Margotlog: In Spring
The watery, inbetween world of spring has me watching leaf-dams gather rain at storm sewers, has me peering through just budding trees to sudden migrants on the wing: yesterday, a magnolia warbler a flitter of deep blue-black, white and yellow touches. "But what's a magnolia warbler doing this far north?" asks my Shoreview friend, who has no view of shore in her north-of-Saint Paul suburb, but instead watches a pheasant cock strut his stuff while the hens play tag with him around a rain barrel.
Lakeville poet Scott King (also translator of Greek poet Yanos Ritsos, and a letterpress publisher of beautiful limited editions via Red Dragonfly Press) steps into spring too. Searching for poems to inspire my memoir group, I light on his poem "What it's like" from his wonderfully titled book, Leftover Ordinary (2006). What do we care most about spring when we're truly young? he seems to ask, then answers from the "mouth of a metal culvert," I imagine somewhere in western Minnesota where he grew up.
A tiny fragment of a cattail blade goes by submerged in the tea-
stained water, spinning and tumbling in the current.
Then a pencil drifts out like a splinter off the original cross.
Then, a styrofoam cup with a piece bitten off its rim.
Strange, he thinks to himself, but wonderful as well.
And just before he leaves, a fresh cut daffodil emerges--surely
this is the flag of some far off and future country. Later,
after the sun has set and the boy has closed his eyes in sleep, the
stars will swim there, in the pool beneath the culvert, like
newly hatched minnows.
Ok: it's hard to beat that ending with its wiggling, scintillating stars. But do my memoir-writer-turned-poets focus on closure? Not necessarily: they are as drawn to the strange splash and discovery of spring as much as Scott King. Here's a memory of seventh-grade spring:
"Too old to splash a puddle. Still--she does, and watered mud sprays flecks of black on virgin white saddle shoes. Near home she slows, then walks down alleyways where one timid dandelion shows its head. Turns into a back yard, bounds down a hill past clotheslines still hung with white pinned tightly against the breeze. Dish towels embroidered with days of the week, bras tucked discreetly behind sheets. All flapping, fluttering in time....She opens the back door...small voices rise from basement darkness. Little brothers too young for school...found a family of kittens today across the street, a marshy field their hidden birthing place. She knows her mother won't approve. But this spring day the girl will make a plan."
I love the hints of sexuality and independence--truly a seventh-grade girl's mantra. And it's the sudden discovery of the unexpected this writer also adores in her watery, transitional world of bras, breezes and kittens.
Another memoir writer from Missouri captures earlier spring, closer to winter:
"There's a mountain on the corner of Kellwood and Catalina, at least ten feet high! It's made of snow. Around the mountain is a moat of ice. And under that moat is a river, at least an inch deep. When the snow starts to melt, I like to go marching. One, Two, down the street, One, Two, up. I have big black winter boots, and they smash the moat into the river. One, Two, left, right, smash smash smash....then I climb the mountain with my hands just like I can real mountains where my grandma lives. I stand at the top and look out down the hill. I can see King's Court from there. Then I slide down the mountain like an avalanche and march back home.
"Sometimes when I go marching, the ice is already broken. Or sometimes it's slush, where snow is watery but not all the way melted. That's when I know that in no time, the moat will be all river...." --Antonia Kreuger
We've been given enormous snow mountains this year in Saint Paul too. Witness the now blackened hills studding the edge of the Sears' parking lot on Rice Street. We've been given rivers all melted and topping off toward flood, then with fear exhaled, subsiding. Thanks to Scott King and my memoir group's poetic prose, I've got phrases and rhythms plashing around my now sunny, now windy neighborhood forays. Maybe a catbird today in the budding lilacs? With e e cummings "In Spring" lines "when the world is puddle-wonderful" and the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Margotlog: Julia and the Gypsies
Margotlog: Julia and the Gypsies
Florence's Protestant (or English) Cemetery used to sit outside the city walls--unsanctified ground. I like to think it was created out of an ancient kitchen midden, which might explain its peculiar shape--low at the entrance and rising at one end to a rather high peak--with the traffic of Piazzale Donatello speeding by on either side like a river of Dis. The cemetery's effect of existing outside normal time is accentuated by its tall swaying cypress and its community of graves which march silently up the hill, carrying their peaked, white roofs.
Actually the cemetery wasn't organized or run by anyone remotely English until quite recently. The Swiss began it in the early 1827 and still maintain it. The English (and American) element was introduced by its many Protestant "communicants" who were buried there. Recently, though, a true daughter of British soil has come to care for it: Sister Julia Holloway, certainly British, by way of an academic stint in the United States, and with many laudable British literary credits to her name--for instance, editing with her father a recent Penguin edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist verse poem Aurora Leigh (1996), not to mention Sister Julia's many books about medieval life and saintly women. With her cheery greeting, and smiling face under a simple white wimple, she does rather resemble a living, breathing saint, a kindly benefactress.
I've brought groups of students to the cemetery to write among the graves. I've walked among the stones, puzzling names and dates, inspired, bemused, ultimately marveling at the calm height above the speeding traffic. In fact I've visited so often that I like to think of myself as a regular: someone who brings food (usually a broiled chicken from Standa) to share with Sister Julia and her lovely, learned Italian assistant, likewise a Catholic nun, though you'd never guess it, passing her on the street.
About six years ago, I happened to come at a time of crisis: Julia was ministering to a young woman from the Roma community, a person we'd call in the U.S., a gypsy. Since I don't remember her name, I'll call her Lelia. Lelia had a terrible toothache, so intense that she could barely stand for the dizziness and pain. Of course, she had no transportation, and very little money. That afternoon, Julia had taken her by bus to the main Florentine hospital in the western hills, Carregi, where doctors had proscribed treatment and medication. As Julia and I sat down to our meal--my chicken, Julia's pesto pasta and salad and bread--Julia kept leaving to check on Lelia, who now was nursing her baby upstairs in a tiny sleeping room. I too became worried about the baby, its gypsy mother, and her agony of the infected tooth.
In my comfortable well-regulated Minnesota life, I occasionally pass someone who's obviously in great need. The operable word here is "pass." Yes, I regularly send money to the local Salvation Army and the international Red Cross; I support many environmental organizations, but I've rarely stopped to help a stranger. Julia and her assistant have what I like to think is a far more Christian response. Far from being afraid of the Roma who beg throughout Florence, they befriend them.
The result, over the years, has expanded in astonishing ways: Julia makes cradles for the Roma babies. She and her assistant have created a simple reading program to teach the Roma the alphabet and the rudiments of written Italian. And with gentle but unwavering persistence, Julia has found ways to employ the Roma in cleaning and repairing the graves' soft stone (often the local grey pietra dura), the ironwork about the graves, and in clearing away the grounds and planting iris.
Yes, I still clutch my purse to my chest when walking the streets of Florence, but as I enter the Standa, I speak to a gypsy woman crouched at the exit. "Dopo," I say with a nod and a smile, meaning "after." After I've done my shopping and acquired some change, I will bring her some coins. Her smile in return belongs to Sister Julia and the cemetery which has offered consolation to bereaved outsiders for several centuries, and now, in the parlance of modern ministry, has an outreach truly astonishing, fueled by two intensely concerned and educated women, outsiders themselves.
Florence's Protestant (or English) Cemetery used to sit outside the city walls--unsanctified ground. I like to think it was created out of an ancient kitchen midden, which might explain its peculiar shape--low at the entrance and rising at one end to a rather high peak--with the traffic of Piazzale Donatello speeding by on either side like a river of Dis. The cemetery's effect of existing outside normal time is accentuated by its tall swaying cypress and its community of graves which march silently up the hill, carrying their peaked, white roofs.
Actually the cemetery wasn't organized or run by anyone remotely English until quite recently. The Swiss began it in the early 1827 and still maintain it. The English (and American) element was introduced by its many Protestant "communicants" who were buried there. Recently, though, a true daughter of British soil has come to care for it: Sister Julia Holloway, certainly British, by way of an academic stint in the United States, and with many laudable British literary credits to her name--for instance, editing with her father a recent Penguin edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist verse poem Aurora Leigh (1996), not to mention Sister Julia's many books about medieval life and saintly women. With her cheery greeting, and smiling face under a simple white wimple, she does rather resemble a living, breathing saint, a kindly benefactress.
I've brought groups of students to the cemetery to write among the graves. I've walked among the stones, puzzling names and dates, inspired, bemused, ultimately marveling at the calm height above the speeding traffic. In fact I've visited so often that I like to think of myself as a regular: someone who brings food (usually a broiled chicken from Standa) to share with Sister Julia and her lovely, learned Italian assistant, likewise a Catholic nun, though you'd never guess it, passing her on the street.
About six years ago, I happened to come at a time of crisis: Julia was ministering to a young woman from the Roma community, a person we'd call in the U.S., a gypsy. Since I don't remember her name, I'll call her Lelia. Lelia had a terrible toothache, so intense that she could barely stand for the dizziness and pain. Of course, she had no transportation, and very little money. That afternoon, Julia had taken her by bus to the main Florentine hospital in the western hills, Carregi, where doctors had proscribed treatment and medication. As Julia and I sat down to our meal--my chicken, Julia's pesto pasta and salad and bread--Julia kept leaving to check on Lelia, who now was nursing her baby upstairs in a tiny sleeping room. I too became worried about the baby, its gypsy mother, and her agony of the infected tooth.
In my comfortable well-regulated Minnesota life, I occasionally pass someone who's obviously in great need. The operable word here is "pass." Yes, I regularly send money to the local Salvation Army and the international Red Cross; I support many environmental organizations, but I've rarely stopped to help a stranger. Julia and her assistant have what I like to think is a far more Christian response. Far from being afraid of the Roma who beg throughout Florence, they befriend them.
The result, over the years, has expanded in astonishing ways: Julia makes cradles for the Roma babies. She and her assistant have created a simple reading program to teach the Roma the alphabet and the rudiments of written Italian. And with gentle but unwavering persistence, Julia has found ways to employ the Roma in cleaning and repairing the graves' soft stone (often the local grey pietra dura), the ironwork about the graves, and in clearing away the grounds and planting iris.
Yes, I still clutch my purse to my chest when walking the streets of Florence, but as I enter the Standa, I speak to a gypsy woman crouched at the exit. "Dopo," I say with a nod and a smile, meaning "after." After I've done my shopping and acquired some change, I will bring her some coins. Her smile in return belongs to Sister Julia and the cemetery which has offered consolation to bereaved outsiders for several centuries, and now, in the parlance of modern ministry, has an outreach truly astonishing, fueled by two intensely concerned and educated women, outsiders themselves.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Margotlog: The Third Eye
Margotlog: The Third Eye
By third grade I couldn't see the chalkboard. My mother took my sister and me on the Charleston city bus from The Old Citadel to the oculist's office on Rutledge Avenue. Eyesight, insight, hindsight: almost always my preferred sense. As I lay in bed with measles, before we moved from Beaver, Pennsylvania, to Charleston, the window beside my bed glowed red-dark, red-dark. The rhythm of awareness, knowledge of self in tune with the world, was my first memory. I was probably three. The florist's sign on the first floor below our apartment tinted the twilight with this glow.
I can almost, but not quite, call up the name of the squat little oculist or optometrist (forgive me, physicians, if I unwittingly demote you). What remains unforgettable were the glasses around his beady eyes and above, strapped to his head, a much larger, third eye. My father also wore glasses--they, in themselves, were part of the family scenery. But this third eye shone silver menacing, protruding like a strange wing, about to lift off part of his scalp. His face was very close to mine as I sat upright and rigid in his slippery leather chair, with headgear of my own clamped over my eyes as he slid lens after lens into place. "Is this better or worse? Better or worse?" It might have been the first time anyone cared so precisely about my opinion.
And now, because it knocks insistently for entrance, I have to recall the billboard from The Great Gatsby, an enormous oculist's sign which looms over the "East Egg, West Egg" characters of Daisy and Gatsby. Ominous, yet observant; hideous yet godlike in its elevation, this eye takes the measure of the wasteland between New York and Gatsby's Long Island pleasure palace, between Daisy's beauty and Gatsby's enormous pretensions about to come to crush. It's one of Fitzgerald's genius strokes, criticism rendered in everything crass about American advertisement.
With my blue-rimmed glasses on my face, I finally could see the chalkboard in third grade. I quickly learned to identify the difference between "there" and "their." Soon I could multiply and achieve long division. Now, the visual world in its most minute particulars demands that I take off my glasses to get a better look. Older eyes, just as my father had, though vision was not his primary organ, that being supplied by the ears. He and my opera- singing sister have heard things in my voice and others which completely elude me. Perhaps it's a matter of training, but no, it's deeper and more elementary than that. Part of the individual essence, the bits of family inheritance passed on.
Vision's hold on me comes, instead, from the North Dakota, German-Swedish side, from my mother's love of visual contemplation, from her absolute fury, in her last years, if any item of her beloved visual arrangement was moved out of place. Never a meticulous housekeeper, she instead fixed her world between the Viennese clock glowing white and gold on the mantel and the dining room blinds opened just enough to let morning sun stream in without the neighbors being able to see. For the last fifteen years of her life, when she lived on after my father died in the big house which they had bought "west of the Ashley," her careful placement of beautiful objects and the familiar, seasonal fall of light and dark wove her into a rhythm of safety. This insistent rhythm never bored her. It was the red-dark, red-dark pump of heart's blood, of a solitary soul recognizing itself in a regular world.
By third grade I couldn't see the chalkboard. My mother took my sister and me on the Charleston city bus from The Old Citadel to the oculist's office on Rutledge Avenue. Eyesight, insight, hindsight: almost always my preferred sense. As I lay in bed with measles, before we moved from Beaver, Pennsylvania, to Charleston, the window beside my bed glowed red-dark, red-dark. The rhythm of awareness, knowledge of self in tune with the world, was my first memory. I was probably three. The florist's sign on the first floor below our apartment tinted the twilight with this glow.
I can almost, but not quite, call up the name of the squat little oculist or optometrist (forgive me, physicians, if I unwittingly demote you). What remains unforgettable were the glasses around his beady eyes and above, strapped to his head, a much larger, third eye. My father also wore glasses--they, in themselves, were part of the family scenery. But this third eye shone silver menacing, protruding like a strange wing, about to lift off part of his scalp. His face was very close to mine as I sat upright and rigid in his slippery leather chair, with headgear of my own clamped over my eyes as he slid lens after lens into place. "Is this better or worse? Better or worse?" It might have been the first time anyone cared so precisely about my opinion.
And now, because it knocks insistently for entrance, I have to recall the billboard from The Great Gatsby, an enormous oculist's sign which looms over the "East Egg, West Egg" characters of Daisy and Gatsby. Ominous, yet observant; hideous yet godlike in its elevation, this eye takes the measure of the wasteland between New York and Gatsby's Long Island pleasure palace, between Daisy's beauty and Gatsby's enormous pretensions about to come to crush. It's one of Fitzgerald's genius strokes, criticism rendered in everything crass about American advertisement.
With my blue-rimmed glasses on my face, I finally could see the chalkboard in third grade. I quickly learned to identify the difference between "there" and "their." Soon I could multiply and achieve long division. Now, the visual world in its most minute particulars demands that I take off my glasses to get a better look. Older eyes, just as my father had, though vision was not his primary organ, that being supplied by the ears. He and my opera- singing sister have heard things in my voice and others which completely elude me. Perhaps it's a matter of training, but no, it's deeper and more elementary than that. Part of the individual essence, the bits of family inheritance passed on.
Vision's hold on me comes, instead, from the North Dakota, German-Swedish side, from my mother's love of visual contemplation, from her absolute fury, in her last years, if any item of her beloved visual arrangement was moved out of place. Never a meticulous housekeeper, she instead fixed her world between the Viennese clock glowing white and gold on the mantel and the dining room blinds opened just enough to let morning sun stream in without the neighbors being able to see. For the last fifteen years of her life, when she lived on after my father died in the big house which they had bought "west of the Ashley," her careful placement of beautiful objects and the familiar, seasonal fall of light and dark wove her into a rhythm of safety. This insistent rhythm never bored her. It was the red-dark, red-dark pump of heart's blood, of a solitary soul recognizing itself in a regular world.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Margotlog: True Wit
Margotlog: True Wit
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (1711) contains the couplet that's recently been tantalizing me:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
Those Age of Enlightenment writers--Pope, Dryden, Addison and Steele--so well educated in Greek and Latin, are scarcely a model for modern prose. That role has been taken by British writers we still read outside the academy: Jane Austen, for instance, who wrote almost a century later, and Dickens, later by 130 years, with a much larger range of humankind and levels of speech at his command. But when I think about our contemporary American prose (as I do a lot these days), I'm struck by how lax and chatty it's become. The saucy Twitters printed every day in our newspaper are largely bland, lacking sparkle and wit. Interesting only because of the notoriety of those who send them out into the flagrant air.
Dickens' first true novel, Oliver Twist (1838), has recently kept me company on CD while I do my nightly yoga. A master of humor--meaning characters wracked by one of the ancient Greek humors of phlegm, blood and black and yellow bile--Dickens attaches minor characters to his plot who every time they appear respond with a similar tag phrase: "Or I'll eat my head," for instance. No, this is not one of Goya's terrors of war, looming with open mouth above a terrified populace. Nor is it a figure from Dutch or English "kitchen" art with food including head cheese strewn across tables and floor where dogs, babies, swains and nurse maids all lounge and grovel. It's simply an imprecation reduced to inanity by repetition as it occurs in the midst of the most unexpected trysts or hold-ups. Someone who can cry, "Or I'll eat my head" while a tender reconciliation is going on can't be entirely right in the head. And we soon know it, smile at Mr. Grimwig's jack-in-the-box pop-up, and eventually marvel at how Dickens undermines the sentimentality of his plots with nature, untrue to wit and distinctly disadvantage dressed.
It's not that I aspire to such wit, well maybe I do, but I recognize my limitations. After all, I grew up in a household dominated by two entirely different modes of speech, neither particularly witty: my father's highly emotional, Italian-laced English, and my mother's spare Germanic parings. Listening to Renee Fleming recently as she sang a trembling, swooning aria, I realized that my father's English yearned toward the swoop and vibrato of 19th century Italian opera, which he'd grown up listening to on records. My mother, in almost constant motion except when she lay down for her daily, two-hour nap, used language as points of order and command. There was no luxuriating in pun or excess.
Yet, I went to school to English and American literature for years and years. When I hear American wit in my head, it's almost always e e cummings or Robert Frost. Frost for his laconic yet immensely controlled rhythms, rhymes, and inversions, and cummings for out and out wild pairings: here's a stanza from "anyone lived in a pretty how town"
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
Almost all single-syllable English words, yet by wit advantaged into colloquy never before heard on land or sea. Almost singable on this dreary April morning edging into May.
Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (1711) contains the couplet that's recently been tantalizing me:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
Those Age of Enlightenment writers--Pope, Dryden, Addison and Steele--so well educated in Greek and Latin, are scarcely a model for modern prose. That role has been taken by British writers we still read outside the academy: Jane Austen, for instance, who wrote almost a century later, and Dickens, later by 130 years, with a much larger range of humankind and levels of speech at his command. But when I think about our contemporary American prose (as I do a lot these days), I'm struck by how lax and chatty it's become. The saucy Twitters printed every day in our newspaper are largely bland, lacking sparkle and wit. Interesting only because of the notoriety of those who send them out into the flagrant air.
Dickens' first true novel, Oliver Twist (1838), has recently kept me company on CD while I do my nightly yoga. A master of humor--meaning characters wracked by one of the ancient Greek humors of phlegm, blood and black and yellow bile--Dickens attaches minor characters to his plot who every time they appear respond with a similar tag phrase: "Or I'll eat my head," for instance. No, this is not one of Goya's terrors of war, looming with open mouth above a terrified populace. Nor is it a figure from Dutch or English "kitchen" art with food including head cheese strewn across tables and floor where dogs, babies, swains and nurse maids all lounge and grovel. It's simply an imprecation reduced to inanity by repetition as it occurs in the midst of the most unexpected trysts or hold-ups. Someone who can cry, "Or I'll eat my head" while a tender reconciliation is going on can't be entirely right in the head. And we soon know it, smile at Mr. Grimwig's jack-in-the-box pop-up, and eventually marvel at how Dickens undermines the sentimentality of his plots with nature, untrue to wit and distinctly disadvantage dressed.
It's not that I aspire to such wit, well maybe I do, but I recognize my limitations. After all, I grew up in a household dominated by two entirely different modes of speech, neither particularly witty: my father's highly emotional, Italian-laced English, and my mother's spare Germanic parings. Listening to Renee Fleming recently as she sang a trembling, swooning aria, I realized that my father's English yearned toward the swoop and vibrato of 19th century Italian opera, which he'd grown up listening to on records. My mother, in almost constant motion except when she lay down for her daily, two-hour nap, used language as points of order and command. There was no luxuriating in pun or excess.
Yet, I went to school to English and American literature for years and years. When I hear American wit in my head, it's almost always e e cummings or Robert Frost. Frost for his laconic yet immensely controlled rhythms, rhymes, and inversions, and cummings for out and out wild pairings: here's a stanza from "anyone lived in a pretty how town"
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her
Almost all single-syllable English words, yet by wit advantaged into colloquy never before heard on land or sea. Almost singable on this dreary April morning edging into May.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Margotlog: I Hate You, Wells Fargo
Margotlog: I Hate You, Wells Fargo
OK, the truth is out. If I didn't have a long history and lots of blank checks, I'd quit. Banking used to be serene and non-threatening. No snarly-eyed tellers inquiring if I was ready to "hand over the dough!" No bouncy pre-adults trying to chat me up. I would walk in. NOBODY WOULD GREET ME! A security guard with a holster stood broad-legged near the door. MY MONEY WAS SAFE. There'd be a line. So what? We were Minnesotans. We kept our distance.
Once it was my turn at a tiny alcove, I slid my deposit across. A serious young or older adult in somber colors, displaying no cleavage, asked if I was still alive on the planet, and THAT WAS IT! No toying around, no inquiring into my day, no probing where I worked, what I was eating for lunch/dinner/snack, no intent curiousity "And where will you be spending your Euros, heh, heh, heh?" As if cousins were poised to slide through the doors of a Roman subway right behind me, and filch the plastic out of my hip pocket, while chatting me up for distraction.
Is it obvious? I am deeply distrustful of fake familiarity. I clutch my purse to my chest. I do not talk to strangers. And people behind counters? Who knows what lurks below their waists, where I cannot see their hands? All the Western movies I've ever seen have warned of this. And the sales-pitch? Forget it. If I want something you are selling, give me "land, lots of land neath the starry skies above. Don't fence me in!" Otherwise, I'll be out of the store before you can say, "Jack Robinson," whoever he is.
My theory of the sub-prime mortgage debacle begins with innocents entering a bank or mortgage company, and being smoozed into a deal their pocketbooks could not sustain for more than a twinkling of an eye. It takes sober, quiet reflection to understand an adjustable rate mortgage, to grasp that after the fixed period of 2%, your interest rate will become variable, drifting up and up with various indices you've never heard of before. No, my friends, this is not a deal. This is a steal. You've been bamboozled by snake-oil salesmen who could not care less if application of same makes you break out in spots and run a high fever. The government does NOT run tests on the contents.
My advice: zip your lip. Avoid eye contact. And check your deposit receipts. More than once, the cutie who could not shut up has bungled the transaction, and I've had to go back for more!
OK, the truth is out. If I didn't have a long history and lots of blank checks, I'd quit. Banking used to be serene and non-threatening. No snarly-eyed tellers inquiring if I was ready to "hand over the dough!" No bouncy pre-adults trying to chat me up. I would walk in. NOBODY WOULD GREET ME! A security guard with a holster stood broad-legged near the door. MY MONEY WAS SAFE. There'd be a line. So what? We were Minnesotans. We kept our distance.
Once it was my turn at a tiny alcove, I slid my deposit across. A serious young or older adult in somber colors, displaying no cleavage, asked if I was still alive on the planet, and THAT WAS IT! No toying around, no inquiring into my day, no probing where I worked, what I was eating for lunch/dinner/snack, no intent curiousity "And where will you be spending your Euros, heh, heh, heh?" As if cousins were poised to slide through the doors of a Roman subway right behind me, and filch the plastic out of my hip pocket, while chatting me up for distraction.
Is it obvious? I am deeply distrustful of fake familiarity. I clutch my purse to my chest. I do not talk to strangers. And people behind counters? Who knows what lurks below their waists, where I cannot see their hands? All the Western movies I've ever seen have warned of this. And the sales-pitch? Forget it. If I want something you are selling, give me "land, lots of land neath the starry skies above. Don't fence me in!" Otherwise, I'll be out of the store before you can say, "Jack Robinson," whoever he is.
My theory of the sub-prime mortgage debacle begins with innocents entering a bank or mortgage company, and being smoozed into a deal their pocketbooks could not sustain for more than a twinkling of an eye. It takes sober, quiet reflection to understand an adjustable rate mortgage, to grasp that after the fixed period of 2%, your interest rate will become variable, drifting up and up with various indices you've never heard of before. No, my friends, this is not a deal. This is a steal. You've been bamboozled by snake-oil salesmen who could not care less if application of same makes you break out in spots and run a high fever. The government does NOT run tests on the contents.
My advice: zip your lip. Avoid eye contact. And check your deposit receipts. More than once, the cutie who could not shut up has bungled the transaction, and I've had to go back for more!
Monday, April 18, 2011
Margotlog: The Former House
Margotlog: The Former House
How deeply, indelibly does a house, a window-view, a room's configuration sink into us? For the last week, I've been caring for Sick Daughter Numero Uno, numero only. Too weak and bleery-eyed to drive, she asked me to accompany her to her dad's house where she'd promised to water the plants. This was my first marriage house, in a border neighborhood between Minneapolis and Saint Paul called Prospect Park, possibly because of its witch's tower on a promontory above University Avenue. University Avenue, which connects the two cities, running from the capitol at its eastern end in Saint Paul to the University of Minnesota at its western end in Minneapolis: each city's major claim to fame.
It's been more than thirty years since I lived in this house, which cost all of thirty-nine thousand dollars in 1970. The streets curve around Prospect Park with its witch's tower. Many houses lift above the deeply indented streets onto mini prospects of their own. This is true of my ex-house. Built probably in 1920, with a brick primary story and stucco on the second and attic stories, it has big banks of windows facing the street, one in the dining room, and another in the major bedroom upstairs. For the ten years I lived there, these two windows were my eyes into the neighborhood, eyes that led me first through the coiling branches of an Amer maple tree.
I'm standing downstairs at the dining room picture window waiting for the school bus to pull its yellow bulk opposite the house, ready to engulf the daughter, age six, on her way to first grade. Under my hand her long fall of hair soothes the anxiety we both feel. There at the corner of the window stands a hand-painted lamp from my ex-husband's Baltimore family. I might not recognize it in an antique shop, but here, it speaks of Great-Aunt Wilhelmina, whom I never met, but who gave her name to one of our first cats who used to lick the ballpoint pen off the paper as I wrote: totally black Willie, who pined for me so much after I left that she waited to die until I could be summoned to say good-bye.
There's so much I left behind which now returns. Between the house and the close neighbor's, the ginko tree we planted when the daughter was maybe seven stands enormous, thick-trunked and far taller than the house. It was a mere shoot then. My ex is an excellent gardener--the backyard, though somewhat changed in its trees, is reminiscent in being full of flowers. Even this early after an April snow, the ground is covered with tiny blue and white sprigs. The blue I call Scilla, though the daughter corrects me with a name I've never heard. And there's the live-animal trap propped against the garage: how many times did the ex trap squirrels and send them gently to their ends with ether?
But the yard means less to me. We're back in the house, which is empty of its human inhabitants--they've gone off to Arizona for a week. Cats greet us, though, different cats entirely from the ones I left behind, but still part of the menage. And I don't hesitate to follow the daughter upstairs, pausing just before the landing to look through the most beautiful stained glass window of the house: a thin panel of two long-stemmed, schematized yellow lilies, dotted about with quasi-stars. It's an art nouveau look, as old as the house, and softened with light. Those two yellow cups helped me rise up many a morning to the daughter's smallish bedroom on the north side of the house beside a huge catalpa tree, still leafless, of course, but holding in memory an enormous great-horned owl who perched there one late winter and hooted at us. In the 1970s, a good portion of woods and marshy land lay close-by, in the corner between highway 280 and University Avenue. Now it's been "developed" into low spreading warehouses, apartment buildings, etc. Owls lived there, so the University Extension service told us in the 70s. I'm hoping they still do.
But it's the bedroom, almost square, not at all imposing that makes my heart stop. This was the core of the house when I lived there. The daughter was almost one, the year we moved in, and would stand up in her crib, calling out in the morning. Evenings we sat together in a rocking chair, long-gone, and sang songs, read simple then more complicated books--Richard Scarry's busy animals with their trucks and planes sent us elsewhere with our insistent rocking, yet we never left the comfort of the two windows tucked under the roof's overhang. My one experience of motherhood engaged all my senses, as if a second self were emerging from my side and slowly separating itself into a face that drew me backward into my own childhood and forward into her own. What I had repressed out of rather harsh necessity came to life again in our gentle rocking, and in fledging her, I fledged that earlier part of myself.
Though I've long explored my childhood in poetry and story since then, it is this simple, profound first knowing of self and my beloved daughter which now sits beside me in the light of these two windows and floods the small room with radiance. I expect to remember this remembering, and laugh at myself for spinning so fine a thread to the connection I still have to this house.
How deeply, indelibly does a house, a window-view, a room's configuration sink into us? For the last week, I've been caring for Sick Daughter Numero Uno, numero only. Too weak and bleery-eyed to drive, she asked me to accompany her to her dad's house where she'd promised to water the plants. This was my first marriage house, in a border neighborhood between Minneapolis and Saint Paul called Prospect Park, possibly because of its witch's tower on a promontory above University Avenue. University Avenue, which connects the two cities, running from the capitol at its eastern end in Saint Paul to the University of Minnesota at its western end in Minneapolis: each city's major claim to fame.
It's been more than thirty years since I lived in this house, which cost all of thirty-nine thousand dollars in 1970. The streets curve around Prospect Park with its witch's tower. Many houses lift above the deeply indented streets onto mini prospects of their own. This is true of my ex-house. Built probably in 1920, with a brick primary story and stucco on the second and attic stories, it has big banks of windows facing the street, one in the dining room, and another in the major bedroom upstairs. For the ten years I lived there, these two windows were my eyes into the neighborhood, eyes that led me first through the coiling branches of an Amer maple tree.
I'm standing downstairs at the dining room picture window waiting for the school bus to pull its yellow bulk opposite the house, ready to engulf the daughter, age six, on her way to first grade. Under my hand her long fall of hair soothes the anxiety we both feel. There at the corner of the window stands a hand-painted lamp from my ex-husband's Baltimore family. I might not recognize it in an antique shop, but here, it speaks of Great-Aunt Wilhelmina, whom I never met, but who gave her name to one of our first cats who used to lick the ballpoint pen off the paper as I wrote: totally black Willie, who pined for me so much after I left that she waited to die until I could be summoned to say good-bye.
There's so much I left behind which now returns. Between the house and the close neighbor's, the ginko tree we planted when the daughter was maybe seven stands enormous, thick-trunked and far taller than the house. It was a mere shoot then. My ex is an excellent gardener--the backyard, though somewhat changed in its trees, is reminiscent in being full of flowers. Even this early after an April snow, the ground is covered with tiny blue and white sprigs. The blue I call Scilla, though the daughter corrects me with a name I've never heard. And there's the live-animal trap propped against the garage: how many times did the ex trap squirrels and send them gently to their ends with ether?
But the yard means less to me. We're back in the house, which is empty of its human inhabitants--they've gone off to Arizona for a week. Cats greet us, though, different cats entirely from the ones I left behind, but still part of the menage. And I don't hesitate to follow the daughter upstairs, pausing just before the landing to look through the most beautiful stained glass window of the house: a thin panel of two long-stemmed, schematized yellow lilies, dotted about with quasi-stars. It's an art nouveau look, as old as the house, and softened with light. Those two yellow cups helped me rise up many a morning to the daughter's smallish bedroom on the north side of the house beside a huge catalpa tree, still leafless, of course, but holding in memory an enormous great-horned owl who perched there one late winter and hooted at us. In the 1970s, a good portion of woods and marshy land lay close-by, in the corner between highway 280 and University Avenue. Now it's been "developed" into low spreading warehouses, apartment buildings, etc. Owls lived there, so the University Extension service told us in the 70s. I'm hoping they still do.
But it's the bedroom, almost square, not at all imposing that makes my heart stop. This was the core of the house when I lived there. The daughter was almost one, the year we moved in, and would stand up in her crib, calling out in the morning. Evenings we sat together in a rocking chair, long-gone, and sang songs, read simple then more complicated books--Richard Scarry's busy animals with their trucks and planes sent us elsewhere with our insistent rocking, yet we never left the comfort of the two windows tucked under the roof's overhang. My one experience of motherhood engaged all my senses, as if a second self were emerging from my side and slowly separating itself into a face that drew me backward into my own childhood and forward into her own. What I had repressed out of rather harsh necessity came to life again in our gentle rocking, and in fledging her, I fledged that earlier part of myself.
Though I've long explored my childhood in poetry and story since then, it is this simple, profound first knowing of self and my beloved daughter which now sits beside me in the light of these two windows and floods the small room with radiance. I expect to remember this remembering, and laugh at myself for spinning so fine a thread to the connection I still have to this house.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Margotlog: Piano Keys
Margotlog: Piano Keys
Before I could type, I learned the piano keyboard. It was Charleston, South Carolina, and the white keys were almost always a little sticky with humidity. A red John Schirmer book, "Little Fingers That Play," opened on the music rack above the keyboard and guided me in a three-note song with the words, "Here we go, up a road, to a birthday party." That ditty required the first three fingers of the right hand. Then using the left hand and going down the keyboard from middle C, "Dolly dear, sandman's here, you will soon be sleeping." Hmm! I wonder what boys starting piano at age 6 thought of putting their dollies to sleep!
My first teacher was Miss Miller who lived close enough to Ashley Hall (the private girls school where I went for grades 1-6) for me to walk. Her tiny house was set back from the street and closed with a gate, which I seem to remember swinging open under my hand. Inside, two upright pianos sat side by side facing the living room. There on a tall side chair beside the twirling round piano stool sat Miss Miller, her reddish hair curling in the heat, and her back bent under her cardigan. We were linked by politeness, and by an unexpected intimacy, for her thin, beautifully manicured hand often lightly covered mine as she guided me in those early lessons. As poet Donald Justice recalls in an essay "Piano Lessons: Notes on a Provincial Culture," even now "her very body odor...comes back as well, secret and powdery. Sometimes there are these delicate small intimacies between teacher and pupil, never spoken of." (From The Sunset Maker, 1987)
Over the years, in numerous small recitals, I often shone as star pupil--once playing with Miss Miller, a Haydn concerto for two keyboards which I memorized and for which she rewarded me with a complicated locket containing three leaves, on which were pasted tiny portraits of "the great composers." I'm remembering that our association lasted through sixth grade. Then my family moved across the Cooper River to the tiny town of Mount Pleasant, and only my sister continued at Ashley Hall. When I declared I "wanted to go to school with boys," it tolled the knell of my piano lessons. For an aborted few months in Mount Pleasant I did study the organ (or was it the violin?) with a man who lived with his mother on a shady side street near our church, but I found the intimacy necessary to teacher and pupil almost insupportable. The nervousness it occasioned interfered so profoundly with my attention that I gave it up.
By then, my sister had preempted the family musical talent and begun the voice lessons that would eventually carry her into an operatic career. From then on, I became a perpetual amateur, playing either piano or organ became an private hobby. Anything more public made me extraordinarily anxious. Once, recently, when I revived organ lessons at Saint Paul's Cathedral, my teacher gathered her pupils for a small recital, performed largely for ourselves. That day, oddly enough, road work in our neighborhood required that the city water be turned off. This occurred in the midst of my preparing to go to the recital. In my flurry and anxiety, I forgot to turn off the suddenly dry spigot, and went off, my heart in my throat, to play various demanding pieces from the height of the organ loft.
When I returned, sweaty and spent, I discovered that in my absence the water had been turned back on, and flooding the upstairs sink, then overflowed and created a stain on the newly painted kitchen ceiling below. In the scale of household disasters, this was rather minor, but it pointed a lesson: I was not cut out for the public performance of music, hadn't the nerves or control. Didn't have that intimacy with its language which I'd by then developed with literature and composing words at other keyboards.
Before I could type, I learned the piano keyboard. It was Charleston, South Carolina, and the white keys were almost always a little sticky with humidity. A red John Schirmer book, "Little Fingers That Play," opened on the music rack above the keyboard and guided me in a three-note song with the words, "Here we go, up a road, to a birthday party." That ditty required the first three fingers of the right hand. Then using the left hand and going down the keyboard from middle C, "Dolly dear, sandman's here, you will soon be sleeping." Hmm! I wonder what boys starting piano at age 6 thought of putting their dollies to sleep!
My first teacher was Miss Miller who lived close enough to Ashley Hall (the private girls school where I went for grades 1-6) for me to walk. Her tiny house was set back from the street and closed with a gate, which I seem to remember swinging open under my hand. Inside, two upright pianos sat side by side facing the living room. There on a tall side chair beside the twirling round piano stool sat Miss Miller, her reddish hair curling in the heat, and her back bent under her cardigan. We were linked by politeness, and by an unexpected intimacy, for her thin, beautifully manicured hand often lightly covered mine as she guided me in those early lessons. As poet Donald Justice recalls in an essay "Piano Lessons: Notes on a Provincial Culture," even now "her very body odor...comes back as well, secret and powdery. Sometimes there are these delicate small intimacies between teacher and pupil, never spoken of." (From The Sunset Maker, 1987)
Over the years, in numerous small recitals, I often shone as star pupil--once playing with Miss Miller, a Haydn concerto for two keyboards which I memorized and for which she rewarded me with a complicated locket containing three leaves, on which were pasted tiny portraits of "the great composers." I'm remembering that our association lasted through sixth grade. Then my family moved across the Cooper River to the tiny town of Mount Pleasant, and only my sister continued at Ashley Hall. When I declared I "wanted to go to school with boys," it tolled the knell of my piano lessons. For an aborted few months in Mount Pleasant I did study the organ (or was it the violin?) with a man who lived with his mother on a shady side street near our church, but I found the intimacy necessary to teacher and pupil almost insupportable. The nervousness it occasioned interfered so profoundly with my attention that I gave it up.
By then, my sister had preempted the family musical talent and begun the voice lessons that would eventually carry her into an operatic career. From then on, I became a perpetual amateur, playing either piano or organ became an private hobby. Anything more public made me extraordinarily anxious. Once, recently, when I revived organ lessons at Saint Paul's Cathedral, my teacher gathered her pupils for a small recital, performed largely for ourselves. That day, oddly enough, road work in our neighborhood required that the city water be turned off. This occurred in the midst of my preparing to go to the recital. In my flurry and anxiety, I forgot to turn off the suddenly dry spigot, and went off, my heart in my throat, to play various demanding pieces from the height of the organ loft.
When I returned, sweaty and spent, I discovered that in my absence the water had been turned back on, and flooding the upstairs sink, then overflowed and created a stain on the newly painted kitchen ceiling below. In the scale of household disasters, this was rather minor, but it pointed a lesson: I was not cut out for the public performance of music, hadn't the nerves or control. Didn't have that intimacy with its language which I'd by then developed with literature and composing words at other keyboards.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Margotlog: Trout Lilies
Margotlog: Trout Lilies
There are two kinds: the slightly more common white trout lily which is actually pinkish, and the Minnesota trout lily, found in rare southeast Minnesota forests like Nerstrand Woods in Goodhue County. That one, I've never seen. But in an alley not far from my house, I've chanced upon a patch of the stippled low trout-shaped leaves which just now are emerging. They live behind an unused garage, under a stand of small river elms, though I guess the flowers have been there a long time.
Why so? Because surreptitiously, a few springs ago, I brought my trowel and dug up a tiny patch near the pavement, justifying this theft by the notion that sooner-or-later a car would run over them. Transplanted to a likely spot in my cool, shaded front yard, beside Virginia water-leaf and white violets, these trout lilies reappeared the next spring, but have yet to show a flower. This suggests that white trout lilies are of a shy, resistant type, found also among humans, who take long to acclimate to change, and much prefer their familiar retiring haunts, their brief leaf and flowering.
Since I sometimes believe I belong among them--entirely forgetting my outbursts of activity and bossy directives--I hold close this secret knowledge, believing it is mine to protect, knowing what can happen when living things become neighborhood darlings, become hybridized for sturdiness, and soon appear up and down the street, in every plant-lover's yard.
The white trout lily will soon send up short dewdrop blossoms which then will open into lively dancing six-legged stars, upside-down stars, that is. These will nod and sway over the stippled leaves, a bit like trout mouths leaping to the survace to catch the sky. But soon the blossoms will die away, as will the leaves, which fold themselves down into the duff until, by mid-May, all are erased until another year.
According to the John and Evelyn Moyle "Northland Wildflowers: The Comprehensive GUide to the Minnesota Region," the other, rarer trout lily was first described by Mary Hedges of Faribault in 1871. She sent a sample to Asa Grey, the famed botanist at Harvard, who proclaimed its distinction from its slightly more common cousin and gave it its botanical name: erythronium propullans, to distinguish it from the cousin with the same first name, but different last: albidum. I won't investigate these Latin nomikers just now. But dwell a bit with unknown Mary Hedges and her consultation with Grey. She had to have been a school teacher, given to solitary woodland walks, and sharp-eyed perusal of tiny shoots. Or maybe a photographer, likewise drawn to the unusual and small. Like my friend Linda Gammell, who bends down to captures prairie rose hips and other more wispy plants.
Let's walk on, content that for another year, despite the debris that a building neighbor strew across the eastern portion of the trout lily strip, the section still uncluttered offers a lovely school of unexpected green fish to early spring.
There are two kinds: the slightly more common white trout lily which is actually pinkish, and the Minnesota trout lily, found in rare southeast Minnesota forests like Nerstrand Woods in Goodhue County. That one, I've never seen. But in an alley not far from my house, I've chanced upon a patch of the stippled low trout-shaped leaves which just now are emerging. They live behind an unused garage, under a stand of small river elms, though I guess the flowers have been there a long time.
Why so? Because surreptitiously, a few springs ago, I brought my trowel and dug up a tiny patch near the pavement, justifying this theft by the notion that sooner-or-later a car would run over them. Transplanted to a likely spot in my cool, shaded front yard, beside Virginia water-leaf and white violets, these trout lilies reappeared the next spring, but have yet to show a flower. This suggests that white trout lilies are of a shy, resistant type, found also among humans, who take long to acclimate to change, and much prefer their familiar retiring haunts, their brief leaf and flowering.
Since I sometimes believe I belong among them--entirely forgetting my outbursts of activity and bossy directives--I hold close this secret knowledge, believing it is mine to protect, knowing what can happen when living things become neighborhood darlings, become hybridized for sturdiness, and soon appear up and down the street, in every plant-lover's yard.
The white trout lily will soon send up short dewdrop blossoms which then will open into lively dancing six-legged stars, upside-down stars, that is. These will nod and sway over the stippled leaves, a bit like trout mouths leaping to the survace to catch the sky. But soon the blossoms will die away, as will the leaves, which fold themselves down into the duff until, by mid-May, all are erased until another year.
According to the John and Evelyn Moyle "Northland Wildflowers: The Comprehensive GUide to the Minnesota Region," the other, rarer trout lily was first described by Mary Hedges of Faribault in 1871. She sent a sample to Asa Grey, the famed botanist at Harvard, who proclaimed its distinction from its slightly more common cousin and gave it its botanical name: erythronium propullans, to distinguish it from the cousin with the same first name, but different last: albidum. I won't investigate these Latin nomikers just now. But dwell a bit with unknown Mary Hedges and her consultation with Grey. She had to have been a school teacher, given to solitary woodland walks, and sharp-eyed perusal of tiny shoots. Or maybe a photographer, likewise drawn to the unusual and small. Like my friend Linda Gammell, who bends down to captures prairie rose hips and other more wispy plants.
Let's walk on, content that for another year, despite the debris that a building neighbor strew across the eastern portion of the trout lily strip, the section still uncluttered offers a lovely school of unexpected green fish to early spring.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Margotlog: And What Month Is April?
Margotlog: And What Month Is April?
Not the cruelest, despite T.S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest...," though there's plenty of breeding out of the deadland. Nor is it necessarily dreaded tax time since for us at least, we're almost always so afraid of not sending enough estimated payment ahead that when the final accounting comes, some branch of government owes us a refund. A crazy form of savings.
This year in Saint Paul, after an inordinately long season of snow, it's a month of melt, with cresting rivers, cresting maybe twice. Yet, so far none of my usual bridges over, or river roads beside the Mississippi have been flooded out. No, for me April is a month of paper flurry, when classes that have been straining to reach their highest peak, let fly long papers which land around me like fallen petals. Some disappointing, so much so that I have to wonder: What was this young person doing when we discussed x, y, or z? But some, often from African immigrants, sparkle with wit and urgency. Real life brought to the page. Teresa, for instance, writing about solar energy, begins her research paper with the stunning remark that in the Bible, God said, "Let there be light," and lo, there was light. Since then this unstoppable source of energy, our sun, has been waiting for us to wake up and take advantage.
Teresa, who is from Kenya, concludes her six pages of solar discussion with a modern instance: a friend also from Kenya recently returned with a crew of other students from St. Thomas. In a Kenyan village, they set up eighteen solar panels which now provide heat and light for cooking and warming water. People there now take warm showers for the first times in their lives; plus they have a heat source for cooking that doesn't require a long trek to forests being quickly depleted. Teresa's enthusiasm opens like the first tulips with brilliant appreciation.
"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour..."
So Chaucer set his Canterbury pilgrims on their way, with the reminder that at the root of us all, spring sends its juices rising, bathing "every vein"--my favorite phrase--"in such liquor" that must eventually come to bloom. Some efflorescence will plague us--there's the wasp and mosquito to contend with. Some will delight: this week, after we had two trunks of a four-trunk silver maple cut back, I spied a Mourning Cloak butterfly! What? This early? My tulips are still pushing up their green. Where could this flutter-bye be dipping its long unrolling tongue?
Come to find out it landed on the edge and side of the cut maple trunk, sopping up the sweet sap. Two springs ago, enterprising young neighbors tapped this very tree for sap and eventually gave us a tiny bottle of maple syrup. Sweet liquor, indeed.
Not the cruelest, despite T.S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest...," though there's plenty of breeding out of the deadland. Nor is it necessarily dreaded tax time since for us at least, we're almost always so afraid of not sending enough estimated payment ahead that when the final accounting comes, some branch of government owes us a refund. A crazy form of savings.
This year in Saint Paul, after an inordinately long season of snow, it's a month of melt, with cresting rivers, cresting maybe twice. Yet, so far none of my usual bridges over, or river roads beside the Mississippi have been flooded out. No, for me April is a month of paper flurry, when classes that have been straining to reach their highest peak, let fly long papers which land around me like fallen petals. Some disappointing, so much so that I have to wonder: What was this young person doing when we discussed x, y, or z? But some, often from African immigrants, sparkle with wit and urgency. Real life brought to the page. Teresa, for instance, writing about solar energy, begins her research paper with the stunning remark that in the Bible, God said, "Let there be light," and lo, there was light. Since then this unstoppable source of energy, our sun, has been waiting for us to wake up and take advantage.
Teresa, who is from Kenya, concludes her six pages of solar discussion with a modern instance: a friend also from Kenya recently returned with a crew of other students from St. Thomas. In a Kenyan village, they set up eighteen solar panels which now provide heat and light for cooking and warming water. People there now take warm showers for the first times in their lives; plus they have a heat source for cooking that doesn't require a long trek to forests being quickly depleted. Teresa's enthusiasm opens like the first tulips with brilliant appreciation.
"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour..."
So Chaucer set his Canterbury pilgrims on their way, with the reminder that at the root of us all, spring sends its juices rising, bathing "every vein"--my favorite phrase--"in such liquor" that must eventually come to bloom. Some efflorescence will plague us--there's the wasp and mosquito to contend with. Some will delight: this week, after we had two trunks of a four-trunk silver maple cut back, I spied a Mourning Cloak butterfly! What? This early? My tulips are still pushing up their green. Where could this flutter-bye be dipping its long unrolling tongue?
Come to find out it landed on the edge and side of the cut maple trunk, sopping up the sweet sap. Two springs ago, enterprising young neighbors tapped this very tree for sap and eventually gave us a tiny bottle of maple syrup. Sweet liquor, indeed.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Margotlog: Museum of Memories
Museum of Memories
George Segal created a room (displayed in the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota) honoring his parents: floor-length living room lamp, overstuffed chair and sofa, cathedral radio, and life-size statues of his parents. In my museum of memories stands a four-poster bed with ruffled flounce and turquoise bedspread and pillow shams. My mother made them for the re-do of my upstairs bedroom when I was entering ninth grade. Here I dreamed of Chad Hunter once the photos from Hollywood arrived in the mail, or listened to Elvis and Fats Domino and the Coasters on my little radio--"I'm going to find her/him..." Here also I wrote long research papers, the one I remember most vividly was about low-country chapels of ease, tiny churches dotting the Carolina rice country from the days when rice planters along the Ashley, Cooper and Wando Rivers found it too laborous to reach big churches in Charleston.
Let's add a closet to that upstairs room with its windows on two sides, one double set overlooking the backyard and my mother's huge garden, beyond which strung the chicken-wire fence of Old Man L. and his son, whose real live chickens scratched in their bare-earth yard. The other window, beside the bed, put me in constant communication with a chinaberry tree, whose rustlings and moanings I barely noticed, until I read Robert Frost's poem "Tree at my window, window tree..." The September my parents drove me to Goucher College in Baltimore, the tree was snapped by Hurricane Gracie, a remarkable act of nature paralleling my own minor wrenching from home.
The closet was huge, delving back under the eaves and crowded with my clothes. Like my mother, I sewed. My sister never did. After taking a course in Charleston at the Singer Sewing Machine store, one hot August week, I churned out dresses galore: a voile summer dress (almost all our clothes in Charleston were summery) with huge floppy bow at the neckline; or a long-sleeved dark print with white collar and cuffs and bound buttonholes--mastering those took hours. Even now I can feel myself standing in the material department at Belk's and moving along the rows, fingering bolts of fabric. Then studying patterns carefully, one of a row of girls and women perched on tall stools as we flipped back the heavy pattern books. I had to be careful not to make anything with too tight a skirt--my hips, you know.
Now that I have myself on the second floor of Belk's, let's remember trying on hats. We wore hats and gloves to church, gloves meant to be decorative and ladylike (hmmm!), hats to give a swash-buckling addition to our outfits. This surely suggests my preference for hats with wide brims and dips over the eyes. I liked even then the notion of secrecy and glamor they provided. Even today, though I've given up sewing dresses for myself, I still search out hats with wide brims. And in summer heat and glare, wear my current version everyday, walking up and down the avenue.
Surely there were rooms downstairs where I took part in family life, but it's a mark of my love of solitude that I choose to make a museum of my teenage bedroom. The sewing I did downstairs at my mother's old Singer. It was set up in the kitchen, with the washing machine on one side, the ironing board on the other, and the tiny kitchen table behind. Very cramped. But hardly anyone else spent time there except when my mother was preparing dinner or my sister and I were washing dishes. Focused over the sewing machine, its needle piercing the cloth as I strove to hold the zipper steady, I was as thoroughly enraptured as I'd ever be over a computer keyboard. Even better, because the tactile and visual appeal of the cloth, plus the speed of the darting silver needle--all required intense concentration, the making of a whole world. After that, wearing the dresses was a bit of a letdown, though I did wear them, even bragged about making them. Anyone could have accurately called me a clothes horse, but the truth lay deeper. My whole being came alive in the making.
George Segal created a room (displayed in the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota) honoring his parents: floor-length living room lamp, overstuffed chair and sofa, cathedral radio, and life-size statues of his parents. In my museum of memories stands a four-poster bed with ruffled flounce and turquoise bedspread and pillow shams. My mother made them for the re-do of my upstairs bedroom when I was entering ninth grade. Here I dreamed of Chad Hunter once the photos from Hollywood arrived in the mail, or listened to Elvis and Fats Domino and the Coasters on my little radio--"I'm going to find her/him..." Here also I wrote long research papers, the one I remember most vividly was about low-country chapels of ease, tiny churches dotting the Carolina rice country from the days when rice planters along the Ashley, Cooper and Wando Rivers found it too laborous to reach big churches in Charleston.
Let's add a closet to that upstairs room with its windows on two sides, one double set overlooking the backyard and my mother's huge garden, beyond which strung the chicken-wire fence of Old Man L. and his son, whose real live chickens scratched in their bare-earth yard. The other window, beside the bed, put me in constant communication with a chinaberry tree, whose rustlings and moanings I barely noticed, until I read Robert Frost's poem "Tree at my window, window tree..." The September my parents drove me to Goucher College in Baltimore, the tree was snapped by Hurricane Gracie, a remarkable act of nature paralleling my own minor wrenching from home.
The closet was huge, delving back under the eaves and crowded with my clothes. Like my mother, I sewed. My sister never did. After taking a course in Charleston at the Singer Sewing Machine store, one hot August week, I churned out dresses galore: a voile summer dress (almost all our clothes in Charleston were summery) with huge floppy bow at the neckline; or a long-sleeved dark print with white collar and cuffs and bound buttonholes--mastering those took hours. Even now I can feel myself standing in the material department at Belk's and moving along the rows, fingering bolts of fabric. Then studying patterns carefully, one of a row of girls and women perched on tall stools as we flipped back the heavy pattern books. I had to be careful not to make anything with too tight a skirt--my hips, you know.
Now that I have myself on the second floor of Belk's, let's remember trying on hats. We wore hats and gloves to church, gloves meant to be decorative and ladylike (hmmm!), hats to give a swash-buckling addition to our outfits. This surely suggests my preference for hats with wide brims and dips over the eyes. I liked even then the notion of secrecy and glamor they provided. Even today, though I've given up sewing dresses for myself, I still search out hats with wide brims. And in summer heat and glare, wear my current version everyday, walking up and down the avenue.
Surely there were rooms downstairs where I took part in family life, but it's a mark of my love of solitude that I choose to make a museum of my teenage bedroom. The sewing I did downstairs at my mother's old Singer. It was set up in the kitchen, with the washing machine on one side, the ironing board on the other, and the tiny kitchen table behind. Very cramped. But hardly anyone else spent time there except when my mother was preparing dinner or my sister and I were washing dishes. Focused over the sewing machine, its needle piercing the cloth as I strove to hold the zipper steady, I was as thoroughly enraptured as I'd ever be over a computer keyboard. Even better, because the tactile and visual appeal of the cloth, plus the speed of the darting silver needle--all required intense concentration, the making of a whole world. After that, wearing the dresses was a bit of a letdown, though I did wear them, even bragged about making them. Anyone could have accurately called me a clothes horse, but the truth lay deeper. My whole being came alive in the making.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Margotlog: Down and Out in Minnesota
Margotlog: Down and Out in Minnesota
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describes his seasons washing dishes as a plongeur in an immense Parisian hotel, where the kitchen and scullery are sunk into the depths like Satan's den, and the floors above rise into beauty and grandeur like springtime and heaven's glory. He was knowledgeable and well-read, but needed work. Living in a tiny attic room (reminiscent of Raskalnikov's in Crime and Punishment) he brought the hotel's squalor home with him and formed it into a vivid account. Yet, it has a different flavor from other documents of poverty and degradation because of his resources of talent and education, his commitment to literature and writing, and his transience--he eventually receives cash and a job that allow him to return England. These quickly alleviate the grimness of working seventeen hours a day and consorting with thieves, "trollops" and murderers.
Most Minnesotans growing up in the inner and outer-ring suburbs or rural areas are white, relatively affluent and, unless they live in Eden Prairie or Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, are totally ignorant of poverty, racism and major crime. Recently a young white woman confessed that her enormous suburban high school included only a few students of color, and that she herself did not encounter groups of African-Americans until as a teen, she went shopping in a Brooklyn Center mall. "Eveyone was black," she said. And she was so startled and uncertain how to act that she left. It was as if she'd been transported to another country where she suddenly was the "other."
I feel sorry for her as she struggles to rectify her "whiteness." Her college experience at the University of Minnesota helped by adding some reading in African-American history and literature. But she still has a long way to go to appreciate the complexity of race relations in this country. This appreciation (earned through experience, effort and reflection) and complexity (always present) will be a lifelong effort, if she chooses to make it so. Since she's my student, and I'm learning from her as she is from me, we are in this together.
Being black in Minnesota has changed, I'll hazard, since the 1940s-60s. Oddly enough, when segregation was in force, two strong African-American communities developed in the Twin Cities: the near north side of Minneapolis, and the Rondo area of Saint Paul. Here African-Americans built their own institutions: stores, churches, barber shops, schools, entertainment. They'd come to the Twin Cities via Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis or other way stations on their move north during World War I or II. They still had strong ties to the south, to extended families of farming people, and they had jobs on the railroad or in industry ramped up by the wars. Many women worked in white homes. Unlike the huge African-American communities in Chicago and Cincinnati or Saint Louis and Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York, those in the Twin Cities were relatively small and hadn't yet developed the range of wealth, education and status present in the older communities.
It's no surprise that President and Mrs. Obama spent formative years in Chicago. Chicago has the community capital to "raise up" black lawyers, mayors, educators, legislators, business people. This has been true since the end of the 19th century. As Alan Spear's Black Chicago describes, some of the great "race" leaders came from Chicago, as they did from New York. When we speak of New York's Harlem Renaissance, we mean a density of population, talent, and financial support to grow writers and artists, musicians and performers. In the 1920s, it was popular among "with it" whites to attend the African-American Apollo theater in Harlem. Many talented African-American writers received support for education, travel, writing time, and publication from multi-race benefactors.
The Twin Cities certainly has now and in the past talented black artists and writers--the Penumbra Theater in Saint Paul is nationally recognized as one of the finest contributors of African-American theater, especially in its productions of August Wilson's series of plays about African-American life in decade of the 20th century. Poets like Roy McBride and artists like Ta-Comba Aiken bring to life their vision. But, oddly enough, with the Civil Rights era and the end of segregation, the two Twin Cities neighborhoods, especially Rondo in Saint Paul, no longer represent as strong a congregation as they did, ready to raise each other up.
When Highway 94 sliced Rondo in two, the construction forced many residents to move. To appreciate Rondo before the highway, read Evelyn Fairbanks wonderful memoir Days of Rondo, published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1990.
Don't get me wrong: the Civil Rights movement and legislation ending segregation and then supporting voting rights made illegal some of the worst forms of institutionalized racism that came into being after the Civil War. But community has always been one of a people's greatest assets. When that frays, and it's easy to see how it would among a small population--busing students away, families moving to suburbs--I wonder what effect that ultimately has on everything from raising children to raising capital.
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describes his seasons washing dishes as a plongeur in an immense Parisian hotel, where the kitchen and scullery are sunk into the depths like Satan's den, and the floors above rise into beauty and grandeur like springtime and heaven's glory. He was knowledgeable and well-read, but needed work. Living in a tiny attic room (reminiscent of Raskalnikov's in Crime and Punishment) he brought the hotel's squalor home with him and formed it into a vivid account. Yet, it has a different flavor from other documents of poverty and degradation because of his resources of talent and education, his commitment to literature and writing, and his transience--he eventually receives cash and a job that allow him to return England. These quickly alleviate the grimness of working seventeen hours a day and consorting with thieves, "trollops" and murderers.
Most Minnesotans growing up in the inner and outer-ring suburbs or rural areas are white, relatively affluent and, unless they live in Eden Prairie or Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, are totally ignorant of poverty, racism and major crime. Recently a young white woman confessed that her enormous suburban high school included only a few students of color, and that she herself did not encounter groups of African-Americans until as a teen, she went shopping in a Brooklyn Center mall. "Eveyone was black," she said. And she was so startled and uncertain how to act that she left. It was as if she'd been transported to another country where she suddenly was the "other."
I feel sorry for her as she struggles to rectify her "whiteness." Her college experience at the University of Minnesota helped by adding some reading in African-American history and literature. But she still has a long way to go to appreciate the complexity of race relations in this country. This appreciation (earned through experience, effort and reflection) and complexity (always present) will be a lifelong effort, if she chooses to make it so. Since she's my student, and I'm learning from her as she is from me, we are in this together.
Being black in Minnesota has changed, I'll hazard, since the 1940s-60s. Oddly enough, when segregation was in force, two strong African-American communities developed in the Twin Cities: the near north side of Minneapolis, and the Rondo area of Saint Paul. Here African-Americans built their own institutions: stores, churches, barber shops, schools, entertainment. They'd come to the Twin Cities via Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis or other way stations on their move north during World War I or II. They still had strong ties to the south, to extended families of farming people, and they had jobs on the railroad or in industry ramped up by the wars. Many women worked in white homes. Unlike the huge African-American communities in Chicago and Cincinnati or Saint Louis and Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York, those in the Twin Cities were relatively small and hadn't yet developed the range of wealth, education and status present in the older communities.
It's no surprise that President and Mrs. Obama spent formative years in Chicago. Chicago has the community capital to "raise up" black lawyers, mayors, educators, legislators, business people. This has been true since the end of the 19th century. As Alan Spear's Black Chicago describes, some of the great "race" leaders came from Chicago, as they did from New York. When we speak of New York's Harlem Renaissance, we mean a density of population, talent, and financial support to grow writers and artists, musicians and performers. In the 1920s, it was popular among "with it" whites to attend the African-American Apollo theater in Harlem. Many talented African-American writers received support for education, travel, writing time, and publication from multi-race benefactors.
The Twin Cities certainly has now and in the past talented black artists and writers--the Penumbra Theater in Saint Paul is nationally recognized as one of the finest contributors of African-American theater, especially in its productions of August Wilson's series of plays about African-American life in decade of the 20th century. Poets like Roy McBride and artists like Ta-Comba Aiken bring to life their vision. But, oddly enough, with the Civil Rights era and the end of segregation, the two Twin Cities neighborhoods, especially Rondo in Saint Paul, no longer represent as strong a congregation as they did, ready to raise each other up.
When Highway 94 sliced Rondo in two, the construction forced many residents to move. To appreciate Rondo before the highway, read Evelyn Fairbanks wonderful memoir Days of Rondo, published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1990.
Don't get me wrong: the Civil Rights movement and legislation ending segregation and then supporting voting rights made illegal some of the worst forms of institutionalized racism that came into being after the Civil War. But community has always been one of a people's greatest assets. When that frays, and it's easy to see how it would among a small population--busing students away, families moving to suburbs--I wonder what effect that ultimately has on everything from raising children to raising capital.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Margotlog: When We Dead Awaken
Margotlog: When We Dead Awaken
Resistance, that powerful guard of the status quo, of the loved prejudice and favored ignorance, stands guard like an upside down angel over our writing.
I'm watching an osprey hover over the surface of a lagoon between the coast of Florida and Sanibel Island. What is sees is impossible to me, yet it recognizes a fish almost within reach. Suddenly its wings lift, and with talons extended it plunges into the lagoon. When the bird emerges, it carries a heavy fish. The capture holds for a few feet, then falls back into the water.
Resistance hovers over something we can't quite gauge. We resist the air with our wings. Weary, frustrated, soon we must make the plunge. Maybe the catch will be smooth, our resistance spent in the act of retrieving what we know will feed us. Or maybe we will retrieve more than we can manage or possibly nothing more than a shadow and the recognition that we must hover again.
This part of the creative process, of any learning process, we hate the most. It's not the same as simple fatigue. That we resolve with rest, tilting down over the keyboard or pen, eyes closing, only to wake hours later, surprised at where we find ourselves. Resistance is active, strong-willed, hungry yet defiant. We battle between the element that normally sustains us with our strong wings, and the element we only partly glimpse below.
My own resistance I treat like an ornery guest--with honor yet caution. Small doses of interaction at a time, hoping that eventually, one of us will relax and make the next interchange easier. Take the question of how much to reveal in the mother-daughter memoir I'm currently revising. It's the early 90s. The difference between what I knew about gay life and what my daughter knew in her first year of college, was considerable. Yes, I'd read memoirs like Mark Doty's Heaven's Gate, set largely on Cape Cod as his partner is dying of AIDS. Doty's tender yet searing chronicle reminded me that watching a beloved die, especially the same age as yourself, rocks hope and sanity to its foundations. At various writers colories, I had made friends with gay writers who treated me with a welcoming kindness, even coddling which I'd never quite experienced from any other man. Better than a brother since we had no sibling rivalry; better than a lover since there was little of that sparring over sexual barriers. Rather more like a distant cousin suddenly dropped into my life offering friendship and gifts of unusual quality.
Yet I had none of the daily intimacy with gays which my daughter developed in her college dorm floor. The first time I passed one of them on her floor, I was shocked with simple astonishment. In my college dorm twenty-some years before, boys were allowed on the dorm floors only on Sunday, and then all doors had to remain open. Instead of gay friends in high school and college (did boys even openly identify themselves as gay?), I acquired some beaux.
Now in her first college year, my daughter desired all the magic of dating, but hadn't been able to manage. Still as in high school, constrained by shyness and thwarted desire. What to do?
As we traveled I encouraged her to let her beauty (and her beautifying) lead to romance. She resisted with all the newfangled "male gaze" resistance of feminist art-history theory. We deconstructed art--my seeing the drama of beauty and heterosexual desire; she seeing the drama of appropriation and fettering.
All this is in the memoir. It's the stuff of our art talk and eventual guy talk. Yet she teases me about her deep friendships with gay guys. "Aren't they getting in the way?" I ask. Or do I? There resistance creeps into my telling of our story. How much of my ignorance, or rather older and less informed perspective of gay-gal friendships belongs in our tale? Should I reveal my own much slower education into gay life and enjoyment of gay friends? Or should I simply cut all the stuff about gays since it only a sidelight of our more crucial themes.
Some readers feel queasy reading about our different experiences and opinions about gay men and straight women. Responding from their 21st-century point of view, when discussion of gay marriage has made it into front-page acceptability, they are made uncomfortable by our earlier, more hesitant responses. Not much, after all, has been written about relationships between gay men and straight women; gay and straight youth. For those on the extremes of the discussion, only interested in gay life OR the opposition to granting gays similar status as heterosexual adults need apply for attention. Only these extremes seem acceptable for mainstream publication.
And so my resistance hovers: how much to plunge into the manuscript and remove? How much to leave just below the surface? As I tire of this uncertainty, I will eventually attempt something. Meanwhile, from a distance, I watch the beauty of the osprey and try not to feel the weariness in its wings.
Resistance, that powerful guard of the status quo, of the loved prejudice and favored ignorance, stands guard like an upside down angel over our writing.
I'm watching an osprey hover over the surface of a lagoon between the coast of Florida and Sanibel Island. What is sees is impossible to me, yet it recognizes a fish almost within reach. Suddenly its wings lift, and with talons extended it plunges into the lagoon. When the bird emerges, it carries a heavy fish. The capture holds for a few feet, then falls back into the water.
Resistance hovers over something we can't quite gauge. We resist the air with our wings. Weary, frustrated, soon we must make the plunge. Maybe the catch will be smooth, our resistance spent in the act of retrieving what we know will feed us. Or maybe we will retrieve more than we can manage or possibly nothing more than a shadow and the recognition that we must hover again.
This part of the creative process, of any learning process, we hate the most. It's not the same as simple fatigue. That we resolve with rest, tilting down over the keyboard or pen, eyes closing, only to wake hours later, surprised at where we find ourselves. Resistance is active, strong-willed, hungry yet defiant. We battle between the element that normally sustains us with our strong wings, and the element we only partly glimpse below.
My own resistance I treat like an ornery guest--with honor yet caution. Small doses of interaction at a time, hoping that eventually, one of us will relax and make the next interchange easier. Take the question of how much to reveal in the mother-daughter memoir I'm currently revising. It's the early 90s. The difference between what I knew about gay life and what my daughter knew in her first year of college, was considerable. Yes, I'd read memoirs like Mark Doty's Heaven's Gate, set largely on Cape Cod as his partner is dying of AIDS. Doty's tender yet searing chronicle reminded me that watching a beloved die, especially the same age as yourself, rocks hope and sanity to its foundations. At various writers colories, I had made friends with gay writers who treated me with a welcoming kindness, even coddling which I'd never quite experienced from any other man. Better than a brother since we had no sibling rivalry; better than a lover since there was little of that sparring over sexual barriers. Rather more like a distant cousin suddenly dropped into my life offering friendship and gifts of unusual quality.
Yet I had none of the daily intimacy with gays which my daughter developed in her college dorm floor. The first time I passed one of them on her floor, I was shocked with simple astonishment. In my college dorm twenty-some years before, boys were allowed on the dorm floors only on Sunday, and then all doors had to remain open. Instead of gay friends in high school and college (did boys even openly identify themselves as gay?), I acquired some beaux.
Now in her first college year, my daughter desired all the magic of dating, but hadn't been able to manage. Still as in high school, constrained by shyness and thwarted desire. What to do?
As we traveled I encouraged her to let her beauty (and her beautifying) lead to romance. She resisted with all the newfangled "male gaze" resistance of feminist art-history theory. We deconstructed art--my seeing the drama of beauty and heterosexual desire; she seeing the drama of appropriation and fettering.
All this is in the memoir. It's the stuff of our art talk and eventual guy talk. Yet she teases me about her deep friendships with gay guys. "Aren't they getting in the way?" I ask. Or do I? There resistance creeps into my telling of our story. How much of my ignorance, or rather older and less informed perspective of gay-gal friendships belongs in our tale? Should I reveal my own much slower education into gay life and enjoyment of gay friends? Or should I simply cut all the stuff about gays since it only a sidelight of our more crucial themes.
Some readers feel queasy reading about our different experiences and opinions about gay men and straight women. Responding from their 21st-century point of view, when discussion of gay marriage has made it into front-page acceptability, they are made uncomfortable by our earlier, more hesitant responses. Not much, after all, has been written about relationships between gay men and straight women; gay and straight youth. For those on the extremes of the discussion, only interested in gay life OR the opposition to granting gays similar status as heterosexual adults need apply for attention. Only these extremes seem acceptable for mainstream publication.
And so my resistance hovers: how much to plunge into the manuscript and remove? How much to leave just below the surface? As I tire of this uncertainty, I will eventually attempt something. Meanwhile, from a distance, I watch the beauty of the osprey and try not to feel the weariness in its wings.
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