Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Margotlog: Three Great American Speeches

Margotlog: Three Great American Speeches

I'm reading James Carroll's memoir: An American Requiem which won the National Book Award in 1996. Sometimes when a friend passes along a book found in the "used bin" at 2nd Hand Books, it's a keeper.

Carroll grew up in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s. His father was a high muckety-muck in national security, but also a failed priest. Carroll set out to put that failure to rights. This was during the great Catholic upheaval of Pope John the 23rd when ancient obeisances and doctrines were questioned and thrown open to fresh air.

As Carroll charts his own growth from homage to church and father toward self-deter-mination, he pauses to record the effect on him of the March on Washington, culminating in Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. Across the plain-spoken prose of Carroll's account, King's words resound with passion and rhythmic power:

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horror of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging...We cannot be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating 'For Whites Only'...No! No! We are not satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'" Then come the more famous lines beginning "I have a dream."

The import of Carroll's account, at this point, is the ultimate weakness of any human being. Soon he and his father will be engaged in their private war over Vietnam. But before that, they argue about King: the elder Carroll is part of a secret "bugging" of King's hotel rooms and telephones. King has had associations with a "known Communist," but what the bug reveals will be King's sexual indiscretions.

Reading King's words again, I'm struck by their power--rhetorical and personal, lived and referential. This is a speech, as Carroll suggests, closer to sermon than to secular address. It draws on Biblical strategies and includes direct quotes from the Bible's grand sweeping language. King's words lift an obvious secular abuse toward a Sermon on the Mount.

It's one of three great American works of the literary and political imagination: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. There well may be others, but this morning, I'm able to quote the openings of "Fourscore and seven years ago"..."(Lincoln) and "When in the course of human events..." (Jefferson). This morning I relish the resounding claims of these three speeches, claims for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and "Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

I'm only an accidental historian, made so in the beginning by opposition to my own father's pounding of African-American rights during the same era as Carroll recalls. His threat of Commie take-over on the coat tails of Civil Rights agitation struck me as ludicrous. His threat that African-Americans eating at lunch counters and sitting in the front of the bus would plunge us into world war struck me as weak, an inflation of danger in order to disguise what was ultimately his personal dislike of black people. The fact that he/we knew no black people, that we were outsiders from the North also under constant suspicion of being "red"--these facts were plain to me even then, in the early 1960s. Reading Carroll's book, I glimpse how in a few minor ways, I might have been wrong. But in the main, I was right: my father's trumping the Commie threat was a way of beefing up his petty resistance to a great wave marching toward social justice.

None of the three great spokesmen for social justice were entirely free of blemish: King's I've mentioned. Jefferson had a long liason with one his slaves, Sally Hemmings, which he refused to reveal--to do so would have cost him his prominence. Lincoln was prone to extraordinary depression, which often debilitated him. Yet, their words mark this country's greatest goal: social justice for all. This morning, in the midst of contention between political parties, when it seems we as a nation will sink even further into some of our greatest sins, I am happy to recall those clarion calls to justice, equality, sacrifice and welcome.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Margotlog: The Saints: Our Best Baseball

Margotlog: The Saints: Our Best Baseball

The Minnesota Saints ballpark in Saint Paul is nestled among railroad tracks, the wreck of a building where the fire department trains its novices to quench fires, and the viaduct that lifts Snelling Avenue over Bandana Square. Not a great spot, you say? Au contraire. There is no dome overhead. A brindled pig scampers onto the field between innings. Trains pulled by old engines tootle past. It's one of my favorite ball parks.

I know: this is not the opinion of a true afficionado. My glance strays far too often from the field. I inspect families with children: a baby with a pink skull cap under a pink hood looks like a laughing pretend-monk, eating a crust. Two boys are gifted with sudden glory: Saints t-shirts, half on, half off, threatening to drown them. I study men's faces--deeply indented or flattened; rising out of necks into lozenges or siting like balls on their shoulders; their expressions--smug, serious or snide, smiling or rapt with anticipation. I listen to men shouting at the field; women laughing at each other.

OK: there is a game going on. After initial flubs, the Saints seem to be winning. There are some dynamite throws from home plate across the pitcher who bends down just in time. The ball put out runners stealing first to second. There are some excellent ground balls whacked far enough into the outfield to allow runners to gain first or second. But the sky is clearing. A second train chugs past with "Canadian Pacific" and "Burlington Northern" cars. I've been in love with trains since my mother took me and my sister on two-night-three-day trips from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota, her hometown. Trains signal the romance of unfurling landscape, stops in cities where puffing and huffing "I Think I Can, I Think I Can" engines gather their resources. Railroads, far more than highways, made the fortunes of this region. You can sleep on trains.

The Saints put on laugh-a-thons between innings: two portly young ladies dressed in animal costumes place their foreheads on bats standing upright on the field, then they twirl themselves silly, and stagger across a bit of field, to retrieve something or other. Soon they're rolling on the grass. We can see this all close-up. No one sits far from the field. We love it that our "friends and neighbors" are willing to entertain us. Once or twice, years ago at the Saints, my husband and I saw "The Chicken," but really, the Saints' rendition of an pig in a tutu is as flirtatious and silly as Ted Giannoulas in his saucy beak and tail.

Threatening clouds have cleared. OK: it's chilly. But the sky is now streaked with pink horsetail clouds. That soft magical light of sunset bathes the scene. Another train passes and toots. The silly pig, no more than a toddler who still drinks from a bottle, scampers out on the field again. This time the pig is wearing bunny ears. We love it that a farm animal, who's likely smart and no-question adorable, is willing to come visit with us. We remember a Baltimore pork-butcher grandfather whose pet pig followed him to school. There's a moment of remorse: pigs are as smart as humans, they just don't have opposable thumbs. We're ready to swear off pork chops, at least for one evening when the world seems made to order for amusement and charm.

The Saints want a new ballpark, my husband mentions. Phooey! They couldn't find a better location than this. Heaven forbid they'd end up in the suburbs. We want an urban experience, spiced just right with Minnesota nice and tom-foolery. We like to remember that there used to be a ballpark at Lexington Avenue and University where minor league teams played including the All American Girls Professional Baseball Team with a team called the Minneapolis Millerettes. We like remembering the book I wrote about them: Up to the Plate, published by Lerner in 1995.

All in all, we couldn't be happier than this one evening with the Saints.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Margotlog: Decibels

Margotlog: Decibels at Gangelhoff Auditorium, Concordia College, Saint Paul - Let's Name Names!

What is so rare as a day in June or let's say May? Not much in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, unless it's the quiet of a small mountaintop over-looking Lake Superior. There, the only sounds on a day in May were the crunch of footsteps on fallen leaves, a whoosh of breeze, an occasional call of a robin or crow, and the snuffle of several friendly dogs. The views were spectacular, not just across the bald mountain top toward the coast (it turns out) of Michigan's upper peninsula, but also within the maple/spruce forest itself where dells and hills defined the "lay of the land" with no brush yet in leaf to impede the sight. There you could see how the mountain had laid itself down to rest, with all the curves of a warm, breathing body.

Not every place I love is necessarily quiet, but such places rank high on the scale of pleasure. "I want to hear myself think," my mother used to complain after spending a day with my father's richly varied but constant Italian voice. Some peoples are by habit, temperament, or culture louder. Minnesotans tend to be quiet-spoken people. Rarely does a neighbor raise a voice to call across the street or shout out a window. But two days ago I discovered a frightening exception: decibel levels at Ganglelhoff Auditorium on the campus of Concordia College.

We attended a women's basketball game - the Minnesota Lynx playing some traveling competitor. I'd never been inside Gangelhoff before, though I've passed it countless times since Concordia lies within an easy stroll of my house. The basketball courts and stands are not a huge space, more like a large living room than a field of dreams. The sound system was turned up so loud that low booms ricocheted like a souped-up ghetto blasters. But unlike cars blasting loud music, which at least pass rather fast, we were stuck inside this blaster, as were large groups of school children and teens.

The amplification of this music also picked up the shrill whistles of referees, and the grating voices of announcers. Within a few minutes, I was pressing my thumbs against my ears. Surely this will cease once the game begins, I thought. How can players pay attention when their entire beings are bound over to this booming, shrilling, nauseating noise? Wrong! The PA system went dead for a blessed interval, then roared again. A few seats below us, other older people began covering their ears. One woman looked around and saw me grimacing and bending down as I clamped my fingers and hands over my ears. She nodded and smiled and made a not-quite obscene gesture to the rafters--meaning we should do something damaging to these sounds.

The game started. The music kept up its din, shut off only briefly as the players sped up and down the court. Finally still in the first quarter of the game, my husband and I got up and left. The sound, intense, insistent, and very loud, was unendurable, painful, obnoxious. Note: noise and nausea have the same root.

I've read that generations of Americans born after around 1970 have significantly reduced auditory sensitivity. Now I see why: they are pounded from birth by TVs, restaurant music, boom boxes, movies and now computer sound systems which are often so loud as to damage their hearing. If we worry about the U.S. Navy's sonar experiments affecting (even killing) whales in the oceans, we should also be worrying about our daily bombardment of our children with noise. It may not kill them, but it will derange them in significant ways. Here are the health consequences reported as the result of constant noise pressure: psychological annoyance and aggression. Physiological: hypertension (read high blood pressure), tinnitus (ringing in the ears), hearing loss, sleep disturbance.

The quietest sound a human can hear is a mosquito flying 3 meters away--that's reported in Wikipedia by British researchers. If a meter is roughly the length of an adult arm, that's quite a ways to hear a mosquito whine. That's auditory sensitivity of the highest order. I'm not sure I have it, but I do know I treasure my ability to hear small sounds--my cats, breathing deeply in dreams from the end of my bed--I can hear them. The hum of this computer--I can hear it. The sparrows chirping outside the closed window (it's still May in chilly Minnesota), I can hear them. I want to keep it that way. I'm surely not going to trade such daily pleasures that help orient me to my world for more than a few minutes of "sound attack" at the Gangelhoff!

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Margotlog: Danse Macabre

Margotlog: Danse Macabre

I'm just getting around to reading one of the finest works of history written in the 20th century--Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. It crossed my attention, probably from a New York Times Book Review, in 1978, when it was first published, but for some reason I thought it would be a weighty tome, crammed with facts and little charm. I could not have been more wrong. Along with David McCullough's biography of John Adams, Barbara Tuchman has my vote for producing one of the most graceful, learned, and challenging works of history I've ever read.

Fourteenth-century France, especially in its last decades from 1380-1400, rivals our own time for conflict, excess, natural disasters, and downright human stupidity. The Black Plague swept across Europe in periodic intervals, reducing the population by half. Comments Tuchman, though no chronicler took note, there was ample evidence of reduced population in abandoned abbeys, shuttered commerce, blighted warrens of the diseased. Still, she insists, with fewer to compete for limited food (especially problematic since a mini-Ice Age cut the growing season throughout much of Europe), many middle class sustained themselves into education. Publishers, working slowly with no printing press, produced more books, and the University of Paris attained a prominence that rivaled crown and church.

Yet what strikes me is the cult of death, epitomized by the Danse Macabre. Tuchman speculates that "macabre" derived from Maccabee and the Biblical story of a mother and seven sons in grim martyrdom. Maccabee might also have been another word for Jews who were employed in the 14th century as grave diggers. Or it may have derived from the Arabic word maqabir for cemetery. In one actual danse macabre, the young king of France, Charles VI, and a group of his followers covered themselves with resin to which they attached shreds of hemp. Then banishing all torches from the scene, they writhed and groveled as if within the grave. (Shades of these "hairy" men appear on either side of the portrait of Oswald Kiel, 1499/1506, by the Nuremberg artist Durer, attacking travelers on a forest road.)

When Charles' brother the Duc d'Orleans and a friend entered from another carouse bearing torches, a spark fell on the writhing bodies of the dancers and within seconds almost all were in flames. The king was saved when his wife threw her skirt over him. One other dancer plunged into a huge wine cooler. All others were so severely burned that they died within days. Is it no surprise that after this, Charles VI began to experience periods of madness which lasted off and on till the end of his reign.

In art the cult of death, writes Tuchman, included tomb sculptures of the deceased as naked and scrawny from age or disease, scarcely noble. Images of Mary shifted from the pink-cheeked, loving young mother of infant Jesus to the Mater Dolorosa, wearing a crown of thorns or holding the limp body of the dead Christ across her lap--the first such Pieta was created in 1390. Charnel houses were built around the graveyard of the Innocents in Paris, piled with skulls and bones as the graveyard was dug up to accommodate more bodies. A mural of the dance of death
was created there in around 1414.

But more enduring than the Innocents graveyard, where mass internments eventually led to its disuse, were images of the dance of death or death and the maiden in which death gives the living its morbid, but very lively touch. In a period when death waited just around the corner, like a lurking rat, ready to spread the plague, fascination with horrors helped spark the living far more than would have depression or submission. Better to dance with death than sink lifeless under its mantle. Better to acknowledge its presence and thus gain a minimal control than to have it grab you unawares.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Margotlog: A Nest of Russian Dolls

Margotlog: A Nest of Russian Dolls

When I took apart my nest of Russian dolls, painted red and white with touches of pink for the lips and green for leaves on their cloaks, I wanted each face to be different. But each doll, which held the smaller nubs of succeeding generations, looked alike. The charm had simply to do with decreasing size. They were clones of each other.

There are families like that--where the children are rescued from the same gene pool as their parents. Where only decreasing size and being embedded in their larger progenitors set them apart. But our mother from an entirely different European gene pool than our father insisted on scrutinizing her children's differences. "You're dark like your father," my mother would declare, looking closely at me out of the blue. "You have his coloring," as if he'd taken a box of crayons and laid on me his own olive skin, deep brown eyes and vividly white teeth. He was thoroughly Italian. She was not.

My younger sister sported our mother's German-Swedish coloring, with blue-green eyes, light brown hair and roses in her cheeks. OK, that took care of the physical attributes. Next came the scrutiny for talents. When I started taking music lessons at second grade, my sister was not even five. It turned out that I was a "good student." I quickly learned to read music, had fine, hand-eye coordination. I quickly progressed through the John Schirmer "Little Fingers That Play" first piano book.

One day, coming home school, I heard my song "In a Country Garden," coming from the piano. Our father was an excellent violinist. In fact, he had studied the violin in Italy, which even then, meant to me that he had traveled to musical mecca for instruction. Was he playing my song for fun? Not likely. He was teaching at The Citadel. And it wouldn't be our mother: she repeatedly announced that she had no musical talent whatsoever, except appreciation.

Tiptoeing to the doorway into the living room, I stood shocked as I watched my little sister stand at the keyboard, playing my song. She immediately looked over at me and smiled her impish grin, which meant "Nah, nah, nah, I can do anything better than you can!"

After that, the scene goes dark until its follow-up several days or weeks later. Somehow my mother doesn't see me: she's talking through the back-door screen that leads into the long shadowed hall which runs straight through our wing of the Old Citadel from front to back. Our apartment near the back faces another apartment across the hall, where the Thompsons live. My mother is speaking to Mrs. Thompson. As best as I can recollect, this is what she says: "D. is playing all of Margot's songs by ear. She doesn't even have to read music. She's inherited her father's musical talent."

Again I'm stunned: I thought I had the music talent! After all, I look like my father. I'm racing through the "Little Fingers" book. I practice the piano every day. He and I also have played little duets. Plus going to Grace Miller's house near Ashley Hall for my lessons, is my activity, given to me because I'm older. Doesn't reading the music in the "Little Fingers" book mean I'm also better, and wiser?

Apparently not. That assumption does not survive my mother's conversation with Mrs. Thompson. Though I continue to take lessons, though I play a Haydn concerto with Ms Miller at a recital when I'm twelve, the evolution of my sister's musical talent will eventually prove the correctness of my mother's statement. My sister has indeed inherited our father's music talent. Her version of the Russian doll looks and acts quite different from mine.

There are so many ramifications to this early recognition, and to my mother's complex response to our various differences, that it will take me years to sort them out and to put them at arm's length. I am not surprised, now decades later, that my sister and I are not close, either geographically or socially. We have periods when we gang up on our mother's legacy, attempt to prove that despite all this business about assigning attributes and talents strictly across the parental divide, we can have fun together and be decent siblings. But ultimately, we revert to prickly suspicion, waiting for our mother's voice to come out of the woodwork and assign positive and negative characteristics which create jealousy and hurt.

I like another version of the Russian dolls better: the one in which the parent insists, "I have three daughters and they're all wonderful." Period. End of discussion. This is the version practiced by my father's only living relative, Eleanora of Delaware. When I visit her, as I've just done, I hear her describe her childhood of three girls, who did and did not resemble each other, but whose mother, the angelic Josephine, treated them all as her beloved offspring and never praised one over the other. She had enough sense to let life do whatever it would in that regard, and kept the daughters close to each other nestled under her motherly heart.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau = Conclusion

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau - Conclusion

I did not go to Dachau that first time in Germany. When I entered the air-conditioned office in the Munich train station, the clerk informed me with great solemnity: "Madame, Dachau is closed on Monday." I felt as if I had betrayed a sacred duty. Gelsey was elated. "Then we go to Garmisch," she intoned. We raced to the train. Once in the foothills of the Alps, we walked higher and higher, took a funnicular to the top of the gorge and on a swaying footbridge over the gorge, looked down into the spray. "Ta dah!" Gelsey cried. "It's where the hero's chicklet falls in action movies." Then she blanched and hurried across. "Of all the stupid tourist moves," she muttered, "looking down twice!"

Two years later I returned to Munich alone. It was an easy city to enjoy. I stayed again in the high-ceilinged pension run by Frau Anika, from Austria, Gelsey and I had learned. Her slightly slurred German added to the sense of being embowered under the ceiling's airy foliage.

This time the train station clerk directed me to take stairs down to a commuter train. I hesitated at the top of the stairway, my heart thumping. Did I really want to do this? Yes, I had come all the way. True, I was going on to Italy, across the Alps, the country I loved above all others except for home in the U.S. of A. But this was an obligation, this visit to Dachau. I owed it to myself as part-German to acknowledge my part in this world-wide pain. I owed it to myself as a simple, adult human being.

I started down. Terror and confusion mounted with each step. By the end, thoroughly rattled, I stood almost blind at the bottom, knowing I had to buy a ticket, but unable to perceive how I should do it. Then an immaculate elderly gentleman in a smooth beige raincoat spoke to me: "Madame, may I help you? Are you enroute to Dachau?" It was as if he had landed with a swoosh of wings.

"Yes, I don't know how to purchase the ticket."
"Come with me," he beckoned. "You insert the money here, and punch this button. The ticket will print below."
As I did so, with trembling fingers, I told him how kind he was and how much I appreciated his help. Turning with the ticket in my hand, I found him waiting. "It is I who must thank you," he said, bowing slightly. I must have looked surprised because he continued, "I fought on the German side in the war. What we did under Hitler was a horror of the greatest magnitude." His eyelids fluttered. It was as if he attempted to push back tears. "Every day I come here and wait. There is always someone I can help find their way to Dachau."

I stepped toward him with outstretched hand. He took my slightly wet palm in his cool, dry one. "Do not be afraid. They have made Dachau a beautiful place. As it was before." Then he was gone. I was crammed onto a commuter train, sensing that this encounter with what I later called my "angel of direction" was perhaps the most powerful part of this homage.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau - Part Two

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau - Part Two

When my beautiful, German-American daughter agreed to guide me to Germany the first time I would set foot in the country, we decided to contact her former host-mother in Nuremberg. This was "the other mutti" who had befriended Gelsey on her high-school German trip. Gelsey was extremely fond of Frau T. who had made her feel entirely at home in their modern townhouse not far from the ancient city walls.

I was both eager and anxious about meeting Frau T. I had so much riding on this trip. It would be our last mother-daughter tete-a-tete, I sensed, before Gelsey headed off into her own adult life. The trip was also an offering to her for what I then perceived as my negligence in the period after I divorced from her dad. When Gelsey agreed to write Frau T., I secretly hoped that she might invite us to stay with them for a few nights. My decade as a single-mom had left me with very little extra cash; our travel budget was very tight.

After a month, however, when Frau T. had not responded, I decided to send another letter, this time written by myself. Still no answer. I began to worry that I had offended her. But shortly before we flew to Germany, a heavy embossed envelope arrived in the mail: we must cancel any hotels, she insisted, and stay with them.

Standing on the doorstep, watching as Frau T. embraced Gelsey, I was struck by how much they resembled each other, far more than Gelsey and I did. Both she and Frau T. were tall and willowy, with regular features. But Frau T.'s hair was yellow blond and cut in a spikey modern style, while Gelsey wore her ash-blond hair long and flowing. Plus, Frau T.'s eyes were turquoise: was she wearing tinted contact lenses? Gelsey's brown eyes gave her a bit of my father's Italian-American softness.

Almost immediately, Gelsey and Frau T. launched into German while I stood to one side, amused and enjoying their mutual appreciation. Soon, we were seated in Frau T.'s woodland living room, drinking hot, American-style coffee and biting into Niger Kuss. The name of this sweet initially sent me into a paroxsym of resistance. Surely it was a racist slur! No, no, Frau T. assured me, offering the box of domed chocolates topped with chocolate sprinkles. "In German what would not be good to say is die Schwartzen." Then as I bit through the hard chocolate to creamy marshmallow, she offered one to Gelsey. "In France these are called Tetes du Negres," she added, "because of the..." and she looked at Gelsey and said something in German. "Because of what you would call in English the 'kinky' hair." Meaning the chocolate sprinkles just that moment dotting my blouse.

Perhaps it was this crack in our reticence that pushed me forward. As we sipped our coffee, and she asked about our travel plans, I blurted out, "When we are in Munich, we must visit Dachau, don't you agree, Frau T.?" Then plunging ahead, afraid of offending her but also determined not to pretend the Holocaust hadn't happened, I added, "I am part German. It is also my duty to remember what happened there."

Frau T. drew herself up and placed her hand against her long slender neck. Suddenly I realized a long scar roughened a ragged part of her neck. What had happened to her? Was it a childhood accident? And I flashed on a girlish form, tipping over a pot of boiling water, then crumbling to the floor. With regal bearing, Frau T. regarded us with serious concern. "Yes, you must visit Dachau," she answered. "Especially for us Germans it is a duty we dare not forget." Then relaxing and lowering her hand, she regarded Gelsey: "You went there with the German students, nicht wahr?"

Gelsey was sunk deep in her chair. "Yes we went, and I don't think I can do it again."

"Oh, but we must!" I insisted. But when I saw the pained expression on her face, I realized that if I attempted it, I would have to do it alone. (To be continued)

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau - Part One

Margotlog: A Visit to Dachau - Part One

For years I didn't want to acknowledge that I'm a quarter German. Had I ever been to Germany? No. But I knew my mother's dictatorial tendencies. These two words--dictatorial tendencies--cancel each other out, I know, but perhaps they should because she wasn't always a dictator. Until my sister and I reached our teens, our mother kept us excellently entertained. She established the kitchen at The Old Citadel as a little art colony with water colors strewn over the kitchen table. In a box under her ironing board lodged pink and blue Easter chicks bought at Woolworths. Our Christmas gifts were either artistic, educational or both. When she had occasional ladies tea parties, we helped her make "blue moon" sandwiches out of tinted cream cheese. In spare moments my sister and I danced to the Sugar Plum Fairy, wearing Thrift Store dresses. Finally by evening, exhausted by all these escapades, not to mention keeping up with the 150 children in the block-long Old Citadel, we sank down on either side of her as she read to us--the Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books were a favorite. She'd grown up in North Dakota. She knew prairie and blizzards, which to us in the warmth and humidity of Charleston, South Carolina, seemed exotic and entirely far away.

Calling her dictatorial and labeling that behavior German was my father's doing. Their kitchen wars (bedroom, too, for all I know) revolved around getting him out the door to teach every morning at The Citadel. He was disorganized. He had what she called the dithers. With his Italian operatic excesses of gesture and voice, he acted out his injured rage at the sharp disgust in her voice: "Oh, Leonard, they're just where you left them!" I.e., his glasses, or briefcase, or Citadel hat. "Oh, Leonard, you've made it worse!" I.e., he'd sponged at a spot on his uniform with a bit of soap and water, spreading the stain across his middle. In a fury of anxiety, he pulled off the shirt while she heated up the iron to smooth out the damage.

Finally when I left home for college, then marriage, then a move to Minnesota, she couldn't keep her mitts off the spots I was making worse. Her voice on the phone truly did dictate what choice I should make--my daughter's schooling, the linoleum for the kitchen, the second-hand car we were buying. She had opinions and directives about them all. I learned to cringe at the sound of her voice.

Couple that with the fact that my first husband was German-American too, and we were spiraling down into divorce--and you have the essence of my dislike for the Fuehrerland. Then my daughter began to study Germany in middle-school and traveled there several times. "Mom, you don't know what you're talking about. Germany is delightful--clean, beautiful, charming." Photos of her with the Munich marble municipal lions showed their mutual classy elan.

By this time I was aware that being German wasn't merely a tendency acted out in an overheated American kitchen. Hitler's rampage across Europe had torn apart civility and civilization. In death camps for Jews and other "deviants" his police perpetrated a genocide never before matched for cold insistent cruelty. Now I began to admit that as part German, I carried a weight of second-hand guilt. If I was going to visit Germany, I had to acknowledge it, and try in part to expiate it.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Margotlog: My Chinese Father-in-Law

Margotlog: My Chinese Father-in-Law

Before I married my current husband, I had no Chinese relations. I knew hardly anything at all about China, except its enormous size, the ink-drawing characters of its language, and its "great wall." Then I met Fran and eventually his parents, Ralph and Louise. When they returned from China, after being interned in their home by the invading Japanese, Ralph went to work for the Fellowship of Reconcilation which preached nonviolence. Soon he was in prison as a pacifist who protested all armed conflict and refused to register for the World War II draft. Louise, pregnant with their first child, spent the rest of the war with her in-laws. Lester (named for British pacifist Muriel Lester) was two years old before he met his father.

What were these two, very WASPish types doing in China? Ralph had been born there, near the city of Xi'an. This is the city where in 1974 the statues of thousands of terracotta warriors were unearthed to astonish the world with their individualized faces, their swords coated in chromium oxide which were still rust-free and sharp after being buried for nearly 2000 years. Ralph and his parents (both originally from Iowa) wanted nothing to do with war. They had arrived in China as missionaries for the United Church of Christ. Born in 1915, Ralph grew up in a walled compound much like Pearl Buck describes in the novel I remember reading as a teenager, The Good Earth (1931). Even before I met him, Fran advised me not to be surprised, but his father had the polite manners of a Chinese, almost bowing between each sentence. His English syntax was also a bit unusual: "Get for me a horse."

Was it any surprise, either, that he did not fare well as a preacher to small Oklahoma churches, but fit right in with the Mandan/Arikara/Hidatsa community on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. There the Native Americans enjoyed several church services every Sunday, making their rounds depending upon which Christian denomination (United Church of Christ, Catholic, or Baptist) offered the best after-service "feed?" Nor surprising that his son, my husband, grew up riding bareback, eating fry bread, and learning to love basketball from watching the Native American teens play in the high school gym?

Not much of a surprise that his parents decided to send him off the reservation for high school. Fran bounced around from Stillwater High, yes right here in MInnesota, to Williston High where he graduated. One of his classmates was Phil Jackson who's just retired as one of the best basketball coaches of the last few decades. Recently coach for the Los Angeles Lakers and before that for the Chicago Bulls, Jackson holds records for winning teams with the most national titles and the highest winning percentages. Fran recalls a lanky, 6' 11" teen practically reaching the basket standing on his tiptoes. Not so unusual now, but back in Williston, quite a feat.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Margotlog: Credit Cards with Wings

Margotlog: Credit Cards with Wings

An adult student of mine who grew up poor in Wisconsin (growing up poor in Minnesota is also quite possible. She just happens to be from Wisconsin), recently described her finances during four years of private, liberal-arts college in the Twin Cities. (Private liberal arts means pricey as opposed to the land-grant universities, which today are also pricey, just not quite so much as private colleges).

My adult student admitted that she grew up in a trailer court. Her college education was financed by scholarships and working during college and summers off. My daughter, a decade plus earlier, also went to a private liberal arts college near the Twin Cities. Her college was financed by family income, largely paid by her father, a physician, and by my mother, the Madame Thrift in our family.

Now, here's an interesting comparison: my adult student finished her college career with flying academic colors, but enormous credit-card debt. Not surprising, you'll say: she was struggling to get by, as are many working adults in today's economy. Her many credit cards were a way to keep herself afloat, perhaps higher in the water than simple buoyancy itself, but afloat, her head at the same level as her comfortably middle-class college friends'.

My daughter had no credit card debt at the end of college because all the adults in her life told her to BEWARE and DO NOT SIGN UP and WATCH OUT FOR INTEREST RATES. We also send her a modest monthly allowance--here's where my mother's contribution kicked in at $200 a month.

The obvious conclusion to this modest comparison is that my adult student wracked up credit card debt because her family could not afford to give her an allowance--as simple as that. But I think there's more to it.

By the time she got to college, my daughter had been through family wars which translated in part into money wars. When her dad and I split up, she was in third grade. Over the next three years, my financial situation declined precipitously: I went from comfort to struggle. By the time my daughter entered high school, I'd invented a work life for myself as a free-lance writing teacher, spent several years "shacked up" with a writing "partner" who had a talent for finding inexpensive but commodious rental situations. At the end of three years, when the divorce was final, I took my share of the marriage house and invested it in a bungalow. (The only way I could avoid paying estate taxes on this money was to invest it in a dwelling which I inhabited.)

When my daughter and I settled into that little bungalow, I had very little extra cash. She and I fought over name brand jeans at Target. She was in ninth grade, tenth grade at the private school where she'd gone since kindergarten, her dad still paying the bills. Meanwhile I struggled to pay electric and water bills; I bought all my clothes used. I DID NOT BUY my daughter everything she wanted. We fought about money a lot. One summer she worked at a high-end clothing store at Victoria Crossing and acquired some lovely Scandinavian items. I bought her ice cream cones; she bought me a lovely high-end Scandinavian skirt.

When we fought about money, I felt beleaguered; she felt short-changed. I felt incensed; she felt deprived. I told her she was not; she insisted everything I bought her was as cheap as I was. IT WAS NOT PRETTY. We said things we almost immediately apologized for, but under the surface conflict was a greater loss: I had deprived her of a stability she had no reason not to trust. I had left the marriage which was her bedrock. We were both fighting to stay afloat--the angry words were our version of thrashing around in rough seas. The fighting helped us keep our heads above water.

My adult student acquired a stable, highly responsible job immediately after college and began paying off her credit-card debt. Now, she laughs ruefully: "I tried to warn my sister when she went to college to avoid maxxing out five credit cards. I reminded her how long it took me to pay off my debt. But it didn't help. She did the same thing."

My daughter did not acquire this habit while she was in college. But after graduating, she did not take a stable, well-paying job. Instead she tried a little of this, a little of that, living in communal squalor (my term) with college friends. Toward the end of this period, let's say six years post graduation, she left her part-time jobs and, taking her modest savings, moved to the suburbs to try her hand at writing. She'd had excellent encouragement for her writing, not only from me but from teachers at college.

Moving to the suburbs she rented a room from another friend who had a full-time day job. By now, the enormous transformation that started in 1965 with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and eventually swept many wives and mothers into the workplace had done its job: the suburbs were empty during the day, except for my daughter in a strange house with only cats for company.

One day shopping for cat food at Pet Smart, she stopped at a large bird cage and began talking to a noisy red and turquoise macaw. "I had to liberate him," I think she told me after she'd bought him. He cost $2000. She now had credit card debt. I won't go into the consequences of this except to admit IT WAS NOT PRETTY! We fought over what she had done. But I also felt deeply sorry for her, interpreting her need to free this beautiful noisy bird as a desire to free something penned up in herself. What that was, exactly, I couldn't tell. But I thought it had to do with becoming a real grown-up creature with wings that could actually fly.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Margotlog: The Dalai Lama in MInnesota

Margotlog: The Dalai Lama in Minnesota

There he stands in the University of Minnesota's hockey arena, not a large, nor a small man in a drape of maroon cloth, his neck and arms bare, and a plastic visor circling his balding head like a slightly errant halo. He's being introduced by the University's president in stately black with a soft velvet tam on his head. The president's words are also stately, full of clauses and politeness and references. Soon he's joined by another stately gentlemen, likewise wearing a modern version of the medieval scholar's robe, though this one in gold. They want to add a white drape to the Dalai Lama's neck, shoulders and back. This drape dips low in the back, almost to His Holiness's knees: it's also medieval in origin, a scholar's hood, though it stands for a contemporary honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.

Sitting far up in the angled seats which fill what would be the hockey court if this were game time, my daughter and I slowly begin to relax toward each other. She's attended other midwestern visits of His Holiness, head of the Tibetan community in exile, now that China has taken over the country of Tibet and sent its Buddhist leaders fleeing. Minnesota is home to the second largest Tibetan community in exile in the United States, the University's president tells us. We are surrounded by Tibetan exiles, the women in wrap-around, floor-length dresses which tie in the back. The dresses are often bright turquoise, which like the maroon of His Holiness's garb must be a favorite color from the country's mandala.

After draping His Holiness in the white medieval "hood," President Bruininks also presents the Dalai Lama with a visor stamped with the University of Minnesota It's a moment for amusement and applause. Finally the Dalai Lama begins to voice his appreciation, bending to show us how his bald head shines through the top of his favorite headgear. More amusement: a revered spiritual leader is poking gentle fun at himself, and with such childlike simplicity and awkward grace that my daughter and I relax even more. Our shoulders now rest against each other.

I've been in the presence of other religious leaders--Protestant ministers who, as a rule, are rather stiff; and an occasional Catholic priest, who often seem obscured in chants and incense. The direct and simple message of the Dalai Lama seems more like gentle conversation, as in fact it is: not a religious observance, but a talk about world peace and inner peace promoted by the qualities of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline. He reminds us of horrific tears in world peace: the dropping of two atom bombs at the end of World War II, and he describes visits to Hiroshima where a peace garden stands over what was the bomb's "ground zero." He mentions the importance of mother love in supporting adult peacefulness and contentment. He wants us to be happy. My daughter and I sigh deeply, our eyelids droop. Soon we slip in dozing, then waking briefly to take in a bit more of His Holiness, then sleeping again. We are tired working women, grateful for the gentle voice, the message of love and acceptance, encouragement to live with compassion.

We wake to applaud this genuine and most compassionate world leader, and walk to our car through the drizzle, a bit more emboldened to work for peace and human rights, within ourselves and for others.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Margotlog: Dandelions and Mother's Day

Margotlog: Dandelions and Mother's Day

When my daughter was maybe five or six, we would walk out of Prospect Park in southeast Minneapolis, cross the bridge over Highway 94, and reach our side of the Mississippi. Since the river runs north/south there before it bends east at Fort Snelling, we'd have the afternoon sun in our eyes as it slowly dipped down the western sky behind most of MInneapolis.

"May is Mary's month," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins from his Catholic Irish perspective, but in our upper Midwest, May is dandelion month and my daughter would pick and pick until she had an enormous bouquet. "Like a bride gone wild," I wrote in a poem then. "No one can make her stop."

When did we lose that childhood abandon, that love of the bright golden face studding our yards, making a yellow picnic along our highways? "Dent de lion," or teeth of the lion for its jagged, deeply indented leaves. Though not originally native to North America, dandelions were brought from Europe by immigrant ancestors to provide habitat for imported bees. They're one of our most successful transplants. Impossible to fully eradicate, their taproot goes so deep into the soil that you'd almost have to dig down a basement's depth to remove it entirely. Even with only a smidgen left, the root will regenerate. How bout that for a mother's love?

Like a mother's love, the taproot goes deep. I've witnessed mother's love in myself, apparently subsiding with the daughter's maturing, but then in a crisis reasserting itself, perennial as that bright disk all around us. The reason May is Mary glorified? Gerard Manley Hopkins answers:
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.
From "The May Magnificat."

Friday, May 6, 2011

Margotlog: Up and Back to the Lake

Margotlog: Up and Back to the Lake

The drive north to Lutsen and back is relatively easy in early May. Road construction already begun, but hardly any traffic on the road. Still I had plenty of time to listen to two short books on disk. Driving up to Lutsen to visit my friend with a deck on the Big Lake, I listened to Joan Didion's account of her Year of Magical Thinking which followed her husband's sudden death in 2003. Since I taught Didion's account of the civil war and U.S. incursion in "Salvador," I've admired her quicksilver way with affairs of the world.

This recent book is no different. During the winter season of 2003-4, the two people closest to Didion were on the split with death--her daughter Quintana struck with sepsis following influenza and in the hospital for weeks hanging over the abyss. Then her husband's sudden death at the dinner table after he and Didion had returned from a visit to the hospital--if it counts as a visit when the patient is unresponsive, "dead to the world." Quintana recovered enough to speak at her father's memorial, then within a week, having flown to California with her new husband, was back in a hospital undergoing brain surgery. The blood thinners she was taking, plus the pressure of air travel, sent a bleed into her brain. Once again, she hung over the abyss.

Didion's crisp account--I know it's an odd word to describe a narrative so logged with grief, but it fits--calls up two strategies to shape the enormity of her loss. First, she dips into science. Not only medicine as she quotes many authorities on secondary infection, sepsis, brain surgery and recovery from same, but also geology. Didion likens the enormous shifts in her emotional/human world to shifts in tectonic plates, the rising and submersion of islands, the wear and tear of weather on the earth.

The second strategy is choral or poetic: she repeats certain lines, reminding us that in obsessive emotional states, when we shift off normal functioning to ride over and over on the spurs of grief, we don't think forwardly, but in circles, going back over and over again to relive what we have not been able to control. "You sit down to dinner and your life changes in an instant." Or something like that: after all, I don't have the text in front of me. I heard it.

The other book I heard is Grayson by Lynne Cox, an account of her youthful (she was seventeen) encounter with a baby grey whale as she swam in training off the California coast. This is another book about loss (and recovery), but it's also a glorious song of praise to the ocean, its creatures, and its beauty. Huge flat yellow sunfish that float on the surface soaking up the sun's rays--the fish weigh around 200 lbs. Or common dolphins (nothing common about them) who play in balletic spins, leaps, double flips around Cox and the baby grey. The many colors of the ocean from pale greens and yellows to deep indigos as she dives deeper. Her determination to stay with the baby until (with help from life-saver crews and fishermen) its mother finds it, her musing on the way very unlikely projects spin their own methods, rationales, and conclusions--all this supports us in our own unlikely attempts. This is a very loving, beautiful and lyrical book.

Thus I wiled away the pleasant hours on the up and back to the lake. Waste not, want not, was a mantra of my mother's house-keeping. Yes, she saved string and rubber bands. I do too! But I also like to apply this attitude to my mental and creative life. Listening to books on disk turns a rather boring, onerous occupation (I hate long drives) into something memorable and rewarding. Plus it's free. I borrow books on disk from the library. After all, my mother was a librarian; I'm now married to one. We like Benjamin Franklin believe in the power of the word. We believe books should be available to us all, no matter what our station in life.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Margotlog: Dragonflies and Puffed Rice

Margotlog: Dragonflies and Puffed Rice

Scott King, poet/publisher of Red Dragonfly Press housed at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, writes to offer appreciation of the recent blog featuring his poem, and the addition of two corrections: the Greek poet who inspired him (and may still do) is Yannis Ritsos. Further, I erred in locating him permanently in Lakeville. Rather we should think of him as from Northfield where he's lived for ten years. In my mind, however, Scott will forever reside in the Anderson Center, just off highway 61 as it approaches Red Wing.

Likewise the Anderson Center belongs in my memory to writers and artists and puffed wheat and rice which was, according to old ads, "shot from cannon." It was "discovered," if you can talk about a chemist discovering a food's properties, by A. P. Anderson over many years of work at the New York Botanical Society, Clemson College in South Carolina, and ultimately displayed at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904.

A. P. Anderson brought his fascination with starchy cereal grains to Red Wing and built a laboratory and gracious home there for his work and family. Now run as a laboratory for the arts of all sorts by his grandson, the poet, editor, Robert Hedin, the Anderson Center sports an ad from Quaker Oats in its kitchen. Therefore "shot from cannon" sticks with me, as do many spring days wandering mental and physical pathways and staggering down steep hills to the Cannon River. This watery world topped by modest-sized bluffs was home to Native American tribes who left artifacts there in various kitchen middens. It was also the home, down by the river, of a most curious Minnesota artist, Charles Biederman, who spray-painted in odd, bold colors bits of metal which he fashioned into abstract assemblages.

Years ago I interviewed him in his vine-covered cottage beside the river I'd later come to know much better from residencies at the Anderson Center. Biederman was a short, blondish, grizzled man, who seemed encrusted with his own work--as scintillating and oddly arranged as his assemblages. His wife had died and the cottage was beginning to close in around him, but he showed no signs of stopping his art, though careless of fame, which he'd had, but which his retirement into this remote hermitage didn't help to promote.

Right now, in my mind's eye, his work appears rather dusty and faded, perhaps became the colors he used, fixed as they were to the metal, were not impervious to sunlight. Or because the works were not topped with glass that deflects ultra-violet rays. It's probably as much my own imagination of him there by the river as any real assessment of the work that insists on remembering him encrusted by his modernist yet slowly crumbling work, as overtaken by age as the man himself. WARNING TO ARTISTS: keep from your door the young prying journalist who wasn't born when you were in your prime.

A contemporary note: Scott King, very much in his prime, reports that he will publish a new book of poems, All Graced in Green, this spring. And among his many pursuits is study of meadowhawk dragonflies, the red dragonfly namesake of his press. To contact Scott and the press click on www.reddragonflypress.org

If we ever have any greening and blossoming to this spring, the hills above the Cannon River will be sweet with flowing plum, and the bike paths, nicely maintained by the city of Red Wing grand places for walking. Also inquire at the Anderson Center about visiting their rather newly installed sculpture garden, visible off Highway 61. This is metal work (which Biederman writ small) writ large!