression." But what to do once peace arrived and there wasn't as great a demand for ships, planes, bullets, tanks? Looking back through the pages of Life Magazine and various histories of the era, I'd say three equally enormous changes occurred between 1945 and 1960. Under President Eisenhower the United States' coast-to-coast superhighway system was built along with the cars to speed across it. What later came to be called the "military-industrial complex" ramped up pre-war spending on armaments to meet new threats: the Korean War and the Cold War with Russia. And finally American household and teen consumerism blossomed into a hugely lucrative bouquet.

Now that we've experienced a second (or is it a third) economic plunge, we're not so dismissive of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose saving ways were formed by the Great Depression. My mother carried to her grave (she died in 2003 at almost 95) habits formed by the lean years of the 1930s: saving string and rubber bands, old sheets, her daughters' cast-off, pointy-toed flats, and never throwing away food that couldn't be coaxed into yet another casserole. I used to scoff at her: I who grew up in relative affluence, tutored first by Life Magazine's post-war emphasis on business that catered to leisure (count the number of liquor and cigarette ads in Life after the war), speed (ditto the two-page spreads for family cars and even family air travel), and home-making made easy. Father was always in the driver's seat after the war; men were always in charge of business; and women in the homes were cosseted and pampered as if they were the new American queens. Item: Electrolux ad in Life, Nov. 10, 1952: three drawings of a permed, lip-sticked, nail-polished dame, each with a slogan: "Touch no dirt!" then "Breathe no dirt!" then "See no dirt!" No surprise: Electrolux is a vacuum cleaner. But we don't see the product. We see the pristine, housewife. The new American post-war home was a castle commanded by a queen who didn't have to lift a finger.

Glamor in the living room: a console TV picturing Lucille Ball's wide-eyed insousiance, and outside the "box" a couple lighting up Lucky Strikes. Glamor in the bedroom: drawings of various negligees on curvaceous female bodies, with an emphasis on "nylon." Nylon, a synthetic fabric, created during the war as a substitute for silk in parachutes. One of my favorite post-war Life ads hangs a parachute on the left side of a bedroom, and a lovely wife in flowing negligee on the right. The message couldn't be clearer: Look what "The War" has won for us!

Minnesotans of the World War II generation have told me that when they married their honeys after the war, they moved into what are now "close-in" suburbs: in Saint Paul, north to Falcon Heights. In Minneapolis, south to Richfield or Bloomington. These communities existed before World War II, but they burgeoned afterwards, with track housing and manicured lawns. Their denizens? The families of "Leave It to Beaver." In the mid-1950s, my parents also moved our family of four out of the city, across the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mount Pleasant where they built a bungalow. Track housing wouldn't t hit Charleston until later. Though we were in what would become a suburb, our small house sat on a huge, acre lot, studded with enormous magnolias. Yet in almost every other respect, we played out the post-war suburban dream--as much as was possible given my parents' cultural snobbery and quirkiness. We had two baths--unheard of in apartment dwelling; we had a breakfast nook. No car port, but a new family car, a bright green Dodge which my father drove away every morning and brought back every night. My mother who'd worked for ten years as a librarian in Pittsburgh before her children were born stayed at home now: she sewed bedspreads; she ironed my father's underwear (I know, it sounds daft!). She volunteered as a Girl Scout leader and, with us girls, spent weeks at Girl Scout camp in the Carolina mountains. She became a crafts instructor.

Eventually with the determined efficiency that marked everything she did, my mother broke out of this caccoon and got a job, like the dissatisfied wives Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Though my mother suffered none of the emotional angst that Friedan describes, her need to shed blissful suburban fakery and take part again in the real world of American work was as real as Friedan's subjects. These were middle-class, largely white American woman, often with college degrees who were side-lined by an ethos of home-making perfectionism and cosseting child-rearing. Forget the notion that whole families worked together to make a life. After the war, Father "worked," and Mother made a home for him and their children. Add to this the fact that most such families had only one car, women didn't drive, and the suburbs were far from downtown and existed only as miles and miles of nothing but track housing, supermarkets, and an occasional beauty parlor--and you begin to picture the intellectual and cultural desert these American wives were supposed to inhabit and adore.

My mother got a part-time job in the Mount Pleasant school library. Wearing my cast-off pointy toed flats, she walked to work. Years later, surgery had to correct the hammer toes created by her saving mentality. But she was busy, productive, and once again had her own money. She kept working when the family moved to the other side of Charleston, across the Ashley River. My father was fed up with the long drive from the suburbs and she was happy to graduate to work in the Charleston County Library, still walking across town after my father dropped her off. She didn't retire until she was 70, her heart in excellent condition from all that walking, and her brain as buzzing with information as ever. I consider it an American success story.

Margotlog: The English Cemetery at Piazzale Donat

Margotlog: The English Cemetery at Piazzale Donatello

The Protestant Cemetery in its own Piazalle Donatello lies outside the walls in Florence, meaning that when it was first established in the early 1800s, it could not be situated on sacred ground within the city walls. Though certainly Christian, its Swiss founders were not Catholic, thus they and the dead they housed--Americans, English, Russians, Swiss--were "beyond the pale," given a rise of ground taller at one end, closer to level at the other, just outside the Borgo Pinto gate. Some old maps suggest that this odd-shaped ground was created by centuries of dumping garbage over the wall, with one side of the dump rising almost to the top of the wall.

These days, with the wall dismantled, two streams of almost constant traffic surge on either side of this odd-shaped piece of earth. You must press the "pedestrian crossing" button to bring traffic to a halt and cross to this beautiful island of the dead, with its stands of graceful cypress, and dotted plantings of white marble.

Ring the bell at the iron gate and it sounds inside the gatehouse, a low simple building with arched entryway where horses used to draw up the bodies. Today, burials no longer occur in the Protestant Cemetery, but visitors abound; the cemetery is a monument, cared for today by two custodians, two wonderful "sisters," one Italian-born and trained, the other, Sister Julia Holloway, a British academic-turned Anglican nun, who recently converted to Catholicism. There could not be a more hearty welcome to visitors than offered by Sister Julia in her flowing grey gown with white scarf around her smiling face.

When I first visited the cemetery in the early 2000s, Sister Julia was recently arrived herself: she had worked as custodian at the Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning house, Casa Guidi, across the Arno near the Pitti Palace. Since she and her father had edited a new edition (Penguin 1996) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel-like poem, Aurora Leigh, Sister Julia's association with Casa Guidi perfectly fit her passion. Now she is passionate about the Protestant Cemetery, working hard to restore the tombs and their iron-work, remove diseased cypress and have the city replant new ones.

The sloping, narrow ground of the cemetery leads the visitor away from the entry, along a wide, stepped path. The graves are ranged in irregular rows away from the main path, with those to the right on ground that drops off precipitously to an iron fence, and from there to whizzing cars. My first visit, I didn't have to stray from the core path to find two graves that stopped me in my tracks. The first was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's, standing on four small columns, presenting its side to the passer-by. There along the bottom were the initials "E.B.B" and a narrow runner of her dates: 1806-61. According to Sister Julia, the medallion profile in the center of the tomb is not of EBB herself, but a rendition of laurel-wreathed Corrine, the heroine of Madame de Stael's novel. I prefer to imagine it's the poet whose lies there.

Further up the main path, I was stopped by another, simpler grave in grey "pietra serena," the local quarried stone used by Brunelleschi and many other Renaissance artists in their serene churches--enter the church of Santo Spirito, also across the Arno, and you'll see what I mean. This tomb also has its enigmas: "Libby" was scrawled across it. Then below: "Elizabeth Russell Jarves, wife of James Jackson Jarves, Boston, died 1861." Along with the inscription was carved a pansy, flower of love and longing. Pursuing the Libby's history has fascinated me for almost a decade now: I'm well into writing a novel about her very peculiar life. But what life isn't peculiar, especially those of travelers to Florence who had the misfortune or fortune to die there and be buried in the English Cemetery?

Sister Julia has wrought enormous benefits for the cemetery since I first visited: she is working to have it declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, which it surely should be. She has hired the people called Roma, whom we in the U.S. rather too casually call gypsies, to help repair tombs and ironwork, arguing that these people, often spat-upon and burned out of their camps, are excellently trained in such repair and will do it gladly for far less than local Florentine artisans.
Not only this, but she has made the cemetery's presence in cyber space full and accessible. Her researcher's impulse to collect and document, to publish and disseminate, and her skills with loading photographs and text onto the Web--all have made the English Cemetery a presence on the world stage, which it was not at all when I first visited.

Especially for American and English tourists, I can't imagine a more restful, yet inspiring spot that standing among the spears of cypress and contemplating Florentine soil which houses the ghosts of many great writers from almost two centuries ago. Plus you'll have the charm and education of meeting Sister Julia: if a cemetery can be a classroom, she has found her academy.