tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49398220007366616932024-03-04T23:24:36.327-06:00MargotlogMargot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.comBlogger411125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-58167480345686733802019-12-30T12:35:00.004-06:002019-12-30T12:35:48.594-06:00Stopping by Woods, with Robert FrostStopping by Woods, one of Robert Frost's finest poems, is full of marvels:<br />
<br />
'Whose woods these are<br />
I think I know. His house<br />
is in the village though."<br />
<br />
So the first stanza runs through my head, as snow drifts and cascades outside my window.<br />
<br />
"He will not mind me stopping here<br />
to watch his woods fill up with snow."<br />
<br />
Creating a world, in poetry or prose, requires forgetting the present and<br />
drifting back into a time past or time imagined out of all previous experience.<br />
It requires the shock of surprise or demonic terror.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
I am standing at the top of the front steps of the Old Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina,<br />
where my sister and parents and I spent, oh, perhaps, 5 or 7 years before my mother rebelled<br />
and insisted we move over the Cooper River Bridge to a small town of Mount Pleasant.<br />
<br />
At the moment, I have walked into the dim Old Citadel hallway, where I<br />
can see all the way to the other end. It's the doorway outside to the cobblestone parking area. Our first-floor apartment looks out onto that area, with its scraggly trees, locusts I think. And where I wait for my father's car to nudge into its slot, and my father, in his Citadel uniform, to trudge on his flat feet toward out kitchen door.<br />
<br />
But that is not really my story. Instead, in that dark hallway full of swirling years, I recognize my mother, and her combination of hard work and dreamy fantasy. I could never have entered her head, not with any accuracy, in that hallway darkness. But I remember its features and energy:<br />
<br />
She has helped my sister and I mount the tall steps to the train called The Empire Builder. After hours and hours, changing trains several times (especially memoriable, the huge train station in Chicago, with its gleaming curved roof, where glass shapes sparkle, and distant voices call out in ragged<br />
sounds the arrival and departures of trains.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
She knew about snow. A photo of her holding me when I was probably five months old confirms her<br />
undaunted treck home to Hankinson, North Dakota. Her Swedish mother was dying: Mama Max, the<br />
beautiful statuesque grandmother whose death introduced me to snow. And now to darkness, the form of darkness that must be trusted to take us into the unknown, making steps as we go. Steps that will become filled with snow if we try to retrace them.<br />
<br />
That is why I write. Not just to find my way back (which is sometimes difficult) but to enter the world of my Swedish grandmother, with the precision and courage of the mother who somehow fell in love with an Italian-American from Pittsburgh, and packed the boxes for their descent from the north to Charleston's Old Citadel, where the marvel of people with brown skin first confronted me. <br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-32477403283831705432019-11-14T13:50:00.000-06:002019-11-18T12:29:57.437-06:00Margotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the HolidaysMargotlog: Sponsoring Critters for the Holidays<br />
<br />
I wasn't a farm girl at all except for the yearly trek with my mother and sister on old-fashioned trains - "clickety clack, I'm taking you back." In my case, this meant going north from Charleston, South Carolina, where my father took a job teaching history at The Citadel, and changing trains at least twice before the "local" landed us in her hometown, Hankinson, North Dakota. <br />
<br />
Desite my father's soft skin and uncalloused hands, he took to wearing a Citadel uniform as if it was his native garb. Oddly, it helped that he had all the anxiety of a first-generation, born-in-this-country immigrant, yet with the flair of a dandy. Until he was older and developed a "paunch," he cut quite a figure in his uniform.<br />
<br />
There are photos of him as a young man, before the Citadel, when he was getting a master's degree<br />
at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh. One of my mother's few stories about their meeting described him leaning across her library desk--she was fledgling librarian. He was so insistent, with his brown eyes and head of dark hair, his musical voice, and soft hands--well, she succumbed, and went out with him.<br />
<br />
Some quirk of fate not only married them but moved them from Pittsburgh to Charleston, South Carolina, where my father found a job teaching history. In my dim memory, we were the only Italians for miles around, except for Leroy LaTorre, my father's dear friend. They met, not at The Citadel, but in a Masonic Lodge. <br />
<br />
There were also occasional Citadel cadelts whom he invited to dinner. He had learned from his mother and her sister, Aunt Josephine (adorable, short, cute little laughing woman) how to make delicious spaghetti. My mother never made noodles from dough, but it didn't take her long to master what was a very simple recipe: thin noodles, a tomato sauce composed of fried onions, one large can of whole tomatoes, a few small cans of tomato paste, and then the spices and some sugar. My father made sure the grated cheese was first quality, bought from one of the few Italian delicatesins in Charleston.<br />
<br />
What does any of this have to do with critters? Well, my father insisted that we have a dog. No home was complete without one. We started with a rather tall, stiff-eared hound named, of course, "ROVER." Somehow this sequed to the little Easter chicks my sister and I acquired at Easter. Their soft feathers were tinted pink, blue, green. Eventually, when they started to crow, we gave them to the family next door. Of course, Rover got a bone for every holiday, wrapped in butcher's paper and eaten--certainly not under the dining room table, but OUTSIDE in the back yard.<br />
<br />
Though my sister and I got a kick out of Rover, it was the little Easter chicks that taught me the most about animals. Within a month to six weeks, they had lost all their adorable pink/blue/green fluff and acquired regular feathers. Did any of them hang out with us until they crowed? '<br />
<br />
No, I rather think we made a pact with our neighbors behind us whose large lot contained chicken coops. It was a rather sad family, if I remember correctly: a grandfather, a mother who worked somewhere in Charleston and unlike my father who drove the family car every morning in a mad dash across the roller-coaster Cooper River Bridge to the Citadel, she took the bus to wherever she worked.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, she was gone workdays from early to what seemed to us, quite late, since our father sometines had only morning classes and would appear at home in mid-afternoon where he retreated to his study to correct papers.<br />
<br />
Now, in Saint Paul, my husband Fran and I have a cat. No one anywhere near keeps chickens. It's probably outlawed in the city of St. Paul. But neighbors nearby have dogs, and now with Thanksgiving approaching, I am confident that almost every family will sit down to a Thanksgiving meal. To help others less fortunate, I give money at this time of year to Heifer International.<br />
<br />
This year, I'm sponsoring one share of 3 Schools of Fish, one share of an Alpaca in honor of my friend Jo in FLorida who takes me to see an alpaca farm when I visit. One share of a goat, in honor of goats at my North Dakota grandfather's farms that used to nibble at us. One share of tree seedlings: One of my few contributions to global warming are the trees I've planted in our postage-stamp yard. They are huge after our many years of living here. I'm also including one share of rabbits, one basket of honeybees, one flock of chicks, and some ducks and geese.<br />
<br />
It makes me happy to help others who will benefit from these animals. We have so much to be thanksful for. <br />
<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-71724577359402911602019-10-29T13:52:00.002-05:002019-10-29T13:52:17.709-05:00Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can StayMargotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay<br />
<br />
It is a most glorious, glimmering morning, with maple leaves turning from green to gold, and I am<br />
remembering Charleston, South Carolina, as a girl where it seemed to take a lifetime for leaves to turn color and fall. Not that I cared, but now, so much more is at stake.<br />
<br />
I stare out at the glimmering maples and elms, oaks and aspen. The phrase "Nothing Gold Can Stay" runs through my head. Beside my desk, the sun on a mottled plant (brought inside with the earlier cold) shows delicate, trasparent, purple-pink tongues. At the tips of thin branches, green sprouts as sharp as needles. Here's to you, Robert Frost with your "Nothing Gold Can Stay!"<br />
<br />
It's not that I expect immortality, yet midway along the desk, a cactus busts into grotesque red-gold hatchets, each tipped by a pink tongue.<br />
<br />
I stare and stare, wondering what I've done to deserve such flowering. Then I recollect fall when the sun is much lower in the sky, hot to get in my windows. Brazen Hussy! Watch out or I'l fry an egg on you. <br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-2229224975590661912019-10-13T16:03:00.001-05:002019-10-13T16:03:41.459-05:00Margotlog: How "Weeds" and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, UsMargotlog: How Weeds and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, and Us<br />
Our neighborhood in St. Paul is far from the suburbs. You can tell, sort of: Some of us, me especially, do not douse our postage-stamp yards with chemicals to "enhance" the growth of grass<br />
and kill those devil "weeds." Turns out, according to many rather dire reports from arborists and<br />
ornithologists, the glorious, manucured, "one size fits all" LAWN is killing birds, not to mention hordes of insects which birds need to survive.<br />
<br />
Imagine you are a blade of grass, or horror of horrors, a flat-leafed weed. The beauty of your simple relation to mother earth is that you have all sorts of leafy relatives of the dandelion or other broad-leaf variety. The soil formed by your seasonal decay is not "polluted" with chemicals thrown on your heads by humans who, for some god-forsaken reason, think one-size, one height fits all.<br />
<br />
Let me remind those crazed lawn-growers: The modern lawn came into being in the English countryside, centuries ago. That countryside was "manicured" by sheep who nibbled greens close to the ground--a type of mowing, you could say. Nothing wrong with mowing or sheep; in fact if we in our small or larger green spaces employed sheep to nibble down the growth, there are very good chances that NO CHEMICALS would be strewn among the clover and dandilions. Such nostrums would eventually KILL the sheep.<br />
<br />
Consider this: chemicals thrown on lawns eventually run into sewers which will sooner or later spill into water treatment plants, or simply run off into streams, lakes. The worms and seeds that manage to live among the chemicals will transfer that toxicity to birds. No wonder, according to many recent assessments, many formerly common American birds are becoming scarce. Guess who's the culprit?<br />
<br />
Humans! For some reasons, hundreds of thousands of humans--be they lawn owners or farmers dousing their crops with poisons to kill off various borers--have concocted such a stew of death that the birds via the insects and seads they eat are becoming scarcer and scarcer.<br />
<br />
Here's my home method: I DO NOT USE HERBECIDES or any kind. I let the Creeping Charley and the various sprays of taller weeds have their place. Yes, I plant some flowering glories that appeal to me. Some are perennials that return year after year. Others I dot through my various "beds" for color, charm, variety. On my backyard deck, I plant flowers purchased from Mother Earth Gardens. These do a fine job throughout the summer of dazzling my eye and sating my desire for vibrant flowers.<br />
<br />
BUT in the so-called lawns, front and back, I let grow whatever wants to grow. Some years if the growth gets too tall, the lawn-mower "cuts its hair." But mostly, what is tall and flowery is a sight to behold. What is short and weedish has more than its place. And<br />
<br />
THE BIRDS I FEED at the bird feeders and water at the bird baths, do not seem to die from the experiment. Am I missing certain worm eaters? Probably. But I do what I can. That's what we all should do!Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-15352279827876028782019-10-01T14:16:00.003-05:002019-10-01T14:16:41.899-05:00A White Squirrel in the RainA White Squirrel in the Rain<br />
<br />
A beautifully white squirrel that often comes into our yard has a horrible deformity in its hind legs. It drags them as it pulls forward with its front legs. For perhaps a year, it's been part of the squirrel/bird congregation that appears early in the morning when I open the garage door and spread sunflower seeds in a trail to the right of the garage, and then straight ahead under the tall maples. Finally I fill the bird feeders,<br />
<br />
The white squirrel has come to recognize me. I speak to it softly: "Don't be afraid," I croon, keeping my arms close to my body and slowly pulling up the door to the garage. "Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you." <br />
<br />
Somewhere, I gathered the notion that white squirrels (as different from gray squirrels) are deaf. This does not surprise me as I puzzle what could have happened to this small creature. If it's deaf, it could not hear a cat inch toward it, or the cry of a hawk as it perches in the Elm behind the house behind us. <br />
<br />
Sometimes the white squirrel appears in sunshine. It almost always has the company of blue jays who are excellent buglers of trouble. Gray squirrels pay it no attention. A few times, I have come close enough to see that one of the white squrrel's hind feet seems eaten down to the bone. The other, though lacking muscle, is covered in the white fur of the rest of the body.<br />
<br />
My heart is full of sorrow. I take deep breaths. But my determination to help the creature I so admire moves me forward. As I open the garage door, the white squirrel pulls itself under some leafy plants. It seems to be waiting for me to finish my sowing of seeds. I wish it well, and return to the house as silently as I can.<br />
<br />
One late summer morning I watched as the white squirrel left the open area with the seeds. It headed, slowly toward the corner of the tall wooden fence that separates us from the neighbors behind and to the side. In that corner it slipped between the slats of the fences, then after a time, reappeared at the top of another fence limits of yard behind us.<br />
<br />
Reaching the top of this wooden fence, the white squirrel was only a foot or two from the trunk of the neighbor's huge elm. With minutes of consideration, the white squirrel somehow propelled itself across the distance. I caught glimpses of its front paws pulled itself up the huge elm, and out of sight.<br />
<br />
I felt as if a part of a mystery had been solved.Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-76264529971212643692019-09-18T14:38:00.001-05:002019-09-26T12:29:17.332-05:00A Sudden Hush<br />
<div class="MsoHeader" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: .5in center 3.0in right 6.0in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
Sudden Hush</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bare of greenery, Munich’s art museum, the Alte Pinakothek,
fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in
tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say,
to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and
monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her
worth and didn’t need to rouge. </div>
<div class="MsoHeader" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: .5in center 3.0in right 6.0in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="font-weight: normal;">As long as I can remember, my mother,
sister and I have worshiped at museums. My father, on the other hand, preferred
religious and historical sites, but my mother made sure we girls poked into
major U.S. museums from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to Washington’s National
Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bare of greenery, the Alte Pinakothek fronted an empty field,
its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a
double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of
Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with
caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t
need to rouge. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the sudden hush that impressed me most. On the curb,
we’d say good-bye to my father and his dithers about cleanliness and proper
attire. Climbing what seemed like hundreds of steps, we entered a quiet that
descended like the stroke of a bell. Nobody bothered us. All was reserved and
anonymous. Nobody cared what we wore or how clean we were as long as we didn’t
touch anything. Even my sister, who usually whined and had to go to the
bathroom, followed without a peep. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our mother wore a distant, peaceful look that I recognized
from the beach when she walked into the wind. Later I would call this her
“Blue-Twilight” look from her stories of skating in North Dakota. Shadows
deepened, and she spun in tighter and tighter circles on a frozen pond.
Ice-skating was unheard of in Charleston, and my father didn’t dance. But you
could pretend you were skating over slick museum floors. The light that shone
from paintings was strange and compelling in its own right, blue as the
twilight snow in my mother’s stories. </div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My tastes
like hers ran to the Impressionists. I was hypnotized by light flickering over
a young woman reading on the grass. Or color breaking like waves, splattering a
boating party. Small figures on a Greek vase called me to attention. Once I
slipped into a vase beside oxen pulling a wagon, their right feet raised for
the next step. A dancer with rippling skirt shook her tambourine. Listening to
that silent music, I fell into a trance that carried me around the belly of the
vase</span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]-->Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-21437652394007358392019-07-04T14:24:00.007-05:002019-07-26T14:02:51.381-05:00Margotlog: Stunned by Race and HistoryMargotlog: Stunned by Race and History<br />
<br />
It's no surprise that I'm often dazzled or stunned by the role that race places in U.S. history. As a child, I'd clench my fists as my father, the history professor, rammed over the loud, metal connectors and onto the roller-coaster bridge, crossing the Cooper River into Charleston, where he taught at The Citadel.<br />
<br />
My father, the fulminating racist with an Italian last name, would turn to yell at me and my sister in the back seat. As if it was his job to terrify us with the history that didn't belong to us at all. I was terrified, all right, but not by the likes of Andrew Jackson or John C. Calhoun. I had every belief that within seconds, the car would plummet through the narrow metal bands protecting us from the Cooper River below, and down we'd fall to be obliterated in our casket of metal.<br />
<br />
<br />
It's no surprise that, years later, living as far north as I can get before hitting Canada, I'm still deeply agitated by U.S. racism and the history that extends from it.<br />
<br />
Item 1: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm one of thousands, maybe millions who find this novel of an Alabama family without a mother, but with a stalwart though often tired father Aticus, to be deeply familiar. For me the familiarity and the differences come in the threads that bind white people to black people, and more well-off whites to poor white trash.<br />
<br />
Down the street in Mt. Pleasant (which was a new town being foisted on a much older village) a friend in my class would meet me to walk toward General William Moultrie High School. She was thin and beautiful, with pale yellow curls and a shashay that brought the boys to a dead halt as she passed. My North Dakota/librarian mother was the doer in our family. She had altered the plans for our two-story new house with the help of the contractor. My sister and I each had a second floor bedroom to herself, a luxury to my friend, whose slanty-roofed, "dog-trot" house was so weathered its boards had turned gray. She never asked me in to visit in a bedroom that belonged to her. It didn't take me long to decide that she had no such bedroom. Her family was poor, and we? Well, with "Papa Max's money" from North Dakota, my mother had built a modern home, taking advantage of the beautiful half-acre lot with THREE giant magnolia trees she'd bought. We even had a huge window airconditioner in the dining room that also cooled my father's sliver of a den.<br />
<br />
The fact that he taught at The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina may well have helped fuel his racism. After all, anyone who was introduced to him, heard "Leonard Henry Fortunato." The "Leonard Henry" weren't so outlandish in South Carolina in those pre-civil rights days, but FORTUNATO? Whoever heard of such a name or how to pronouce it? With a few more years under my belt, I learned to say to those meetng me for the first time, "It's FORTUNATO like FORTUNATE." This seemed to quiet most of them.<br />
<br />
Was I fortunate? Let's say I was confused, during those years. Confused and desperate to fit in. I didn't have the kind of pedigree that Scout and her brother had in To Kill a Mockingbird, growing up without a mother (who'd died when they were little), but with a father respected as an admirable lawyer. They also had Calpernia, a wonderfully tart and efficient and caring African-American woman, who in many many ways took the place of their mother. I say that with all due respect to the racism of Alabama and South Carolina. But even with my rather myopic Northern/Southern eyes, I saw that the friends I'd acquired during my early school years at the private girls' school Ashley Hall, even these girls whose families lived "South of Broad" in Charleston proper, even they had African-American women in their kitchens, cooking and no doube, like Calpernia, standing in for their mothers, never to spank then as my North Dakota mother did my sister and me. But to "set them straight."<br />
<br />
It was my father who suffered the most, I think now. He somehow had to produce the right racist attitudes to fit in as a white man during this truly problematic period of change in Charleston (and most of the south). Thus, he became a rabid racist, lifting his hands off the wheel as he drove way too fast over the Cooper River Bridge, until I had to protest: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel! You'll kill us!" But he was in the middle of a rant: "I want you girls to understand. You cannot trust any of these darkies." Yes, that was his word: "darkies."<br />
<br />
"You never know when they might come after you!" It took me more than a few years to understand he intended us to be terrified that black men might rape us.<br />
<br />
If my mother was in the car with him, she'd talk back: "Leonard, keep your hands on the wheel, and stop that ridiculous talk." She'd glance at my sister and me in the back seat. "We don't know any Negro men like that," she would sometimes conclude. It did nothing but turn his wrath on her. And for the next twenty minutes, he'd yell, and rant, and lift his hands off the wheel, until my sister and I were yelling at him: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel. The car's going right over the railing and into the river."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-35631594412706983012019-06-25T19:24:00.001-05:002019-06-27T17:49:47.494-05:00Margotlog: More Than Ever, We Need "To Kill a Mockingbird"Margotlog: More than ever, we white folks, north and south, need Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I've been listening to the disks for the past few weeks, or maybe as long as a month, as I lie on the bathroom floor before going to bed, and soak my eyes with warm cloths. I listen to a wonderful reading of Scout and Jim, and Aticus, the family in Alabama, and their wonderfully tart-talking household helper (she's brown-skinned, but an absolutely integral part of the family, and in a moment I'll remember her name!), all of whom take me back to the South Carolina of my youth.<br />
<br />
We had no brown-skinned household helper. My mother Maxine from North Dakota couldn't imagine needing help. And my father, the sometimes warm-hearted and other times fulminating racist, Leonard from Pittsburgh via Italy, kept up a running display of "northern" attitudes. I did not yearn for a black woman in the house, though many of the girls in my all-white school had a brown-skinned helpers. Yes, they were paid, as was Calpurnia, Scout and Jim's "mother-substitute."<br />
<br />
I say that with all sincerity. Their mother had died before the book begins, and Cal as they call her, is more than a presence in the kitchen. She is part of the family as were the brown-skinned women who worked for the families of friends I made at the fancy all-girls' private schools where my mother insisted my sister and I attend. Sometimes when I visited these privileged girls (my mother's father, Papa Max, sent money from North Dakota to pay for our private school education) I felt uncomfortable at the way the grown-up white women talked down to these women who cooked, helped raise the children, kept the house clean, and no doubt, like Calpernia, sometimes verbally disciplined my friends.<br />
<br />
To Kill a Mocking Bird is extraordinarily in the way Harper Lee characterizes the family and neighbors, and even the mad dog that for a long, trying afternoon stumbles around in the dust until Mr. Heck Tate, the sheriff, brings a loaded shot-gun and insists that Aticus shoot the stumbling animal. This and other hints tell us that Aticus is more than competent. He is the hero of the story, and the children are his chorus, as they struggle to grow up (their mother has died), begin to discern the layers of society, including the disgusting white father (years ago we would have called him"white trash") who brings charges against a black man for "having carnel knowledge" of his pathetic daughter. Turns out, the father, a slovening, n'er-do-well has been raping her, and now tries to pass off the horror on an honest, kind "colored man."<br />
<br />
This trial is in many ways the culmination of the racist society, but for me, the book's heart and soul reside with Aticus and the children and Calpernia--with the day-to-day functioning of their household, and of the mysterious family next door, with its aging pathetic son. And also the white woman who's lived alone for decades, drinking herself into a fury, so we learn as the children come to hate her and Jim ruins her peony bushes in a fury at her tormenting. Yet, there is redemption: just before she dies, she with the doctor's help weans herself off the alcohol that has soothed her deformities. <br />
<br />
There is no stereotyping of black people versus white people. Each character is absolutely and continuously made individual and present to us. In my opinion, To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the finest pieces of literature written by an American, in company with Melville's Moby Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and hundreds of others (usually only a single work among an author's output).<br />
<br />
We need To Kill a Mocking Bird not for the horribly sad ending, but for the daily interaction of people in the south, mostly white people, but in one memorable chapter, when Calpernia takes Scout and Jim to "her" African-American church, in a rendition of different ways of redeeming what can't be helped, and offering a welcome to all who come in good faith.<br />
<br />
This is open-hearted book, true-to-diverse kinds of talking and living, as it offers a hand even to the most isolated. Truly, an American original that belongs with the very best of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and so on.Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-11876805243136525272019-05-18T20:09:00.001-05:002019-05-18T20:09:22.168-05:00 Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria AssuntaMargotlog: Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta<br />
<br />
John Ruskin, the 19th-century British art critic and historian, is said to have complained that most American and English tourists to Venice will "dash through the Basilica di S. Maria della Salute," paying no more heed to the gems by Tintoretto and Titian than they would to clothes on a line.<br />
<br />Determined not to be such a dolt, I spent hours a few days after arriving, getting into a slow moving vaporetto (rapid only in comparison to a row boat), and making my way with others crammed on board to the Campo della Salute. Another visitor, a well-dressed woman who spoke with a Southern accent (she was African-American) admitted as we paused in the huge campo that she had not much idea what we were supposed to see. In another minute, a friend stepped from a nearby building that announced itself as the "Peggy Gugghenheim Collection." The woman waiting suggested that I join them, but when I explained that I had promised mysef to see the Salute, she nodded and disappeared.<br />
<br />
The church was dim and lofty. Chapels held huge paintings, some so high up that I had to crane my neck and shift about to find the right angle for discerning their subject matter. After several turns around the church, with careful study of the art and the artists' names, I became comvinced that I had seen only one Titian.(Maybe modern scholarship had changed the attribution of others?) So many paintings depicted figures in flowing robes ascending into the heavens that the message seemed to be: we all should be full of bliss or awe. But I'm afriad the paintings struck me as old, difficult to see, and repetitive.<br />
<br />
The next day's "misty, moisty weather" kept me much closer to Hotel Boccassini. The wind off the lagoon which stretched a far distance, was brutally cold. I held tight to my hood, and to the railings as I forced my way up one steep bridge after another.<br />
<br />
It had occurred to me that when I'd visited Venice years before, I had entered a church not far from were I was staying now. It was the Church of Santa Maria Assunta dei Gesuiti. Reaching it again, I was reminded that its imposing marble facade faced a rather narrow strip of open space--nothing like the Salute's command of an enormous espanse of the Canale de San Marco and from there onwards to the Adriate.<br />
<br />
Carefully ascending the wet steps, I forced myself against the wind and through a heavy iron door. A few other visitors moved in the vast church, yet I felt as if the dim church belonged only to myself.<br />
<br />
"Founded in the 12th century and reconstructed in its current configuration in the 18th century, the church of Santa Maria Assunta has the typical plan of the Jesuit order, and an imposing Baroque facade. The interior decorated with white and green marble inlays on walls and gilded stucco work is absolutely unique in Venice." So described a brochure.<br />
<br />
Titians and Tinterettos seemed to be everywhere. The first, "The Martydom of San Lorenzo," by Tiziano Vecello (Titian's true name) pushed the martyr being burned alive over glowing coals, into the lower third of the painting. High in the darkness, like dying coals, came a hint of the divine.This, I told myself, was what Ruskin's adulation of the Salute church had promised. Here, was that sudden adulation confirmed.<br />
<br />
Baroque art is perhaps harder to appreciate from our contemporary perspective than, say, Impressionism which has its feet on the ground, and the charm of children rolling hoops in a park. Trying my best to be elevated with the truly magnificant figures--some simple, others in long flowing gowns with cherubs and angels circling on high--soon in the semi-darkness, I began floating, the cherubs and angels almost guiding me into another realm of flying, and adoring. <br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-33400532667446682222019-04-30T10:23:00.000-05:002019-05-01T12:33:49.683-05:00Margotlog: Horrific Degradation Looks So Appealing Margotlog: Horrific Degredation Looks So Appealing<br />
<br />
This past weekend, I stood in front of two large photographs in the Weinstein Hammons Gallery, 908 West 46th Street, Minneapolis. For a few moments, I thought I was seeing rather benign, large-scale but odd images of the Earth. Not the entire earth, but segments: one looked like a huge mountain with blocks cut out of it. The other was of a bulldozer, creating long connected ribons of sand. The ribs took the shape of a fan, except that in the midst of them sat a bulldozer in bright yellow, casting a tiny shadow of itself. At the edge of the sand that hadn't yet been disturbed sloshed a liquid element of vibrant green. I could see little wavelets at the right edge of this watery element.<br />
<br />
Turning to the young assistant at the museum, I requested what information existed about these two photographs by Edward Burtnysky, an artist unknown to me before. She brought me a three-fold explanatary card, titled "Anthropocene," with information that the term signifies our current geological epoch. The previous one, the Holocene, "started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded." Now geologists believe that we as the Earth's inhabitants have left that era for the "Anthropocene," which refers to the "indellible marks left by humankind on the planet."<br />
<br />
The photographer, Burtynsky, also writes, that he is concerned "to show how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks."<br />
<br />
Finally I began to understand. Yes, it is a beautiful image, this fan of shadows and sun-streaked ribs, with puffs of sand at its edge. I could almost imagine Madame Karenina, deploying her fan as she flirted with Vronsky on a dance floor. But this was "near Lakeland, Florida," USA, in 2012. Note: Madame Karenina threw herself under a train. The tailings from phosphorous mining poison the water into which they slosh.<br />
<br />
The other image hung beside the one from Lakeland, Florida, captured an enormous mountain from which blocks of marble were being excavated. Centuries ago, marble was mined by slaves. Michaelangelo carved his "David" from a single block of marble. Later slaves used metal chisels and wooden wedges "inflated by water." It took me a few moments to understand why the wood wedges needed to be inflated. Then I imagined that if the wood was water-soaked, it would be more maleable, less liable to crack and break.<br />
<br />
Next, in the 18th century came explosives which left huge piles of waste called "raventi." Yes, probably an Italian word that means refuse, so much amazing marble sculpture originating in Italy. Now, since the 1960s, trucks and excavators cut helical slabs, eliminating the waste caused by using explosives.<br />
<br />
The owner of the quary, at 63 years old, says what has been taken "is as if I plucked a hair from a pig." The mountain has been worked for 3000 years, but its capacity still seems limitless.<br />
<br />
Both of these "excavations" can be seen from space. This impressed me, suggesting just how vast they are. "Life in the Anthropocene" prompts us to consider how profound and lasting have been human changes in Earth's systems. <br />
<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-71668162239690581382019-03-31T16:25:00.001-05:002019-04-01T10:22:07.768-05:00Egg Rolls on Sunday or I Had to Leave the House!Egg Rolls on Sunday<br />
<br />
I had to leave the house, and so I drove to Vina (about three miles away from home to a shopping area near Ford Parkway) where I ordered two, then another egg roll, making three, and ate them all in one fell swoop. I had to leave the house, and not be overcome, as I'd been for some weeks by the insulin treatments for Julia, our adorable black and white (no not Julia the Terrible or Julia the Magnificent but Julia the Purr-Queen). My only other acquaintance with diabetes, if memory serves, wafted toward me as a girl when my mother took me and my sister on the train, from South Carolina to North Dakota to visit her father.<br />
<br />
Twice a day, a nurse appeared in a starched white uniform with little crown on her head and took him into one of the two downstairs bedrooms where, my mother said, "She gave him a shot." He was old and square, with wisps of white hair across his reddish head. My mother adored him, or so it seemed, from the amount of time she spend cooking "from scratch" oatmeal he liked, frying bacon and eggs, and dousing his dessert coffee with cream and sugar.<br />
<br />
Julia is an adorable cat, pliant, warm-hearted toward us, and now almost willing to be subjected to twice daily syringes of tiny amonts of insulin. I sit with her in "Fran's chair," a large recliner, while he gives her the shot in the loose furry skin at the back of her neck. Now that we've been doing it so long, it seems almost routine. But there's the weekly "test day" when in four-hour increments, a drop of her blood has to be extracted by a poke to her ear (which makes her flinch from surprise and pain, and poor Fran, my husband, flinch at the horror of hurting her).<br />
<br />
I had to leave the house. I had to get away from the inexpressible desire for all this to end, even though my part in it is rather minor--my hands not sufficiently strong enough to extract a drop of blood. Oh, poor darling cat! She seems to have learned that we don't want to hurt her, that hurting her is hard for us (but of course harder for her). <br />
<br />
When I returned, she came to the back door to greet me. She was so willing to be patted and have me fluff her fur "the wrong way" from tail to neck, that I almost broke down. She held no grudges that the day before, we'd held her down on a towel while Fran pierced the edge of her soft black ear as we whooped for a drop of blood. It was not fun, perhaps worse for us since we knew it was coming, or maybe because we are not as loving and joyful as she is, has always been. She is the best cat ever, among the dozens of cats (dozens? Well at least a dozen.) whom we have loved, and cherished, until it was time.<br />
<br />
We dread that time. And have no idea when it will come. Maybe that's the worst of all. No, the worst of all is perhaps this: that I had to leave the house for the surcease of three egg rolls. Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-11807017617645942012019-03-10T11:58:00.002-05:002019-03-14T13:07:23.949-05:00Margotlog: Brightness Falls from the Air"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."<br />
<br />
A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them. <br />
<br />
It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.<br />
<br />
When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.<br />
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.<br />
<br />
Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.<br />
<br />
*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:<br />
<br />
<br />
<h1>
<span class="titletext">Brightness falls from the air?</span> </h1>
<br />
<article></article>
<br />
<div data-jsparams="{"page":"index\/question_answered","qid":"50834151","qtitle":"Where
can you find a poem containing the lines Brightness falls from the
air?","mode":19925,"flagged_vague":0,"is_answered":true,"qurl":"https:\/\/www.answers.com\/Q\/Where_can_you_find_a_poem_containing_the_lines_Brightness_falls_from_the_air","delay_textarea_fill":false,"expand_edit":false}">
<br />
<article><section class="frame expanded ">"Brightness
falls from the air" is a line from <i>A Litany in Time of Plague</i>, a
death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: </section><section class="frame expanded "> <div class="js--section">
Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss; </div>
<div class="js--section">
This world uncertain is; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Fond are life's lustful joys; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Death proves them all but toys; </div>
<div class="js--section">
None from his darts can fly; </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
<div class="js--section">
Rich men, trust not in wealth, </div>
<div class="js--section">
Gold cannot buy you health; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Physic himself must fade. </div>
<div class="js--section">
All things to end are made, </div>
<div class="js--section">
The plague full swift goes by; </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
<div class="js--section">
Beauty is but a flower </div>
<div class="js--section">
Which <nobr style="font-size: inherit;"><a href="https://www.answers.com/Q/Where_can_you_find_a_poem_containing_the_lines_Brightness_falls_from_the_air" id="PXLINK_4_0_4">wrinkles</a></nobr> will devour; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Brightness falls from the air; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Queens have died young and fair; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Dust hath closed Helen's eye. </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
<div class="js--section">
Strength stoops unto the grave, </div>
<div class="js--section">
Worms feed on Hector brave; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Swords may not fight with fate, </div>
<div class="js--section">
Earth still holds open her gate. </div>
<div class="js--section">
"Come, come!" the bells do cry. </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
<div class="js--section">
Wit with his wantonness </div>
<div class="js--section">
Tasteth death's bitterness; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Hell's executioner </div>
<div class="js--section">
Hath no ears for to <nobr style="font-size: inherit;"><a href="https://www.answers.com/Q/Where_can_you_find_a_poem_containing_the_lines_Brightness_falls_from_the_air" id="PXLINK_3_0_3">hear</a></nobr> </div>
<div class="js--section">
What vain art can reply. </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
<div class="js--section">
Haste, therefore, each degree, </div>
<div class="js--section">
To welcome destiny; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Heaven is our heritage, </div>
<div class="js--section">
Earth but a player's stage; </div>
<div class="js--section">
Mount we unto the sky. </div>
<div class="js--section">
I am sick, I must die. </div>
<div class="js--section">
Lord, have mercy on us! </div>
</section></article></div>
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</xml><![endif]-->Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-66011127335201073832019-02-16T10:37:00.002-06:002019-02-18T09:07:47.597-06:00Margotlog: Singing in the DarkMargotlog: Singing in the Dark<br />
<br />
When you've taken a dear friend to the airport with only a three-quarter moon and a few stars in the sky, when you drive home alone through night-enveloped streets, it helps to sing: "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, Charming Billy?"<br />
<br />
Darkness is the mood of inspiration. Suddenly, you're singing with the voice of your mother or father, ages ago in Charleston, South Carolina, with clacking palmettos in those long, languid summers. "I will be true, for there are those who trust me..."<br />
<br />
And you're back at Girl Scout camp in the "foothills" northwest of Charleston, and Meta, the Scout of all Scouts, who stands at least six-foot tall in her sneakers, and sports long rippling golden hair, Meta is singing: "In a cottage in the woods, by the window a little man stood. Saw a rabbit running by..." <br />
<br />
You, suddenly, have become the rabbit--ears erect, nose twitching. And you're remembering a recent holiday including the kid-clan of your husband's grand children. Decent, the hard-working parents, more than decent, inspired perhaps, but failing in one respect: the oldest kid, a boy about 13 wanted a pet. His parents who both work hard at jobs and at the even more demanding business of parenting, have allowed a small lizard, a gecko.<br />
<br />
Darkness returns, and I am home again in South Carolina, with our first puppy, who lived with us for maybe three months before the little black and white charmer died in the night. My sister and I were heart-broken. Kudos to my parents, especially to my finicky Italian-American father, Leonardo, who refused a cat. "It will jump up on the table and that will be the end of it!" he thundered. Yes, thunder. His voice had a range from sweet morning dew to thunder and lightning.<br />
<br />
We sang opera, my sister and I, dressed in our mother's fancy nightgowns, which she never wore in our presence. But then, my parents had been married eight years before I, their first child, was born. It was the Depression, after all, and both of them worked.<br />
<br />
Singing in the dark of that 6 a.m. drive from the airport home, I find myself giving voice to all the joy that substituted for "things" in our Old Citadel lives. Wearing our mother's fancy nightgowns, listening to recordings of Lily Pons singing excerpts from the finest Italian operas, we girls discovered how fortifying it can be to gave voice to our own, immediate presence in a world that would open from fantasy to reality. My sister becoming an opera singer, and I? Well, poets are writers of songs too. <br />
<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-27553682215712601252019-02-01T12:16:00.000-06:002019-02-01T12:16:10.641-06:00Frozen Pipes and the Death of a White SquirrelFrozen Pipes and a White Squirrel<br />
<br />
It's been polar here in Minnesota, land of ten thousand frozen lakes. Wind-chill well below zero and temperature an eager competitor. For the first time in 20 years, the pipes to our kitchen sink froze. Yes, they are close to an outer wall, but so are the pipes directly under them in the basement. To reach those lower depths, I had to wear a down robe AND my down coat, plus thin plastic gloves with heavy gloves over them, just to reach the cat litter box at the bottom of the basement stairs. Why the cat, who is mistress of two other cat boxes on the warm second floor, insisted on doing her business in such depths of cold is a miracle of feline sagacity.<br />
<br />
For the past two days, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen, first rinsing dishes in a little bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, then filling the tea pot and heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the frozen sink. I could have lugged the dishes upstairs to the bathtub, where warm water still gushed, but somehow the kitchen process seemed important. I told myself the warm water exiting the kitchen drain JUST MIGHT help thaw the frozen pipes. <br />
<br />
Eventually, I asked husband Fran to drive me to the pharmacy where I purchased a heating pad. Walking home, I felt very proud of my hardiness, giving most of the credit to my North Dakota mother. Of course, I looked like a walking blimp. In her North Dakota hometown, children walked to school, their legs bound in multiple leggings, bodies stuffed into coats, cloaks, and mufflers, and their hands in double mittens. Their heads were wrapped in so many scarves, the children themselves were virtually unidentifiable. Luckily, there were only 10 children in her class, all perfectly familiar with each other, wrapped or unwrapped.<br />
<br />
These days, we Minnesotans with well-heated homes and cars have it relatively easy, except for the people somehow bereft of decent housing who try to survive 20-below by running a car motor from time and time and hoping the numbness they start to feel isn't frostbite. This morning, as the temp rises toward 19 ABOVE, there's a sad StarTribune story of a homeless man who did just that with his pal of a dog. He himself was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter and from there to a hospital. The dog, finally found, appeared to be fine. <br />
<br />
Yes, at 20 below, stray dogs can survive for a time, as can most critters in my back yard. I work to help them, with a heated birdbath, which I fill every morning. On my multi-armed bird feeder pole, I hang suet and a sunflower cakes, and feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Finally I spread sunflower seeds and a mix of smaller seeds on two long pathways in the yard.<br />
<br />
Mid-afternoon yesterday, I looked out the broad picture windows in our second floor bathroom to find an enormous red-tailed hawk bending over something white. These figures were was stationed in a leafless elm tree just behond our yard. Even now, as I write this, my heart starts beating erratically. The spill of white might have been the feathers of a dying pigeon, but as I stared, a white leg and tail appeared, splayed over the limb--it was "our" white squirrel, the only white one we had among all the other grays. Perhaps an albino, perhaps with hearing or eyesight loss, yet it staked out its spot every morning for munching seeds. A familiar member of the yard, and as welcome as the red-chested nuthatches, the red-bellied woodpecker (who seems twice as large as the little nuthatch), and the hairy and downy woodpeckers, the blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, finches, juncos and even a few crazy robins who left, I assume, the minute the temperature began to drop.<br />
<br />
I couldn't tear myself away from the window, tears in my eyes, as the huge hawk, with its rear end lifting and falling, pulled at the squirrel body. This "winter kill" was happening as I watched, and the hawk was taking one of the denizens of my yard whom I'd come, in a mild way, to love. From time to time, the hawk would pause and turn its profile. The beak and nasal area were smeared with blood. It was making a meal of the white squirrel. It was devouring a creature I had come to love.<br />
<br />
I know it's somewhat insane, to become protective and possessive of a wild creature. But I did love the white squirrel, and I did not love the hawk, though it was impossible not to admire its huge body, puffed out in the cold and the rigor of its yanks. But the hawk was an interloper and the white squirrel had gamely visited the yard for food and water, winter, spring, summer, autumn. It was the only white one. Would I have been as sad had the hawk begun to eat one of the grays? I might have been mesmerized by watching one creature devour another. But I doubt that I would have continued to feel the loss.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-60460306480759520882019-01-03T12:51:00.001-06:002019-01-03T12:51:39.463-06:00Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter!)Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter and Summer)<br />
<br />
Ok, I've tried everything aside from moving back to South Carolina where I grew up, and where, LET ME REMIND YOU WARM-HEARTED RESIDENTS, there was SNOW during one of my holiday visits to my parents, years ago. YES SNOW! With all the city's bridges, glazed to ice, getting to the airport was strictly for seasoned S.C. drivers. I bit my tongue and clenched my fists as the taxi-driver, with nonchalance, kept looking over his shoulder to deliver yet another bon mot.<br />
<br />
Now over the last few frigid Saint Paul weeks, the heated coil that has worked to keep bird bath water liquid for two years now has given up. No frilly waves as a strong wind soars over the back yard. No beaks dipping for a drink.<br />
<br />
I do love to watch the birds--winter, summer, spring, fall. They are my soul mates, whether they know it or not. Every day I praise them silently, these brief and joyful reminders that some can fly, and not only in giant jets. I don't want to be Icarus and have my human-made wings melt as they approach the sun, but I love to watch birds congregate--over seed, grass, flowers, and yes, all year long over liquid water.<br />
<br />
But in our frigid winters, this inevitably becomes a challenge, and not a cheap one either. The heaters I use cost nearly $70 each. This is more than I spent for any Christmas present except my husband's neon green "Warm Things" robe. Am I throwing around brand names? Can't help myself: this is the best robe either of us has ever worn. His neon green, mine forest green. His a woman's Extra Large because the guy robes weren's nearly as warm, and neon green because when I got my money ready to order a woman's extra large, all the somber colors were used up.<br />
<br />
Lately also, due to construction noise in the neighborhood, my bird visitors have declined. Only in the twilight do the deep red male cardinals come to the feeders, and the tan-red females forage on the ground. Occasionally a sassy blue jay barges in, no fear except for a fast exit. And the rosy finches that bear up under the cold also come to the feeders only the twilight, when from my kitchen window they look like sparrows.<br />
<br />
Off and on, I've considered in my frustration stomping around the neighborhood, yelling at front and back doors, "Your noise is bothering the birds." But this is Saint Paul. We don't dare get too "fresh" with our neighbors, though this past summer, I chastized my near neighbors for "adopting" a mostly outdoor cat who loved leaping into my yard and startling the far greater number and variety I so loved to feed. My neighbors are dandy people, cat people, like me, but not bird people.<br />
<br />
I became truly rancorous and even bellicose because eventually they stopped feeding this feline wanderer, and the critter appeared less and less. I was grateful, very grateful, but would not want to go through that angry trauma again. So now, I try to keep my mouth shut and let Robert Frots's motto: "good fences make good neighbors" suffice.<br />
<br />
Finally and totally out of my control, I spied a hawk way way up in the bare brances of a wide-flung elm.It kept leaning over and tearing at something it held in its claws. Even with my binoculars, I couldn't see what the victim was, but the bird itself was unmistakeably a Peregrine Falcon. Looking it up in the bird book, I read: "feeds entirely on other birds." Yes, our Audubon friends have helped restore the Peregrine Falcon. I will just have to curb my selfish desire to be in charge of every single winged beauty. Bird depredations on each other are completely out of my control<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-50518966826332687722018-11-29T15:25:00.000-06:002018-12-01T10:41:33.184-06:00Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"<br />
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It's as if I've been waiting to use Yeats' astonishing phrase until my dear friend and honored writer Patricia Hampl was about to retire from the University of Minnesota. Little did I know, years ago, that she'd been hovering in the fields where I would eventually spy my husband-to-be, sitting across from me at her townhouse. This was long after they'd worked together on the Minnesota Daily, long before I knew either of them. But when W. B. Yeats wrote "When You Are Old," he traversed the life of a woman he loved and discovered within her a love that belonged "amid a crowd of stars."<br />
Trish lost her dear husband Terry Williams, one of the most self-effacing and meticulous people I've ever known. I lost my first husband via divorce, but kept the daughter. Perhaps being a pilgrim means walking along rough paths as well as catching glimpses of perfection.<br />
For me, some of the finest prose written by anyone in our era has come from Patricia Hampl. My favorite of her memoirs remains <i>A Romantic Education, </i>published after she'd established a name as a poet. Reading about her romantic education felt a lot like reading about my own, except it was so exquisitely expressed. I had to read some paragraphs over and over<i>, </i>perhaps because reading it as I did, before I knew her better, felt like entering a romance so enticing that I had to be a part of it.<br />
This evening, Trish will be honored as a distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota. She is retiring. I and many others will be there to applaud dear Trish, who has traced her path among the stars, even as she has held hands with us, given voice to her marvelous gifts, and continues to make so many of us happy. May she be the same.<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-28070179134451991132018-11-12T11:23:00.002-06:002018-11-13T13:17:22.568-06:00Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke <br />
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<br />
I haven't had many men "friends" in my life probably in part
because during my growing up, it was so clear that the boys belonged to one
tribe and the girls another. Times have changed. Now among a gaggle of women I
trust and adore, there are several gay couples who are as close to my heart as
the best of brothers. I especially appreciate this because I had no brothers.<br />
<br />
My mother and her twin brother, Maxine and Max, did not remain close in part
because of family abuse. This subject is very vivid in my mind right now
because I'm writing a memoir that now touches on it. My parents came from
quite different ethnic backgrounds: my mother's side of the family was German
(her father) and Swedish (her mother); whereas both sides of my father's family
were what we'd now call, without hesitation, "Italian." In the days
of their immigration, however, they would have been labeled, at least in Italy,
Sicilian and Neapolitan. In the generations before widespread railroad travel,
crossing mountains or bodies of water, even relatively small ones, set people
apart.<br />
<br />
In the North Dakota small town of my mother's youth, being either
Scandinavian or German was relatively common. It was the distance in age that,
in part, prompted what became an ugly episode in my grandparents' lives. My
German grandfather's first wife died in childbirth, and the family of the wife,
from Milwaukee, took the child to live with them. Then my grandfather's eye
fell on a tall, willowy young school teacher at a rural Dakota school. Her
parents had died shortly after immigrating, and she had been raised by two
older sisters. The photograph/portrait I have seen of her was taken later in
life, but despite her gray hair, she was a lovely woman, her face turned
slightly aside, her eyes gleaming, her mouth holding a hint of a smile.<br />
<br />
When our mother would bring us on the train from Charleston, South Carolina,
where my father spent most of his working life teaching at The Citadel, she
intended for us to appreciate not only her successful businessman father, but
also her "Mama" who loved beautiful things, who took naps (as did my
very energetic mother), and who made delicious Swedish pastries. I never knew
this grandmother, but my oldest cousin whose family remained in the small North
Dakota town, has told me about going with her father to visit "Mama
Max." Her father, Buddy, was my mother's twin brother, the one who stayed
in the town; whereas my mother, after graduating from the University of
Minnesota, went east as fast as she could to a library job in Pittsburgh. There
she met smiling, curly-haired Leonard, second son of the Italians. My Italian
grandfather had been converted to Protestantism and preached powerfully to a
Pittsburgh Italian congregation. Not easy, that business of being Protestant
among a community of mostly Catholics. My father used to recount being pelted
with rotten eggs when he and his family walked up the hills to their father's
church.<br />
<br />
At some point when I was still very young, my North Dakota grandmother
developed stomach cancer. I have a hazy memory of tiptoeing across the large parquet
floor of the hall to a small door which usually remained half-open. There in a
narrow bed, lay a figure who was my grandmother. She did not speak nor raise a
hand. I don't remember ever seeing her stand. Slowly over the years, it came
out (largely from my cousins who grew up in the town), that "Mama
Max" had been abused. When the last of her four children left home for
college--the youngest would have been "the twins," my mother and her
brother--Mama Max slowly fell into a depression and wept a lot. After his first
semester in college, my mother's brother, Buddy, came home to protect her.<br />
<br />
My mother spent one summer helping her father repaint the kitchen a sunny
yellow, but without fail, she returned to graduate from the University of
Minnesota and head east. It has taken me years to piece together this story,
and to honor my uncle's dedication to protect his mother. It was only years
later, when I was pregnant with my first and only child, that my mother and I
took the train from St. Paul/Minneapolis back to North Dakota. There we stayed
two nights in a local motel. We called from the motel to see if her brother
Buddy was at home. No doubt he was astonished to hear that she was
nearby. Years later, wondering why she did not call long distance ahead of
time. I think there can be only one answer: she intended to make the trip
without the fear, embarrassment, or awkwardness of having already contacted her
brother. But he was welcoming and invited us to his family's large lake house
just outside of town. My first glimpse of Buddy, sitting in a large family
room, immediately told me he was my grandfather's son. They looked very much
alike.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Our visit was brief and friendly enough. The big house
in town, which my grandfather had expanded when "the twins"
were born, was being fashioned into a bed and breakfast. Though I have seen
some of my cousins since, I probably never will visit Hankinson again. This
essentially means that my sister is my only relative outside my daughter, and my
husband's wide circle of family and friends. Keeping family secrets so long a time
can turn confidences into whispers, so soft that they eventually disappear like
smoke. </span>Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-64959398547641194382018-10-20T18:01:00.000-05:002018-10-21T17:20:11.654-05:00Margotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can StayMargotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can Stay<br />
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Today with wind in golden leaves, and the sky a brilliant blue, it's as if loss is being transformed into immediate memory. We memorialize the gold even as it mounds the streets.<br />
<br />
I pack up three bags of organic compost to recycle. As I finish my work at the compost site, a young man with a fist-full of smallish plastic bags walks past. I call out: "Do you have any larger ones?" He is gone in an instant, and just as leaves fly up in a slant of sun, he hands me two long green bags. The magic of memory: I have been listening to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It is very very long. In the eight-disc set, I visit over and over the house at Combray where he waits anxiously for his mother to come upstairs and give him a good-night kiss. The beach at Balbec where he goes with his grandmother--her gentle figure leaning over him. The next day at breakfast, intense golden light is smothered by heavy curtains, which let only a sliver fall across the breakfast table.<br />
<br />
Finally in the midst of this memory magic, I can't stand my limited knowledge any more and look up Proust in the encyclopedia. I knew that he'd waited until the last decade of his rather short life to retire to a cork-lined room and write. There where he gave memory precedence, he initially wrote only one volume.Others followed, embellishing, recovering, re-inventing. He captured the extraordinarily lush style that neither smothers or impedes the onward flow of narrated memory. In the narrator's voice there is a tinge of irony, as adult Marcel faintly sympathizes with his younger agony when the young woman Albertine, whom he's loved for a long time, now fully reveals her sexual interest in women. <br />
<br />
Yesterday, my husband and I went to Minneapolis to see a movie called "Colette," based on the early years of another French marvel, almost Proust's contemporary.Whatever I'd read about it had completely vanished to be replaced by my much earlier fascination with this true French stylist. Though Colette, like Proust, made marvelous decoys out of her own life, I found that Willie, the much older literateur who seduced young Colette, had initially used the material of her life to boost his own reputation.<br />
<br />
When she took leave of him, intending to tell her own stories, not letting Willy subsume her into a charater called Claudine, I urged her on. By then, she had done away with her coil of braids; her hair became an enticingly boyish bob in fasion in the early 20th century. My mother's hair never had the swagger of Kiera Knigthly's Colette, but it fit nicely under a cloche. By this time, Colette had a girl/boy lover. Not so different, I say to myself, from Proust's Albertine who also seduced girl lovers whom she tried to keep from Marcel. <br />
<br />
What was it about French culture at the close of Proust's era and the opening of Colette's, that gave these extraordinary stylists such rich aplomb? There is a freedom from niceties or reticence (think Emily Dickinson) which turn many American women's stories away from celebrating the flesh and toward hints of mystery--both powerfully appealing, but unable to capture the body as a free-wheeling ironic entity, worth all its rambunctious license. Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-49248617011636622582018-10-15T11:27:00.004-05:002018-10-16T11:13:33.986-05:00Margotlog: First Snow Margotlog: Snow <br />
<br />
Yes, it snowed yesterday in St. Paul, Minnesota. The air swirled with heavy globs and drifty flakes, making me think, for a moment, of recalcitrant students until it dawned on me that I was not teaching undergraduates any more--AND this stuff in the front yard, back yard, and up and down the avenue was enrolled in an eduation system of its own kind.<br />
<br />
Item One, Memory: Let's say thirty years ago, THE Halloween blizzard of all blizzards dumped at least three feet of snow on the Twin Cities in twenty-four hours. There we were, Fran and I, driving around in his "superior" Volkswagen. Item: THERE IS NO SUPERIOR VOLKSWAGEN in three feet of wet, heavy snow. We got stuck. Our tires spun. We skidded into snow banks. A big car pushed us out. Somehow we made our goal, whatever it was. That GOAL has melted into memory, but the blizzard itself will always remain frightful and intense--a whoop-de-do.<br />
<br />
We were young and foolish.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, globs of white stuff plummeted down, driving the squirrels in the backyard frantic. They were very wet, hungry and desperate. Not a one had built a leaf house in the arms of a tree. One, more intrepid than the others, rushed up on the deck and began chewing into the cooler where I'd been directed (by a higher power) to keep chunks of fancy suet cold. In my heavy house slippers, I chased the varmint off, but feeling sorry for the mob of gray desperados in the back yard, I cut several suet cakes into bits, grabbed handfulls of dry cat food, and with my parka flapping, but in my boots, rushed out to succor the mob. Opening the garage door to the metal trash cans that house the various kinds of seeds which I usually sprinkle on the ground, I suddenly found myself fanned by a squirrel rushing OUT of the garage. How it had made its way in, I now refuse to consider. <br />
<br />
Let's say that nature has been kind. Outside my window, sun sparkles on the gold and red and green of a lovely fall morning. The light's angle is low which makes the leaves glimmer and shimmer in the light breeze. The temperature is around 45 degrees. It is a lovely fall day. I'll walk the long way, over Hamline Bridge to Fran's old neighborhood where Fran and I were deliriosly happy in first love.<br />
<br />
But, I remind myself, it was May when we met. No weather events to mar our giddy delight. More mature and seasoned now, we can still be happy--he'll be home today from playing Scrabble in Madison. That would be Wisconsin for anyone reading this who isn't from the UPPER Midwest where almost every weather extreme except sand storms have been known to happen.Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-39477902527506239602018-09-23T17:12:00.001-05:002018-09-24T10:44:40.249-05:00Margotlog: A Russian Artist Among Us: Alexander TylevichMargotlog: A Russian Among Us: Alexander Tylevich<br />
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<i> </i><br />
In our own vast country, how many of us can make sense of Russia with its mix of peoples, its peculiar history of enormous change, and its extraordinary artistic heritage? I have two recent claims: listening for maybe the fourth time to a wonderful translation and reading of <i>Anna Karenina </i>by Leo Tolstoy, and visiting the Bloomington (Minnesota) Center for the Arts to discover Alexander Tylevich's narrow, see-through mylar/bronze/steel figures frozen in motion--walking, biking, running. <i>Anna Karenina</i>, first published in its entirety in 1878, is set in the mid-to-late 19th century. It is probably the quintessential novel in any language, full full of gentle love, enormous wealth, dreadful sadness, and a sophistication that would put most Americans of any era, except maybe Lincoln, to shame.<br />
<br />
Now, into our rather bland midwestern mix comes a contemporary Russian artist. My husband and I discovered Alexander Tylevich's work with the help of a friend. We saw first, Tylevich's huge, spiraling, free-wheeling collage in the "Robert Bruininks" University of Minnesota building just across from the Weisman Art Center. Tylevich's collage sculpture, probably five stories high, rises up and up and up from the ground floor, within its own columnar space, accompanied by its own spiraling stairway as if to help viewers take in the marvels of see-through colored plates cut in unexpected cones, squares, daggers--different yet related not just to each other, but to things scientific and mathematical, for this is a science building. Yet, when we asked the young people at the information desk, none seemed to know anything about the sculpture. We determined to find out what we could about Alexander Tylevich.<br />
<br />
Then several months later arrived an announcement that his small sculptures would be on view at the Bloomington, Minnesota, Art Center. Here is what the website of the Art Center says about him: <br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><b>Alexander Tylevich</b> is an award-winning sculptor
and architect born in Minsk, Belarus. His projects range from
freestanding site-specific sculptures to a master plan for a
metropolitan city. Since immigrating to the United States in 1989, he
has realized more than 70 major art commissions and several
architectural projects. He often works as a member of a larger team,
with architects, landscape architects, and other design professionals.
Tylevich’s work always demonstrates a purposeful co-mingling of the two
disciplines of architecture and sculpture, and perhaps the best single
word to describe his approach is ‘confluence.’ </i><br />
<br />
This certainly describes the enormous suspended sculpture we discovered in the University of Minnesota Bruininks' building. In fact, our neighbor who introduced us to Tylevich's work, helped install it, and emphasized that the process was rigorous, pains-staking, and frightening<i>. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
What we saw last week at the Bloomington Art Center certainly had elements in common with the huge suspended spiral. But two things were remarkably different: Though a few of the Tylevich's sculptures in the show are heroic, rising head and shoulders above some sort of crowd, most of the sculptures are small. Not tiny like Thumbelina, but the size of a large hand as they stride along or ride their bikes, in motion even as they themselves are anonymous--perhaps a Russian form of the "common man." Not a single one I saw seemed female. But then, these figures propose change, even revolution. I couldn't help thinking of my young, chain-smoking college literature teacher from Russian who introduced us to <i>One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. </i><br />
<br />
The point of the book and perhaps too of Tylevich's small, very active figures is that the common man is made for change, brought about not by long hours at a desk but by odd offerings --a leg ending at the knee, or a face missing an ear, or a body as narrow as a pane of glass, steel, or bronze, somehow peddaling along though missing most of its other half. Yet motion/action never pauses for loss. One may be disfigured, yet one soldiers on. Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-15725051239036322362018-09-11T07:45:00.000-05:002018-09-13T12:05:49.771-05:00Margotlog: Cerise Chiffon and Medieval Stone: Musing on an Exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of ArtMargotlog: Cerise Chiffon and Medieval Stone: Musing on an Exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art<br />
<br />
Walking up from the cafeteria in the Museum's depths, I stepped into the Medieval galleries, expecting ancient gray stone. A shimmering cerise gown stood in the way. As I moved through the large gallery, I discovered other models wearing rich fabrics. Some suggested medieval styles: high flared collars, tight sleeves with flaring cuffs, and bodices tight to the female form. These were not live models, but "dummies" without heads, except for the sightless eyes and severe lips of those wearing <i>cloches</i>--an odd word I remember my mother using. <i>Cloche</i>: a hat, usually made of felt, fitting tightly to the scalp. Some of these were of the same rich brocade as their heavy gowns.<br />
<br />
Yet all around these figures, so dazzling in color and form, remained the mute, gray, ancient bas reliefs, or occasional figures from the medieval period. Many of them were fragments of larger works; many of them had religious meaning. The Virgin Mary is a crucial figure in Christianity. Her son died on the cross for human sins, yet she lived on and became an intercessor for our weak and troubled souls. I find her cowled and praying figure one of the most endearing hopes when I feel the most downcast. She is the mother of us all, quiet, loving, and generous in spirit. She mourns, yet lives.<br />
<br />
What point did the museum curators intend when they studded her medieval milieu full of piety and quiet generosity with the dazzling gowns of modern designers? Yes, the gowns were all meant for women. No question about that. So, in their own way, they celebrated women, in figure, and elegance, and lavish richness. I suppose the gowns could be taken as a critique of medieval quietude.<br />
Some of them almost flaunt the female body, like the cerise, strapless chiffon gown.<br />
<br />
I propose that we need them all, these images of women, gray and antique, or lavish and modern. As the medieval gongs and viols, sharp cimbals and rat-a-tat drums made their mark, I thought of the centuries of women's presence, whether carved in stone or simply brought to life in contempory rich, elegant and sometimes revealing garments. <br />
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<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-45518097013725727992018-08-27T13:41:00.000-05:002018-08-28T10:38:54.931-05:00Margotlog: News from China and Iowa of Long AgoMargotlog: Galts in China And Iowa During World War II and the Vietnam War <br />
<br />
Here is an email I received this morning, out of the blue:<br />
<br />
<i> Dear Ms Galt: I
have come into possession of a small notebook once kept by Edith Galt
(1917-1961). I would be happy to return the
notebook to the Galt family if you would like it back. I traced Edith\'s
family via Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com and Google, and am contacting
you because your contact information was the easiest for me to quickly
find. The notebook is about 3x4 inches and contains notes and accounts
that Edith kept while at Grinnell College and in China. Wedged among the
yellowed pages is a small photograph of a young woman. The book was
found, years ago, in the attic of farmhouse near Tama, Iowa, which is
about 30 miles north of Grinnell. The elderly woman who found it is no
longer sure exactly where the house was or if it is still standing. She found the notebook while sorting for her own move. I\'m happy to mail the book to any address
you provide.</i><br />
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What a thrill: This is what the internet and email are supposed to provide: surprises, astonishment, and gratitude. Feeling all those lively emotions, I wrote back to this kind, honorable women:</div>
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<i>It doesn't surprise me that the notebook was found near Grinnell.<br />
According to my rather sketchy knowledge of the Galt family, my husband Fran's<br />
father Ralph was raised in China by missionary parents, both of whom came<br />
from Iowa. They returned to the U.S. for Ralph to attend Grinnell. </i><br />
<i>Once graduated , Ralph married a lovely young woman from New England, Louisa (named for Louisa May Alcott), and the two of them, in their turn, took a ship for missionary work in China.<br />
<br />
This brings us up to the outbreak of World War II, during which Louisa and Ralph were exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war and were allowed to return on a slow boat around the tip of South America and through the Port of New York. Once in the U.S. Ralph refused to register for the draft. This was 1942, in the midst of World War II. As "draft refuser," or conscientious objector, Ralph was imprisoned in a federal prison in West Virginia from September 1942 to early 1944, a total of 21 months. </i><br />
<br />
<i>When he was incarcerated, his wife Louisa was already pregnant. She gave birth to Fran's brother Lester in 1943 while Ralph was still in prison. Once he was released on parole, the family moved to Shawnee Mission, Oklahoma, where Ralph was state director for the Christian Rural Oversea's Program, or CROP. The couple's second child, the son Francis, was born in 1947. Francis would eventually become my husband. </i><br />
<br />
<i>Interestingly enough, Fran himself refused the draft and spent two years, from 1966-68, in Federal prison at Springfield Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, Missouri. He was given the job of typist to two employees: a prison psychologist and a jail inspector. Released in 1968, Fran was later paroled by President Gerald Ford in 1976. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Grandfather Galt, the original missionary to China, and his wife Alti Cummings, had three children, Ralph, and two sisters, one of whom was Edith, whose diary has been discovered in an attic near Grinnell. It's truly astonishing how in the years before the internet or even transoceanic telephone, so many of my husband's family conducted their lives overseas. Perhaps it's a clue that until he met me, Fran did not cross an ocean, but remained close to the Midwest where his family settled before and after they took the long boat to China. </i><br />
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Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-10488484238526973372018-07-26T15:57:00.000-05:002018-08-07T09:16:01.509-05:00Margotlog: The Art of LosingMargotlog: The Art of Losing<br />
<br />
Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle, "The Art of Losing" has the command and sheen of great art. It's been one of my favorites for a very long time. Now I think of it after a day of losing first one, then another, then yet another crucial item: my car keys, my bigger cell phone, and almost my mind.<br />
<br />
The art of losing isn't hard to master<br />
so many things seem filled with the intent<br />
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.<br />
<br />
Losing and searching can become an obsession of flitting here, then there. Will the cell phone be hiding in the depths of my purse? Did I put it on the dining room floor as I ate dinner last night?<br />
<br />
<br />
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster<br />
of lost door keys, the hour badly spend.<br />
The art of losing isn't hard to master.<br />
<br />
I call my very put-together friend whose house is just beyond the Ford Bridge i.e. just inside Minneapolis. "Mary," I say with a touch of hysteria in my voice, "I can't seem to find your house. Some nice man with a dress shop pointed me back to the Parkway, but now the numbers on 35th Avenue are totally off, far beyond yours!"<br />
<br />
....I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster,<br />
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.<br />
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.<br />
<br />
Plucking up my courage, still unable to find my cell phone. I take a discarded old phone to AT&T where a charming young man sets is up to work again with a new "sym" card. Now it's chirping as it powers up. But will I be able to turn it off once on the plane to Amherst? So far, that hasn't worked. It chirps, and chirps, and chirps.<br />
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<br />
practice losing farther, losing faster:<br />
places, and names, and where it was you meant<br />
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow in the dark before dawn, I will fly to visit this dear friend, younger than I am by at least a decade. Seven months ago, his partner of many years died of a cancer that could no longer be kept at bay. "I still weep every day," he tells me on the phone. Now as I turn myself toward the east, I sorrow for the one who is lost, joy for his life we both loved, though in vastly different intensites. <br />
<br />
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture<br />
I love), I shan't have lied. It's evident<br />
the art of losing's not too hard to master<br />
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.<br />
<br />Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-6533496335563627652018-07-06T11:15:00.002-05:002018-07-07T10:50:00.897-05:00Margotlog: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free <br />
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Margotlog: "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Be Free"</div>
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The photo on the front page of the <b>StarTribune</b>
6/16/18 shows a boy, around six, staring up at an adult in combat garb toting a
night-stick and hand gun. Behind the boy stands another adult wearing a red
t-shirt, worn jeans, and running shoes.</div>
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How is it possible that the United States, home of
immigrants from around the world, has begun in a big way, the separation of immigrant children from
their parents? In 1900, my Italian grandmother, newly arrived in New York from Sicily. Her husband had served in the Italiay army and been sent to the North where he converted to Protestantism. When he returned to their tiny town in northern Sicily and built a small church for a very small congregation, Catholic townpeople burned it. He rebuilt, but the townpeople burned the second church. Fearing for their lives, the family came to New York. There Rose who would become my grandmother became so concerned
for the hungry children and poorly clad women around her in the New York tenements that she
delivered food, warm clothing, and blankets to residents three flights up. She
soon collapsed and died.</div>
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Doing good for those in need is surely at the heart of every
religious tradition on earth—that is, except for the Trump administration.
Trump & Company have ordered thousands of children to be separated from their
parents who’ve illegally crossed the U.S./Mexican border. </div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This U.S. policy smacks of Nazism, separating the
“outsiders” from the clean, upright insiders, making those different from
ourselves suffer. The thought of these thousands of children deprived of their
parents and put in “holding pens” fills me with horror and dread.
Congress needs to pass laws forbidding such heartless
treatment of the friendless and powerless. It’s time those of us who are not Native American remembered that our ancestors also strove to enter this country, often poor and friendless. It is time we all remembered Emma
Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">"Give
me your tired, your poor,</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Send these, the homeless, tempest-[tossed] to
me,</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br />
</span><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"</span></i></i><br />
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<span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Let us be the lamp of hope, as we offer freedom from want, charity toward all, and acceptance among us.</span><i><i><span style="color: #464646; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></i></i><br />
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</xml><![endif]-->Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939822000736661693.post-27759453709703391332018-06-14T10:39:00.002-05:002018-06-15T11:05:34.724-05:00Margotlog: Two Statues in Florence's Bargello Margotlog: Two Statues (Interrupted) in Florence's Bargello<br />
<br />
Usually I've thought of myself as a lover of paintings, but when I visited Florence's Bargello Museum this past May, I changed my mind. Once a prison, the Bargello now is Florence's "municipal" sculpture gallery, full of extraordinary sculptures that fill a huge upper gallery. There are so many it's hard to take them all in. I didn't try. Almost immediately I was riveted by two, small, free-standing sculptures of young men. The first--Donatello's "David," is very family. This tart" of a boy, with round stomach and flaring backside, hides his expression under his shepherd's hat, decked with flowers and pulled low over his curls. But his pose is unmistakably that of triumph: Standing with one leg cocked, he balances one hand on the sword he used to slay the giant, Goliath.<br />
<br />
It is a very sexy statue. The giant's winged helmet slides its wing up the boy's leg, giving us a shiver so enticing, it's hard to believe--that soft wing against the boy's naked inner thigh. Yet David doesn't seem to notice. He pouts, and withdraws into himself. He does not lift his head. In fact, he seems bemused by what he has done.<br />
<br />
Across the huge chamber stands another young male figure--very slender, almost emaciated, holding a staff against his body. He is "St. John the Baptist" by Desiderio da Settingnano.<br />
<br />
............................ <br />
<br />
To visit the Bargello I was using the last few hours of my "Firenze" three-day pass. Initially I had activated the pass when I arrived with my two friends from Minnesota, Mary and Drew. An hour or so after we checked into our "Monestary Stay" convent, Drew became ill. The vivid red swath on his neck shouted distress: infection was creeping down his throat from his ear.<br />
<br />
Immediately we took a taxi to a British doctor whom Mary located on the internet. This kind man gave Drew an antibiotic injection, but also suggested we visit Careggie, the hospital/clinic complex high in the hills around Florence.<br />
<br />
I remember nothing of the drive to the hospital, but the nightmare of arrival is clear: we flitted from door to door, doctor to doctor in this huge complex and finally ended taking seats in a huge clinic full of other sufferers. Despite my Italian, despite waiting four hours, we eventually gave up. <br />
<br />
Sitting beside the taxi driver as we left the hospital and drove back to town, I was struck by the beautiful green of the umbrella pines and darker spears of cypress. It was a beautiful May afternoon. For a few moments, the land enchanted me it has so often before.<br />
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Mary and Drew located a flight home that left just after midnight. This gave us time to enjoy a "last supper" at Accadi near the hotel. Next morning, they were gone, and I had two days to use my Firenze pass.<br />
<br />
Sampling gelato, which was especially delicious, I walked along the Arno with its frothy jets and visited the Church of the Carmine. Then retracing my steps toward the Ponte Vecchio, and my room, I changed clothes to something cooler and headed for the Bargello. <br />
<br />
..........................<br />
<br />
Desiderio da Settignano is a less well-known than is Donatello, in part, I think, because he did not live as long, and in part because his scrulptures are more direct than Donatello's. Yet I was determined to give St. John the Baptist as much attention as I could muster.<br />
<br />
Slowly, studying first the front of the sculpture, noticing the pelts that clothe the shepherd's emaciated form, I remembered bits of the Baptist's story. As Christ's precurser, John the Baptist lived in the wilderness, searching for spiritual insight. He ate nuts and fruit and made friends of wolves and even lions. Settingano's Baptist is so thin as to be anoxsic, but that is the point: he has renounced the fruits of the worldly life, and become an ascetic.<br />
<br />
Keeping my eyes on the face with its somewhat stern expression, I slowly walked about the scupture. Do I remember whether Settignanon put his John the Baptist firmly on both feet? Now that I think of it, I believe that like Donatello's David, Settingnano has John the Baptist bend one knee. One heel is off the ground. This seems to suggest that all human effort is tentative. Just as with myself and my dear friends, Mary and Drew, we become caught in a flow of experience, not knowing what would happen next.<br />
<br />
Now my eyes fill with tears. I am so sorry that Mary and Drew lost the experiences we had hoped to share. Their return home was harrowing--they missed the first transAtlantic flight out of Amsterdam and had to wait hours and hours before boarding another. Once home, Drew spent two days in the hospital. But modern medicine can work miracles. Drew is well, and Mary is her joyful self again.<br />
<br />
Like Settignano's beautiful, emaciated figure of John the Baptist, we can pause only for a moment before life sends us on our way. Yet, as I studied this astere figure, so slender and alone, I discovered on the far side of his face, the beginning of a joyful smile. In the midst of uncertainty and torment, he broke free into ecstatic hope.Margot Fortunato Galthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05053564922718719635noreply@blogger.com0