Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original

Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original

Maybe it's not surprising that as we watch friends diminish and lean toward death, their most prominent and loved characteristics stand out. I wouldn't have said this about Phebe even three months ago, which was when I probably last saw her. I wouldn't have thought of her essence like this, but since she died recently at 88, I find myself asking, What were the most formative experiences of her life? And without much hesitation, I find myself answering, having her mother die when she was still a child, and developing a rare disease called Wegener's Syndrome when she was edging toward old age.

Growing up in a small Minnesota town where her father was a Lutheran minister, Phebe developed what I think of as a "giving" personality. She must have been born a talker, but the circumstances that shaped this trait had to do, I think, with carrying around a halo, sometimes tarnished (and thus open to humor) which she wore jauntily to better spill its glow. When her mother died, that glow became even more necessary. The girl's humor drew the world close, not in a frantic way, but with a warm, spirited intensity that united us with her in what felt like a mother's energetic embrace. I've never known anyone else whose quirky, inclusive humor could so quickly make us feel like her pals for life, and darn happy to be laughing with her even as we bemoaned what the world was up to.

"Long Underwear," one of my favorite poems published in her first book, Sacred Hearts (Milkweed Editions, 1985), suggests two somewhat contrary but ultimately sympathetic traits. First there's the getting out of bed early in snow-filled dark, and before anything else, letting her "flannel nightgown/ fall to the floor" while she stands "in forbidden nakedness...over the rush of Satanic heat" from the furnace below and pulls on her long underwear, the underwear she "won't discard/
       until spring melts the stubborn snow
       of my father's caution,
       and lets me wear my legs naked again.
I love that little jab at her father because it's so evident that he is the parent of her life, and she with her encompassing humor must foster within herself a motherliness, not only to warm her, but the rest of us, her delighted readers.

Phebe's much later millstone, the Wegener's Syndrome, caused her at various time great distress. Her vision became impaired, and sometimes her mobility. I wasn't privy to the many manifestations of this difficult disease, but I do know that the steriods used to treat it caused her great trouble from time to time. She had to retire from teaching, she a natural-born teacher of all ages from school children to college students to adults. Yet, it seems to me that the teaching never stopped. She herself became the lesson, a witty, often laughing, sometimes mordant mother to the parts of herself that wouldn't work. That instead of isolating her from friends, the disease somehow urged her to reach out with humor that enlivened us as well as herself.

I know there were bitter, bitter periods. But her struggles seemed to disappear when we stood at her door. We became the company she needed to delight and draw close. We were the necessary others to her wit and insight. It was a most satisfactory embrace. So much so that I almost can't believe she is dead. Yet, just as she herself needed to be reminded, we do too. At the end, the obituary in the Minneapolis StarTribune notes: "As a lifelong worrywart, Phebe often expressed anxiety that she would die, and for many years, family members assured her that she would." We love you, darling friend, We'll keep assuring ourselves that without the claw of death reaching toward us, there'd be little need to relish what we have among us.

Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

In the dark, waking hours when I'm up with the cats, William Butler Yeats' famous lines written September 25,1916, in the Irish/English turmoil, move slowly and repetitively through my thoughts, "All changed, changed utterly,/ A terrible beauty is born."

If I ever knew, I've forgotten the circumstances that led this greatest of 20th-century Irish poets to write this longish poem, "Easter, 1916," though along with others in this volume from my graduate school days at Columbia, this poem is full of minute jottings, paring from the lectures of William York Tindall, now also, no doubt, "changed in his turn."

With Yeats' calm turnings of an almost biographical nature:
"This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force..."




Yeats offers lines exquisitely modulated with sorrow. He suggests an enormous upheaval even as he casts what feels like the ultimate quietly across our path:
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may yet keep faith..."

A lot of us this November 2016 are sliding around as did Yeats in dark, yet imagined uncertainties, grasping for names, for what has happened and yet will happen:
"For what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDouagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse...

Can we ever understand enough to grasp what this election of a man called Trump may have done to us? Glimmers there will be, perhaps a cataclysm, but for now, there is foreboding. We are mourning, and listening to the wind in the trees, as cats meow for their food in the dark.

Margotlog: My Grandmother and the Election

Margotlog: Stunned - My Grandmother and the Election

     Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
    Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
     She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
     Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
     There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
     "You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
     "Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
     This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.

     Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
     I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
     I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
      It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
     Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
     He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."

Margotlog: What My Cousin Said

Margotlog: What My Cousin Said

Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.

As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.

Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.

Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.

What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.

I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.

Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.   

Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk

Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk

All things are new and beautiful, depending on the light. Today, at noon, with soft overcast skies, colors along the alleys sing "Zinnia" orange, deep red, magenta, pink. Sturdy and hairy, Zinnias clump, taller than umbrellas in a stand. I pause to inspect bees hovering and pausing in their centers. Frost will darken the flowers, erase their colors, but now, mid-September, I edge away from frost. Zinnias right now are as good as they'll ever get.

Walking is the only way to take nature in; otherwise, it whizzes past in a churning haste. Just now, I caught the oldest cat sipping out of the toilet that somehow was left running. Quick, close the lid.The wind has picked up, fluttering the boughs of ruffled locusts outside my study window. I've come home just in time.

Yet I'm still walking toward the alley, toward the corner house where I used to find an old man outside. His tanned face under crust of bright white hair smiled appreciatively--we had cats in common. I bent to pat his "Blackie" who twined around his legs as I congratulated him on his yard which was, and still is, a model of correctness, unlike mine overshadowed by trees, the boulevard rampant with goldenrod, brown-eyed Susans and something tight and purple in a spire, whose name I can't remember. Anyone who knows is welcome to say so.

The point today is to filch huge raspberries, come to fruition in a second ripening. But the owners have stopped harvesting, leaving canes heavy with fruit. As I pass, my hand reaches out and I unhook a berry from its stem, pop it immediately into my mouth. The warm juice rushes around my teeth and down my tongue. I pop in another, and another. Still walking so I won't be accused of loitering, I eat berries in open air, almost on the run, berries that belong to the warm day and the plant's desire--well they're memorable, maybe because filched, warm, lucious, and huge.

It's been an almost perfect summer, with more than enough rain, and plenty of sunshine. Now as the days shorten, I gather up a bouquet of memories, hoping they'll stay fresh in the dark. Some think we store up summer memories to feed us a long time, akin to a pantry stocked with honey, squash, and other eatables for winter. But somehow it doesn't work that way for me. I need a daily dose of outdoors; otherwise, I'm cranky, dislike the world, wonder what's the point.

So, a hurrah for Laura and Mary, and dog Jack, for baby Carrie when she comes along, and for the most simple yet engaging parents I've ever encountered on the printed page. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about woods and prairie not unlike those here in mid-south Minnesota. We have oak groves, left over surely from pioneer days, huge towering, wide-hearted trees that stud a small pocket park on my way home. Only a few oaks rise in yards on our street; none are left on the boulevards. Each time I pass one, I tip back my head and look up as far as my eyes can see their delicious, quirky branches and lobed leaves, almost like fingers. Who says we aren't all related under the skin?

 

Margotlog: Round Up

Round-Up

During the last month, I’ve been sampling random chapters of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. My studio mate, photographer Linda Gammell, has the book here in our studio as she prepares for a show of native prairie photographs. My mother, who grew up in North Dakota, read the Little House books to my sister and me years ago. Now, I’m enjoying rereading this one, at how the story holds my attention, simply told, though it is.

In an earlier volume, Wilder described “The Little House in the Big Woods.” These woods which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the flat lands of western Minnesota and the Dakotas. And where the woods stopped, a river of grass began. This green river has of grass has flowed through the middle of North America for millennia. As snow flattened the grasses over the centuries, and the grasses decayed, the soil of these prairies became the most profoundly fertile soil in North America.

We make do with what we have. And sometimes we make “big.” Minnesota’s corn and soybean enterprises stretch for miles over former prairies. My guess is that they stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions. And of course Minnesota soils are not alone. There’s Iowa and Nebraska to our south--flatter and warmer, prime soil for corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.

This would all be dandy if it weren’t for one thing: for years farmers have been using, a deadly herbicide called Round Up, made by Monsanto. Today, farmers plant genetically altered seeds that are protected from Round Up. Then they spray Round Up on their plants and soil. Round Up kills everything that isn’t corn or soybeans.

It’s as if an enormous genii stood over the Big Woods of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Houses and sprayed gigantic hoses full of a leaf killer. Within days, the oaks and maples, the ash and tupelo trees would all shed their leaves, denuding the canopy and depriving animals of food like acorns, and insects that depend on trees for food, and animals that need tree cover for protection from the bigger and fiercer. It’s as if in one fell swoop a gigantic silence and famine hit the land.

I’m no Rachel Carson, America’s finest environmental writer. Her book Silent Spring warned of such a silencing and deadening from another era’s wanton use of DDT. Now we’re wantonly applying a broad leaf herbicide that eradicates plants crucial for many insects.

Take bees. More and more evidence is accumulating that even if plants survive Round Up, they’re tainted. Bees that draw nectar from such tainted flowers lose their ability to reproduce or to navigate that life-saving “beeline” to their hives. It’s as if they have been hit on the head and can only stagger around.

Also Monarch butterflies. The Sierra Club, mounting a large campaign to outlaw Round Up, estimates that in the last 20 years, 90% of all Monarch butterflies have disappeared. I assume that this means they’ve died or never been born. Gone, Kaput, Fini! Not only is this a loss of one of nature’s most beautiful creatures—the fluttering gold of autumn passing gently among our flowers. But like the loss of the bees, the Monarchs’ decimation means doom to plants that monarchs have historically pollinated.

But we can’t blame only the farmers. Lawn-lovers too use Round Up. Since lawns are almost entirely built of thin-leafed grass, anyone desiring a lawn so uniform that it looks painted onto the soil can use Round Up. Such lawns grow not a single broad-leaf plant—think dandelions, clovers—whose flowers attract and feed bees and butterflies.

Round Up can also directly threaten human life. An old couple I used to know had maybe six or seven years together at the ends of their lives. They found each other over a bridge table, and happy to have love in their old age, bought a nice bungalow on the outskirts of a prairie city. Being nice, accommodating folks, they wanted their lawn to look as nice as everyone else’s. Like their neighbors, they used Round Up liberally, for one, then two, then three seasons.

In the fourth season, the old man began to sicken. He began to totter and slur his words. “Stroke,” whispered his daughter and son-in-law. His skin began to slough off. He stopped eating. Within three months he was dead.

His widow, mourning him, stayed on another couple of years, spreading Round Up on the lawn just as her husband had done. She’d been the younger of the two, full of laughter, a hearty, jolly sort. First her skin turned pale, then gray. Her hands began to shake. She became unsteady on her feet. “Make sure she’s eating well,” doctors advised her children. “Let’s have a look at her if she doesn’t improve.”

When they opened her up, her stomach was riddled with cancer. Quietly, without telling her, they sewed her together. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough,” the cheery doctors told her. It did rain, and the Round Up she and her husband had for seven years lavished on their lawn, once again seeped into the soil and into the water, which, once again, ran into the lake.

She did not last out the winter, and was buried beside her husband high on a hill overlooking a lovely river. “They didn’t have to die so soon,” whispered the chickadees that had nothing to do with lawns and gardens. “They did themselves in,” whispered the rabbits and squirrels, whose cousins near the lake had died, leaving these critters higher up on the bluff, where the soil was too rocky and steep for gardens, where scarcely anyone thought of lawns under spreading oaks and elms, but instead liked to pick wildflowers to honor the graves, some of which dated back to the Civil War.

Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers

Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers

Driving away from Terminal 2 at the Minneapolis airport early this morning, I passed the acres of white crosses that represent Minnesota's military dead. Out of the blue came a sudden memory of my father's first cousin Eleanora, who lived virtually her entire adult life after her husband Dick was killed in the Pacific just before the end of World War II. She was only twenty-one. For years and years afterwards, she and her sister Sadie worked in Washington, D.C.--Eleanora as a nurse for various government agencies, and Sadie in the Office of the President. When I was old enough to visit on my own, they became my extended family, hosting me as a Baltimore college student, inviting me for years afterwards to various Washington apartments and eventually to their assisted living residence in Dover, Delaware. They were the most joyful women, and some of the most accomplished, I have ever known.

My own mother was quite accomplished in her own right--she liked to brag about being a librarian in Pittsburgh for a decade, "BB," before babies. Later, when my sister and I could fend for ourselves after school, she went back to library work, first at a nearby highschool, then across the roller-coaster Cooper River Bridge that linked our suburban Mount Pleasant home to Charleston, South Carolina. She took the bus because she never really learned to drive. Later when my parents moved across the other of Charleston's two rivers, she often got a ride from my father, since her commute coincided with his teaching at The Citadel. I have learned to love my mother, to appreciate the subtleties of her nordic intensity. But that affection came when she, as Emily Dickinson wrote of her own mother, depended on us, not before.

Last night as I listened to Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic Party's nomination for President, I heard echoes of my foremothers. Hillary talked about her mother's impoverished childhood, and the hand-outs of food given her mother as a child. She talked about her father's printng business and how hard he worked to make enough to support a family. My own mother's father did quite well--first as a postmaster in their small North Dakota town, then marrying the daughter of a furniture store owner and eventually acquiring the store, and finally during the Depression buying up farms for unpaid back taxes. In many ways, my hard-working North Dakota grandfather lived the American Dream--he worked hard and was eminently successful, finally becoming the town's s mayor, "raising the roof" on the cottage and expanding it until the house I knew as a girl awed me with stained-glass windows, burnished staircase, and columned rooms.

Yet there were undercurrents--her father beat the much younger, Swedish immigrant teacher who became his second wife. Perhaps he did not beat her at the beginning when she was giving birth to their four children, but afterwards after the children had grown and moved away. She must have been depressed and wept for hours. This is the undercurrent that (I suspect) created the harshness that frightened me in my own mother, along with her determination to get things done, no matter what the consequences. Not that she broke any laws, but she ignored some unspoken contracts of civility and kindness. She also married a charming, but volatile man who needed "managing." This meant that the tension between my parents revolved around power and respect--my mother could be snide and dictatorial. I understand now why he often yelled his resentment at her.

When we elect a president, we enter into their histories and psyches. Some grow remarkably in office, rising to challenges with a fairness and strength that awe us far beyond what we expected. Others seem to shrink, decay, go bad. The trick, I think, is to listen for several things--an awareness that for those in need, government policy can give them a leg up and that it is up to a president--Eisenhower, Johnson, Obama--to craft initiative and support policy that make sure chidlren have enough to eat so they can concentrate in school, adults have jobs that help them reach their potential, and the rights to organize and vote are protected. These are the bedrock on which this country must rely if our "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." is to remain a democracy. 

As Tolstoy writes in the opening of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way." Democracy depends on happiness for the greatest number of people to the widest extent possible. Listening to Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech a few nights ago, I heard her personal story give meaning to these national goals. She also has amended and reframed some earlier ideas and adopted new ones. Such ability to bring new emphasis and initiative into play strikes me as crucial if a leader is to grow in response to changing challenges. Though she is no more perfect than any of us, I was struck by her range of care and precision of planning. Struck by how she honored her family's struggle,and dedicated herself not to hate or divisiveness, but to building individuals, families, communities and country stronger, with honor toward all and rancor toward none. This sounds like Lincoln, surely a great model for any pulic servant. But that she spoke in a woman's voice, from a woman's perspective still gives me the chills. It is time we elevanted one of our most dedicated public servants to our highest office. It is time we had a woman as resilient, capable, informed, and inspiriing as Hillary Clinton for president.

Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look

Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look

There was a gaggle around the boulevard ash tree as I stepped down the driveway. "We're from Rainbow Tree," they told me, "checking to see how your ash is doing." Couldn't be better, as far as I was concerned. Treating my ash for the borer that's spreading destruction slowly westward has become my priority --every two years, going on twelve now.

I love shade! My essay "Eight Species of Shade" chronicles how when we first moved to this St. Paul city lot in 1985, only the boulevard ash offered any kind of shade. Otherwise, grass, front and back, did nothing to soften the lines of the clunky old house, nor offer any measure of shade to capture summer light and send it flickering into "green thoughts in a green shade" (Ben Jonson, "To Penthurst"). Over the next three years I begged, bought, or otherwise acquired five spruce sprouts, four silver maple fledglings, a decent sized golden locust, several foot tall white pines, a Russian olive, a flowering pink crab, and miscellaneous other self-planted offerings.

Caring for trees made me a sharp observer of other green growth: such as lawns, and what seemed to be a sudden decline in our winged insect messengers. Neighborhood residents were beginning to plant broad-leafed varieties of green in their boulevards. I followed suit, with hostas and lilies. I dug up some goldenrod and golden glow from the Ayd Mill Road walk-along and transported it a bit west, Ditto with violets found elsewhere on the property, and Virginia Water-leaf which re-established itself once mowing stopped. Slowly what had been "turf" became populated with broad leaves and some flowers. I heard the message against pesticides and herbicides and vowed never such killers would touch my green. (Note: honey bees, butterflies especially Monarchs are in sharp decline due to slow neurological poisoning by chemicals containing neonicotinoids.)

As the Rainbow Tree gaggle a studied the ash tree's broad, green branches. and checked its root flanges for the places where the ash borer pesticide had been injected, they pronounced it a very healthy tree. "It's beautiful ," said one of the urban foresters, as we all surveyed its rich and lively green. My heart soared into its branches where I preened and chirped.

"You're doing just right with these broad-leaf plantings around the base," said another. "Grass doesn't make the best bed for trees.It's best to plant like a forest."

I pondered that as another stepped up to explain--"Think of all the leaves that accumulate around the base and spread wide under forest trees. They decay and form mulch which helps to absorb and retain moisture. Plus leaf mulch like your plantings help to keep the soil cool. This means trees are much less likely to dry out during heat or suffer because they're unprotected from extreme cold."

For the rest of the day as I walked around the neighborhood, I inspected the base of oak and hackberry, some maples (the sugar maples are dying due to warmer temperatures, but there's a very nice hybrid being planted in the neighborhood), and the many, many ash trees that dominate St. Paul plantings.

Not everybody can afford to treat their boulevard ash every two years, but it doesn't require much outlay of funds to plant a boulevard and yard garden with broad-leaf perennials. In fact, many times throughout the spring, summer and early autumn, I walk past little mounds of dug-up hostas and lilies, offered quietly, free-of-charge to any gardener who wants to give them a home.
 

 

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

Have you noticed recently how sedate and almost severe are the two most prominent European political women--Queen Elizabeth of England and Angela Merkel, of Germany? Recently I've been comparing them to Hillary Clinton, whom the US press has criticized for her inability to "connect" with the American voters, even as most commentators acknowledge that electing her president is the only sane thing to do, given the choices.

I've been aware, also, of life experiences and standards for correct behavior that apply quite differently to men and women. Such as being viewed as a "cold" female, even as her own husband, whom we all remember as a dashing guy with a big smile and hearty handshake, conducted a flagrant affair with an aide so much younger than he that she could have been his daughter. Shades of ancient Rome.Yet there were enough exonerating snickers about Bill Clinton to let him off the hook--boys will be boys, you know. But what about grown women? What about the wife of a flagrant philanderer?

Hillary Clinton did more than survive the ravages of that scandal. She emerged essentially unscathed and had the integrity and hardiness of spirit to soldier on without much ado. She kept her wits and let the glare of publicity fall where it was deserved. Such is not a scandal that would affect an American male in the same way. We don't elect women to higher office with the unspoken awareness that they may make a sexual misstep and we will forgive them.

I would argue that much of what the press finds "cold" about Hillary Clinton is her canny awareness that however she may be judged politically, she would never, as a woman in public life, be forgiven any tinge of indecency. I wish she would select Senator Elizabeth Warren as her running mate. Senator Warren has chosen to be guarded about her political ambitions. She has not pushed herself forward, and instead let her outstanding qualities burnish her reputation. I'd like to watch the psychological fortitude of two extraordinary woman working together to make the country run straight and true. I'd like to be spared the awkward, embarrassing dance of a subservient male as running mate. I can't think of a single American male politician who could support a strong, empowered female president except perhaps the generous, mature Joe Biden, and we've already enjoyed his good qualities in our current presidency.

One last thing: Until the current middle-east refugee crisis, I thought Angela Merkel was cold and almost too self-effacing. Of course I'm not German, but I'm female, and I grasp the challenge of heading an essentially male-dominated political order, constantly in the public eye. When I have read about Angela Merkel's successes in Germany remind me of Hillary Clinton--they are both policy "wonks," with great capacity for managing details and guiding larger issues toward successful conclusions.

Then came the refugee crisis. Angela Merkel extended the migrants a welcome far greater than was offered by any other European country. Week after week, month after month, she rallied her government, sometimes against severe resistance, to do not only what was generous and humane, but what became politically, and economically risky. This is true heroism. This is an awareness of Germany's debt to humanity for Hitler's decimation of the Jews. This is the hardiness and courage to do the right thing. I believe that Hillary Clinton would do the same. The reasons would be different, but the impulse I am sure would be there, along with the fortitude, compassion, courage, and determination to make the impulse a reality.

Of the three major contenders for the nomination, Hillary Clinton stands far above Donald Trump whose shoot-from-the-hip style is brash, untutored and terrifying. Especially of late, Hillary's Democratic competitor Bernie Saunders has also shown himself mean-spirited, vituperative, and stupid. What could he possibly gain for himself or his party by ranting against his opponent like an ill-mannered teenager?

As every day passes, Hillary Clinton looks stronger and stronger. I applaud her political experience, her stalwart presence, and her proven capacity to adjust her approach when necessary, to keep in sight what is good as well as possible.

Margotlog: Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

  Two high-spirited, deep-feeling, savvy young women start an online poetry magazine. They title it Rag Queen. I submit a poem, after a poet friend, also a woman, introduces me to its existence. After my poem is published, I tell my daughter, plenty savvy herself, that the magazine is called Rag Queen. She exclaims with unalloyed pleasure, “That’s great.” She knows immediately that the rag in question is the monthly rag worn to collect menstrual blood.

     I’m startled. Does her generation of women feel as mired in their femaleness as mine occasionally did?  Is it still outspoken smart-ass to refer to menstruation in public? When did I stop being fixated on my femaleness and become more attuned to the ways gender and generation twine through both men and women?  

   Exhibit: My husband has become softer in body as he’s aged, yet his upper body is still laughingly much stronger than mine. His forearm muscles are rock hard. He lifts weights to help keep them so. But my legs perform better than his. I don’t have ankle, knee, hip pain. He does. My legs are relatively strong, compared to the skinny-minny, other parts of my body. Is this because, since early childhood I walked to school and biked everywhere? Or is it because I inherited my father’s flabby upper body, but my mother’s strong lower one? Through the thirty years I’ve known my husband, he’s preferred driving to walking. Most of his cars are red.

   Exhibit: This mid-April I escaped Minnesota’s cold and took the slow ferry from Naples across sea-green waves to the Isle of Capri. The slow ferry was quieter and less crowded than the “turbo-powered,” more pricey option. Sinking in bliss and fatigue onto a bench on the upper deck, I let go all kinds of imperatives and simply gazed at what was passing on the right: rocky splits of land dotting off from Naples proper, then the bigger island of Ischia, shimmering in the sunlit blue.

   A family of four sat ahead of me. The father was tall and sandy-haired, with a hawk-like nose and long, stilt legs. Moving jerkily around the benches, he seemed almost incapable of sitting still. The dark-haired mother lounged in one place, her soft plump body slowly sliding as she dozed. Their daughters, both tall and willowy, yet acted quite differently. One, like her father, kept on the move. The other, like the mother, sat quietly in place, reading or staring over the brilliant blue. It took me a while to notice that though the daughters both had long, sandy-colored hair which whipped in the breeze, their profiles were surprisingly distinctive—the sedentary one had their mother’s broad, soft features; the active one, their father’s sharper look.

   Eventually the two sisters sat together, talking softly. I sighed with relief. This was the way it should be, I thought. But given how my sister and I have tugged away from each other over the years, such sisterly companionship is not at all predestined.

   Exhibit: Back to literature: The mysteries my husband likes usually bore me after a few pages. He doesn’t show much interest in the psychological memoirs, novels, and poetry I enjoy. It’s a gender divide I tell myself, as is the fact that though far more women read works of all kinds than do men, far more men are published.

     Thank you, Rag Queen co-founders, creative director Marlana Eck, editor-in-chief, Kailey Tedesco, for your energy and aplomb, your friendship that flowered into a garden of female delights. Thank you for publishing men, but putting women writers first.

     Thank you, for letting me interview you via the internet, for insisting, Marlana, that “Women’s stories are SO important. It’s imperative that we let them tell their stories from their viewpoints….Women develop a lot of grit in their lifetimes, and Rag Queen hopes to speak to that.”  

   Thank you, Kailey, for asserting that “I’m not looking for [Sylvia] Plath mimicry…I want confessionals that are eclectic, hybrid, messy in all the right places, strange and professional at once. Give me a poem that can easily transmogrify into its own woman. Give me a sea-witch, or a mushroom fairy, or your Nana on paper.” 

   What woman could resist such an invitation?

Margotlog: Taking a Long View

Margotlog: Taking a Long View

     Sometimes it helps to stand up, leave the house, and drive south to Red Wing with a good friend at the wheel. Red Wing, named for an Native American chief, is a Minnesota town nestled among three natural beings: two bluffs (one with a memento to Prince on its granite side) and a mighty river, aka, the Mississippi. From Soren's Bluff, Mary, my driver friend, pointed out a sharp curve in the river. "Hard for long barges to navigate," she said. Mary should know: she and her husband own a houseboat moored at a local marina. While she was cleaning the boat, I stood on the dock and stared a two, curved-roof barges, pushed by tug boats. River traffic.

     Since coming home, I've been sitting quietly eating homemade veggie soup with limes to keep it from going bad, and letting two publications nudge my thoughts around some stiff curves.The first is an article in The Nation* distinguishing between the actual workers for racial justice and those who make noise about it, aka the media makers. Creating a true movement depends on people getting to know and trust one another, which can't happen via 140 characters, aka the scope of a Twitter. For various reasons including having my Facebook page hacked about five years ago, I don't participate in social media, except for this blog. Instead I write letters, talk on the phone, email friends, strangers, even organizations. All of this invites plenty of mental exhaustion. It helps to get away and let mental and social activity slow to one other person.

     I've been concerned for a while about the dangers of unbroken screen time. Watching young people walk down the street, their heads bent over a hand-held device, makes me wonder what happens to them when they reach a curb and keep going. Smash-ups? Inattention to dying trees, hungry children, flaming buildings?
Hearing that Donald Trump's ignorant, inflammatory comments are often met with fierce delight also feeds my notion that we've been co-opted by quick, down-and-dirty media. We've lost the ability to look both ways.

Reading over my cooling soup, I noted that the National Resource Defense Council is taking some huge forest-wreckers to court. Canada has one of the world's most extensive old-growth forests. Such forests are hugely important as sequesters of carbon, not to mention homes to thousands of living things from microbes to toads to migrating birds to bears, and caribou. Decimating these forests with roads and logging not only would permanently damage these benefits, but alter another that's becoming more crucial with increasing climate change--the protection and cleansing of water.

     As our human range extends, it's possible to understand that our needs are not merely met at the local level. They can be potentially stymied by what happens thousands of miles away. We've always lived on a globe, but we haven't always had the power to create havoc on such a scale, nor to recognize that there are some streets we should never cross.

     Just to see what happens, tomorrow I'm going to wear a blindfold and walk five houses down my block. Since I walk this way almost every day, I should know the terrain quite well. But I imagine my ears will become extraordinarily alert. I'll nudge only one foot forward at a time. I'll stand still every few paces and listen to make sure some neighbor isn't backing a car out the driveway and potentially across my path. What I actually own will shrink. I'll become like the brother and sister dogs who were recently brought to a local Animal Humane Society. When well-meaning workers separated them, one dog began shaking violently. Only when a veterinarian examined him, did she discover the dog was blind and had been depending on his sister for all his cues. Luckily, the dogs were reunited. We depend on so much in our world.

* "Black Lives Matter: What Comes After the Hastag? by Dani McClain, The Nation, May 9/16, 2016.

Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

I never expected to meet anyone from Cuba, but there he was beside me on a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis/Saint Paul--a wiry, curly-haired young man named Sergio. We weren't even near Cuba or Miami. What was he doing outside the ring I'd unwittingly drawn around Cuban participation in the world?

I hadn't given much thought to Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first time I was old enough to realize that a world event might actually affect me. More recently when my husband and I have visited Key West, Florida, we've imagined that we can see Cuba just over the horizon. Once in the mid-1990s, we met a Minnesotan library aide, who was taking his girlfriend to Cuba, via Mexico. He seemed thrilled to attempt what was then, and still may be, a rather risky trip.

In my book, Up to the Plate, I remembered writing about Las Cubanas, a Cuban "girls" team, who hosted the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the World War II era. The All-American girls stayed at the Seville Biltmore Hotel in Havana and drew bigger crowds than the Brooklyn Dodgers who were there for spring training. One Cuban player, Isabel Alvares, also landed a place with the All-American Girls, coming to the U.S. once she turned fifteen.

But May Day, as I'd mentioned in the book, was a dangerous time for the All-American visitors. The Havana hotel manager confined the female ball players to their rooms, fearful of political street fights on this "red letter" day for socialists and communists. In my rather hazy calendar of Cuban change, Castro's  Communist revolution overthrew the right-wing Battista, and after that, came the missile crisis. Now, thinking about my impressions of Cuba, I saw that the country had seethed with turmoil before the overthrow of Battista.

Now, here was Sergio, telling me how hard he and his Canadian wife worked to support their two children in the very expensive city of Vancouver, Canada. Since he's a carpenter, he's been able to fit out their one-bedroom apartment to provide everyone a bed, but it's clear that he and his wife worry about how they'll afford college. "Everyone in my family went to college free in Cuba," Sergio tells me. "My mother, my aunt, both have advanced engineering degrees, and their education was financed by the government." I'm impressed by this far-sighted program of Castro's communist government, well aware that even in U.S., going to"state" universities like the University of Minnesota can cost close to $80,000 for a four-year college education, not to mention the additional cost of a masters or Ph.D.

Not only was it very pleasant talking with this kind and articulate young Cuban, but we even traded differing versions of what started the Spanish-American War--his certainty that the explosion of the U.S.S.Maine in Havana harbor was an intentional act of aggression, and my suspicion that the explosion was simply an accident which the U.S. took as a pretext for invasion. In either case, we agreed about U.S. aggression, and I remembered a memorial in the Key West cemetery listing the Cuban dead from the war, assuming that Key West had had a substantial Cuban population.

We also both applauded President Obama's recent visit to Cuba. When he arrived in Havana, Obama sailed smoothly through Fidel Castro's refusal to meet him (though Raoul Castro did greet him). Obama gave a speech encouraging better relations between the two countries. Both of us applauded the President's composure and far-sighted desire for more neighborly relations. In the end we both feared what the current Republican front-runners for the presidency might make of Cuba. Sergio told me that Fidel Castro himself seemed to have lost the ability to grapple with current affairs. He seems stuck on the past, on the missile crisis and what he had hoped but not been able to create for his country.

Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

Several weeks ago, we rented the 1972 movie Cabaret set in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. The naughty, insinuating face of Cabaret master of ceremonies Joel Grey rouses in me a cheap, nasty thrill of disobedience and slummyness. Writing soon after the movie's release, Pauline Kael called Joel Gray in the role a "devil-doll" which his intoxicating, leering nastiness,. On the music hall makeshift stage, scantily clad women strut around, showing their boobs, or belting out "Mein Herr," with Liza Minnelli, the Kit Kat Club star dancer/singer. But she's ultimately an American girl gone astray who'll get herself pregnant by a bisexual Brit student, and (shockingly for the time) have an abortion. Yes, her love-affair gone awry adds to the atmosphere of limits and decorum being breached, and though trenchant stuff for the era, it's not what makes my blood run cold today.

It's the SHOW, the Cabaret performances. As the secondary plot evolves, with a young German Jew trying to pass himself off as a pure-blood Protestant but falling in love with a Jewish heiress, and shedding his disguise to marry her, Joel Gray dances and sings with a costumed ape--"if you could see her as I do...she wouldn't look Jewish at all." It's his leer at the audience that rouses complicity and a thrill of defiling tabus which ultimately both rouses joy and alarm.

So why does Cabaret make me think of the Trump Act that's threatening to swamp the Republican party, and in another horrifying possibility, give him the presidency? What was it about the Nazis that helped them rise to power, setting aside the Wiemar Republic and vote in Hitler? As in Cabaret, it was their SHOW. The spectacle, first of a uniformed young blond man singing in a tea garden "Tomorrow belongs to me," with all the lyric loveliness of yearning youth until that yearning becomes insistent and ends with everyone in the audiences shouting in triumph. "Tomorrow will belong to me or by God, I'll trample all convention and borders, all warlike codes and prisoner rehabilitation into the dust." Gradually when men with such attitudes infiltrate every level of society, when their uniformed bodies fill the audience in the Cabaret, march through the streets, raise their hands in automaton salute, and shout in ecstatic, shameless power, "Heil Trump," then we might as well pack our bags and flee to Canada.

We have decided today that Germany's defeat in World War I, and the huge reparations demanded of the country, already heading toward economic collapse, helped to fuel the Nazi rise. But that doesn't explain how in disheveled defiance, a large white millionaire (billionaire) with disorderly hair can thrill and titillate American audiences into supporting outrageous shots and promises that will trample not just common sense but good will. That will send millions of Americans "back" from where they came, that will build fences along hundreds of miles, that will BRAND and no doubt ultimately imprison in ruthless camps, those deemed "OTHER." 

I personally can't bear watching Trump. But there are millions of Americans (mostly white) who rise shouting to their feet at his unashamed abuse. Who suck it up like a substance they've craved for a very long time, and here he is, finally giving it to them. They and their master of ceremonies seem not afraid at all of the horror he may well be unleashing. It's time we all found a copy of Cabaret and watched it with ourselves in mind. As anyone who reads about the German Holocaust well knows, though German concentration camps murdered millions of Jews and "Others," and though the German armed forces fought long years against the Allies, Germany was ultimately decimated by World War II. Today German leader Angela Merken has led her country to open its borders to thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. It is an act of contrition for acts of unspeakable brutality, years and years ago, but not forgotten.

Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees

Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees

    "Bundle up!" My mother used to say. We were kids in Charleston, South Carolina, and "bundling," as in wrapping a girl in a blanket and putting her to bed with a visiting young man (when sleeping space was scarce--or not)--well, it was something they did in our mother's North Dakota, not in S. Carolina where the weather was mild.

     But even when we walked home from school, lowering winter days sent humid cold went right through us. In our Old Citadel apartment with its sixteen-foot ceilings, heat rose and disappeared. Our father, who "felt the cold," wrapped a gray-blue scarf around his neck and pinned it in place. He wasn't Santa Claus but something like the Muffin Man or the "old man dressed all up in leather,"
               I asked his destination and said the day was fine,
               He said he was on his way to Dalton by way of the Alton line
So memory has it in those "misty, moisty mornings of real Chicago weather." Another from my mother's cornucopia of sayings.

     Today before I began walking our Saint Paul neighborhood, it rained, then snowed furiously for twenty minutes, then settled into a gray-white wind. I had to go back for a scarf before heading out along rain-wet sidewalk, past piles of musty, declining snow.

     On either side of us now live members of the next younger generation. Pet ownership, in place for decades at our house, now attracts them. Other homeowners along the block have put up bird feeders. I don't complain of these expansions of sympathy. But I have to remind myself that, like them, we began by adopting cats that actually lived elsewhere, or cats that wandered the neighborhood, taking hand-outs where offered.

    With all the cat action, the birds I've enjoyed feeding for years now disappear for days at a time. It doesn't help that hawks fly over periodically. A few days ago, a mound of white feathers tinged with gray identified the remains of a pigeon. Only a large hawk, a red-tailed hawk, could have carried away a bird that big. A slanting streak of blood on my side window marked the passage.

     What, after all, do we care about? Good question to ask this season when politicians of many stripes seek to engage us. Yesterday evening, Fran and I visited Form and Content Gallery, a Minneapolis cooperative just north of Hennepin Avenue. Our friend Joyce Lyon had new work there.

     What, after all, captures and moves us? I have admired her large pastel drawings for a long time, especially those early ones of her night backyard in South Minneapolis--the dark suffused with bright light from indoors, as if a fire burned and menaced the arms of trees and the rigid angles of a clothes pole.

     Now she has created watery daylight where sparse trunks of trees bend slightly, move off into their own business, or align themselves either side of a goddess beam. Now we are quiet observers, letting the trees make what they will of us.

     There is both vacancy and relief in this quiet grove. We don't always have a say.

Margotlog: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3) Reading the Riffles

Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3)

Reading the Riffles

     It helps me understand the skill and insight Wesley McNair brings to interpreting his mother’s aging and dying to remember how the Niangua rolled before us in a constant, challenging glimmer.

   For as his mother tries to renew her connection to every object bagged up during her stay in the hospital, she keeps inventing motives and miracles happening around her,

           …as if when she examines

           each rescued object…..

           the past suddenly becomes the present

           and time has not happened to her at all…(“The Abduction”)

Later, as she lies dying in the hospital, the anger and hurt she vented on him as a child now, he understands, has prepared him for “the shock

        Of this final unbelievable loneliness…..

        …………..And never mind

        her lifelong anger, and all the failures

        of the heart…………

he can reach her now only “through her favorite song

        he sang as a boy to lift the grief from her face," The Tennessee Waltz. (“Dancing in Tennessee”)

In the very act of bringing home her ashes, he discovers again “the scar of/ her rejection and hurt”

       disappearing into her work, then and in all

       the years afterward…

Yet the river of her family affection carries him along, with an occasional scrape—her brother calls her a damn Yankee.” He joins them in lifting her soft ashes in their hands,

       ……………each of them speaking

       to my mother in a soft casual way as if

       she stood there beside them…

 And because this binds him to them, and because together they have brought her finally home,

     “she would never, ever again, be gone.” ("Why I Carried My Mother’s Ashes").

     In this book of humorous and humane, angry and revelatory poems, Wesley McNair renders his mother's anger, and confusion, her stubborn, yet elated growing old, and the twining stories of her siblings who second-guess each other, hide truths from themselves and at times embrace love and persistence. Thus, he helps remind us of our own riffles and fear, what we hide from ourselves and what will ultimately puncture our certainty, even as we find joy in living to navigate at all.        

Wesley McNair's The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)

Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)

     There are many ways to be an outsider. In an email McNair wrote how, when he took his mother’s ashes to the Ozarks, he renewed his friendship with his mother’s sister. “She talked on and on in the lamplight with her beautiful country accent…using these long, unfolding sentences…as if the sentences…were timeless and could contain anything.”

     These sentences, Wes explained, become the long, looping medium of The Lost Child's second section filled with family poems and titled like the book. Describing for example, an annual Fourth of July reunion, he hears “husbands…making wisecracks at each other” as they watch Chip’s second wife Donna, sitting “near the tubs with her empties.” The men imagine she might turn out like her mother who’d “gone to partying and alcohol,” but as they all knew,

     …………..in families there were things

     you didn’t say to a person, storing them up

  

     from phone calls or visits one-on-one where you first

     heard them, while confessing something in confidence

     which got spread until everyone knew your story too.

       (“The American Flag Cake” p. 36)

Now I am back on the Niangua River, watching for riffles made by stones just below the surface, still not knowing if I’d seen a “shy poke,”

         

     McNair’s narrative poems, constructed of these long lines grouped in five, six, or seven-line stanzas, read like the swift shifts and nuances of conversation. Talk is the family’s medium, showing off glinting, weaving alliances, and the sudden isolation that sends us toward loss and death.

     One of my favorite poems in this long, middle section is “The Run Down 17 Into Phoenix.” Its underlying story is simple and part fictional as the poet says of all these poems: Even with her new house in Amarillo, Texas, Jo-Lynn starts missing her husband Floyd on his long-distance trucker runs toward Phoenix. Her new home feels empty. Even surrounded by life-size, inflatable bears doesn’t keep her teeth from chattering as they used to when her first marriage went belly up. Sympathetic, Floyd's teeth rattle too, but he still can’t help being proud of the time he’s making to Phoenix, driving in the dark.

     Halfway through these long looping poems, Ruth reappears as the outsider sister, determined to go her own way. She full of delusions that sometimes sweep her up into an end-of-the-world “rapture,” and sometimes gnaw at her, making her justify her lonely obsessions. When Ruth’s sister Mae calls  “…to offer comfort on Ruth’s/ first night in the nursing home,” Ruth doesn’t know who she is. And Mae

    then listened to the distant voices

    of the commercials on tv, while Ruth thought about

    husbands and sisters and women getting cleaner counters

    and kitchen floors. “The only one who’s still alive,”

     Mae added, then wished she hadn’t, because

     It made her think of how useless and dead she felt

     In that moment as the family helper....

        

(End of Part 2 of 3)

Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child

Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child  (Part 1 of 3)

     When we first moved to Kansas City, Missouri, years ago, the city seemed not much different from cities I'd known on the east coast. That is, until one June morning when I opened the door to find six, black Angus steers standing in our parking lot.

     Kansas City was a cow town. And didn't I remember that Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" lived in Kansas? Maybe Oz referred to the Ozarks.

     That summer we rented a cabin and a canoe in the Ozarks. As our host slid the boat into the Niangua River, he pointed downstream. "There's a shy-poke," he said with a grin. I scanned the water but had no idea what he meant.

     It's hard bringing to life the shy pockets of life hidden from the main currents. Recently attending a workshop in New York, I enjoyed meeting Maine's (soon-to-retire) poet laureate Wesley McNair. Listening to his almost uninflected speech, I wondered what it was like for him to live as far north/east as we lived north/central. Yet though I was intrigued by his Maine poems, the book of his I bought was the newest one about his Ozark mother and her quirky, sometimes downright zanny clan.
     
     Most American poets of our generation cut their eye teeth on family poems. Freed from more formal modes of the recent and distant past, we wrote free-verse family poems that came to grips, settled a score, or fondly revealed family traits. McNair's poems in The Lost Child share something with such poems of early adulthood, but they also have a mature canniness, shapeliness, and depth that come only from long practice navigating the undercurrents.

   The slim book begins and ends with poems about his mother's death. In the opening poem he shows us both the shambles of her life alone and her refusal of help:
         ......the bags of unopened mail
.        and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
..........................................................................
        .....in her don't-need-nobody-
        to-help-me way of walking, with her head

       bent down to her knees as if she were searching
       for a dime that had rolled into a crack...

Then comes the shock of what brings her low:

     ......When the pain in her foot she disclosed
     to no one was so bad she could not stand

    at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
    to find what was edible....

At first the hospital is a bit like Elysium: "her white room among nurses who brushed/her hair while she looked up at them and smiled..."

This pleasure disappears when her Ozark kin show up, the ones she's known largely through late night phone calls: her "stout, bestroked younger brother...her elderly sister/ and her bald-headed baby brother/
whom she despised." They file into the hospital room, come "all the way/from Missouri."

Her suspicion cuts to the bone:

When it became clear to her that we were
     not her people, the ones she left behind
     in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper

she would not speak. She turned away.


     The relatives plead, then accuse:

    ..........You was always
    the stubborn one. We ain't here to poison you,
    turn around and say something.


     In the last line, the poet show how she snaps shut:

     When she wouldn't.

This is only the beginning of Wes McNair's discovery of his Ozark family.  When he takes her ashes home to be buried, her sister sits talking with him. Her beautiful speech, he will tell me, used "old country expressions like 'a-going,' and 'fixin' to, and 'this-a-way, that-a-way.'" Fictionalizing some, and borrowing some, he brings the Ozark kin to life as if we sat with his favorite aunt and listened to long looping stories, connected by and, and because, and so and when. 

(Part 2 The Family Poem)
     

Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl

Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich's "Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster"

I bought a copy of Voices from Chernobyl when I read that the author, Svetlana Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But eventually, even without this intense spotlight on her achievement, I would have found my way to her book partly because I, too, have created literature out of other "voices"--my oral history memoir of Minnesota's premier Ojibwa artist George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around (MN Historical Press). But also because, every year or so, I read one of the great works of Russian literature. Voices from Chernobyl belongs with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. 

In Jane Austen's miniature world, immense things happen in muted form. Long years of waiting and longing plague Ann Elliot in Persuasion but we hear hardly a peep from her. Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice experiences her comeuppance on a rather small stage. But the works of the Russians invoke wide and troubling distances, uncertainties that drill deep into the psyche, and as in Voices from Chernobyl, a range of experiences that often defy categorization.

The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made world headlines when it occurred in 1986. The explosion and nuclear fire released radiation so intense that in some locations, it could not be quantified with available instruments. Men with inadequate protective clothing arrived to attempt to contain the fire and the spill of radiation For months and years after, residents near enough to have been affected were offered relocation, butthe true story of Chernobyl was not officially told. Only a softened, hushed version found its way into the press.

One of the rare gifts in Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices of Chernobyl" is to respect the confusion and silencing that characterized the disaster from the beginning. She takes the people she interviews at their word. She does not dispute what they experienced, including what various official agencies told them. Yet, from these 
voices, including many refugees from "Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Chechnya" who came to live in the homes left by escapees from the disaster, she records the intensity of feelings, their shock and chagrin at finding themselves living in a destroyed world, where the destruction is not always noticeable.

Commenting on her response to these stories, she writes in the afterword, "I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision....The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me." (p. 236)

Some of the sections read like choral call and response: "The only time I don't cry is at night. You can't cry about the dead at night....."

"We have the best kind of Communism here--we live like brothers and sisters..."

"The boss-men come, they yell and yell, but we're deaf and mute. We've lived through everything, survived everythng."

"I'm not afraid of anyone--not the dead, not the animals, no one. My son comes in from the city, he gets mad at me. 'Why are you sitting there! What if some looter tries to kill you?' But what would he want from me? There's some pillows..."

"Why did Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists' fault. They grabbed God by the beard and now he's laughing. But we're the ones who pay for it." (pgs 76-78)

Many other segments are what the author calls monologues: Here's a bit from "Three Monologues about a Homeland"  Lena M.--from Kyrgystan says: "The place we called our homeland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which also was our motherland....This is our home now. Chernobyl is out home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue....People don't understand. 'Why are you killing your children?'....I'm not killing them. I'm saving them...They fear what they have here in Chernobyl. I don't know about it. It's not part of my memory."

This ultimate awareness of limits, this is one of the most startling elements in these strangely moving, yet unconnected accounts. Add to that, the refusal to be characterized by anything except ongoing life, with its mixture of the bizarre, quiet, hateful, sad, sustaining and unpredictable. 

I read it avidly, quickly. Then, when I'd finished, I wasn't sure what I'd read. Perhaps some other time, I'll start over.