Margotlog: The Star at the Top of the Tree
It's very northern of us, this tree-in-the-house at Christmas. I know, there are Celtic precedents, something about mistletoe, holly and the Druids, but the Christmas tree itself came from Nordic folk around the Baltic Sea, worshipping what remained green throughout the long, dark, cold winter. Germans, my mother's family included, set their trees up on Christmas Eve, which in the Roman Catholic tradition, remains Adam and Eve's feast day. Some of the early German trees were hung with one tantalizing apple.
Ours for years was some kind of fir, usually bought from an outdoor lot beside a hardware store or even from the Boy Scouts. We hoisted it atop the car and drove home with it, our version of the hunter's prize. Early in this second marriage, we took our young kids out to a tree farm and hacked one down. It was hard work, all done by already worn-out parents. But those self-harvested trees brought into our lives empty birds' nests, which we took as wonderful symbols of fecundity and joy. They became our first communal ornaments, passed down and still displayed in our now fake tree.
It's interesting, even challenging, making a union of two quite different traditions--mine and my second husband's. His two kids, my one, and all the ornaments and associations that we'd already acquired. Now with the kids all grown, and only us aging adults to tend the tradition, I stand rather bemused before our fake tree lighted with bright blue and white LED lights. There hang floppy white plastic catfish with long whiskers and bright beads--holdovers from his parents' years as missionaries in China. From my parents' early Depression trees have come balls with much of the color worn off--now faded blue, silver, green. I couldn't bear to throw them away after my mother died. I also kept funny pipecleaner men in stripped pants and bowler hats--who knows their origin or what they signified.
There among the thick plastic branches hang small red cherries. Last evening driving down Summit Avenue, I asked my daughter if she remembered buying a living Norfolk Island pine covered with these little balls, the first year I moved out of the first marriage house. She has no recollection of those years, she says. But even now I can see the small tree bravely fronting an increasingly desperate living room, its little bright cherries twirling in the furnace heat.
Dotted up and around our current tree are expensive ornaments given by affectionate, well-heeled relatives and friends--a tum-tum-tum drum with guilded ribbon up and down its sides; a fiercely snouted hedgehog dressed in mob-cap and old lace; a tiny mouse in top hat sitting in its own white rocking chair. Oddly enough, I can't remember their givers, only the yearly sensation that they must reappear as promises of continued beneficence.
Finally up and down perch dozens of birds. Our first birds' nests fit my fascination with birds so perfectly it seemed preordained. Especially in winter, feeding and providing fresh, warmed water for outdoor birds keeps me from desperation. After all, my earliest remembered Christmases were in Charleston, South Carolina, where winters are dark, but only dampishly cold, not ever frozen, never. And my parents' last backyard drew wonderful flocks of migrants--waxwings, robins, and resident cardinals, mocking birds and jays, chickadees and nuthatches, plus an occasional hawk, not to mention in the swamp just out of sight a heron or two. For our tree the Audubon Society has kindly provided (for a yearly membership) wonderfully bright, stained-glass bird ornaments, and we have purchased tiny feathered creatures who sit so pertly at the end of twigs, I expect them to cock their heads and sing.
It is all about hope and sustenance in dark times. We've never had much of a star atop our tree, though there is one, surrounded by a bevy of wasted angels, retrieved from the dump of my parents' ornaments. With paper wings and sequined skirts, they have sustained another kind of fluttering hope for over sixty years. I can't imagine ever "doing over" the tree in decorator colors. What lives on are its associations, and the revival of winter hope from year to year.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Margotlog: Bat Attack
Margotlog: Bat Attack
I know, we are supposed to treasure our fellow creatures on this steadily shrinking planet. But there are limits. My limits start with bats. Pipistrelle from French or Italian; ours are probably myotis. From our first year in this tall old house, we have had bats in the attic. The heavily taped tiny attic door at the top of the third-floor stairs attests to my first attempts to keep them between the walls. Yesterday once again I failed.
You'd think with three cats, our problem would be solved. Not so. At the first swoosh, they're under a bed. It was early, probably 8 a.m. Husband and I groggily drinking morning coffee when lo and behold, across the living room fluttered a winged thing. "It's a bat," croaked the husband. We were slow at that hour--putting hand to broom took a minute or two. (I'm good at fetching, worthless at capturing.) By then, the creature had retreated, probably up the stairs, back toward home.
I don't want to hate them and in the abstract I realize they belong just as much as I do. They were, after all, here between the attic walls before we arrived. Lately, I'm also disturbed by the die-off of bat colonies in the eastern U.S. from a fungus called "white nose disease." A million or so bats gone, with some subspecies threatened with extinction. Recently a newspaper article mentioned the genome of the causative fungus had been deciphered, leading to hope for an cure. Evidently European bats can harbor the fungus without dying. No doubt they brought it to our shores--flew the Atlantic? Sped over in a cargo of Turkish coffee? Spanish dates? Italian olive oil?
Over the quarter century we've lived in this Saint Paul house, we've probably maimed, murdered, or simply helped escape at last a dozen bats. A few got thrown outside in winter. One was eased into a trash can in February. The next day, husband released the lid for another load of garbage. Lo and behold out flew a winged thing. OMG!
Last year we put up a bat house. I seriously doubt it has been given the once-over. The critters like our "between the walls" abode. I can hear them scratching and sometimes even peeping when I'm writing away on the third floor. Usually I just sigh and carry on, hoping no wing or snout will show itself emerging from a hole as thin as a dime.
My fear has abated from its original absolute terror--screaming, running from the room with head covered, hiding in closets until the "bat trapper" had done his job. Lately I watch to make sure I'm not in its line of flight, then hope the trapper can capture it within minutes, rather than the hours it took yesterday. Bat first sighted at 8 a.m., captured and released into the cold around 10 p.m. I haven't been outside to see what creeps. Mostly I d0n't want to know, yet am drawn in terrible fascination. I hope it died of exposure.
The cause of this fear inevitably comes back to me. Years ago, soon after arriving in Minneapolis and buying the likewise tall house of my first marriage, I awoke in early morning dark to a scratching and clawing at the headboard. Then in total consternation I realized the thing was inside my pillowcase. Leaping out of bed, I screamed for help. Husband jumped up, whacked the pillow and its case many times against the floor. Finally he dumped the contents in the toilet. The pillow slumped to one side. When we looked into the bowl, there floated the bloody little body of the family hamster.
It was flushed in a flash, but I was reduced to a voiceless crouch for many minutes. When I could finally stand, we looked at each other. No way could we admit to this rodent-a-cide. That afternoon when the kid was in nursery school, I visited the pet store and bought another hamster. Placed in its cage, it was supposed to start speeding around its wheel. Nothing doing. As I watched, I realized that the poor thing had a stump for one of its back legs.
As I write this, I'm beginning to breathe shallowly. It took the kid months to realize that "Freundlich" was wounded. We blamed it on the wheel. I have never quite recovered.
I know, we are supposed to treasure our fellow creatures on this steadily shrinking planet. But there are limits. My limits start with bats. Pipistrelle from French or Italian; ours are probably myotis. From our first year in this tall old house, we have had bats in the attic. The heavily taped tiny attic door at the top of the third-floor stairs attests to my first attempts to keep them between the walls. Yesterday once again I failed.
You'd think with three cats, our problem would be solved. Not so. At the first swoosh, they're under a bed. It was early, probably 8 a.m. Husband and I groggily drinking morning coffee when lo and behold, across the living room fluttered a winged thing. "It's a bat," croaked the husband. We were slow at that hour--putting hand to broom took a minute or two. (I'm good at fetching, worthless at capturing.) By then, the creature had retreated, probably up the stairs, back toward home.
I don't want to hate them and in the abstract I realize they belong just as much as I do. They were, after all, here between the attic walls before we arrived. Lately, I'm also disturbed by the die-off of bat colonies in the eastern U.S. from a fungus called "white nose disease." A million or so bats gone, with some subspecies threatened with extinction. Recently a newspaper article mentioned the genome of the causative fungus had been deciphered, leading to hope for an cure. Evidently European bats can harbor the fungus without dying. No doubt they brought it to our shores--flew the Atlantic? Sped over in a cargo of Turkish coffee? Spanish dates? Italian olive oil?
Over the quarter century we've lived in this Saint Paul house, we've probably maimed, murdered, or simply helped escape at last a dozen bats. A few got thrown outside in winter. One was eased into a trash can in February. The next day, husband released the lid for another load of garbage. Lo and behold out flew a winged thing. OMG!
Last year we put up a bat house. I seriously doubt it has been given the once-over. The critters like our "between the walls" abode. I can hear them scratching and sometimes even peeping when I'm writing away on the third floor. Usually I just sigh and carry on, hoping no wing or snout will show itself emerging from a hole as thin as a dime.
My fear has abated from its original absolute terror--screaming, running from the room with head covered, hiding in closets until the "bat trapper" had done his job. Lately I watch to make sure I'm not in its line of flight, then hope the trapper can capture it within minutes, rather than the hours it took yesterday. Bat first sighted at 8 a.m., captured and released into the cold around 10 p.m. I haven't been outside to see what creeps. Mostly I d0n't want to know, yet am drawn in terrible fascination. I hope it died of exposure.
The cause of this fear inevitably comes back to me. Years ago, soon after arriving in Minneapolis and buying the likewise tall house of my first marriage, I awoke in early morning dark to a scratching and clawing at the headboard. Then in total consternation I realized the thing was inside my pillowcase. Leaping out of bed, I screamed for help. Husband jumped up, whacked the pillow and its case many times against the floor. Finally he dumped the contents in the toilet. The pillow slumped to one side. When we looked into the bowl, there floated the bloody little body of the family hamster.
It was flushed in a flash, but I was reduced to a voiceless crouch for many minutes. When I could finally stand, we looked at each other. No way could we admit to this rodent-a-cide. That afternoon when the kid was in nursery school, I visited the pet store and bought another hamster. Placed in its cage, it was supposed to start speeding around its wheel. Nothing doing. As I watched, I realized that the poor thing had a stump for one of its back legs.
As I write this, I'm beginning to breathe shallowly. It took the kid months to realize that "Freundlich" was wounded. We blamed it on the wheel. I have never quite recovered.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Margotlog: Shy-Drager Dearth
Margotlog: Shy-Drager Death
It's not a Star Wars character, nor the name of a deep sea creature. It's a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the central autonomic nervous system. It's caused (as much as is known) by long exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It's a major player in Mary Rockcastle's new novel, In Caddis Wood.
Over the weekend I dipped into DuPont land, better known as Delaware. Beautiful country with flat plains and copses of trees, plus one of my favorite bird-watching spots in the country: the National Wildlife Refuge called Bombay Hook. There my adorable oldest living relative Eleonora and I watched hundreds of ducks and Canada geese paddle in tidal pools, a few great blue heron hunch at the edge of swift-flowing tidal creeks, and a weird fox, surrounded by wary Japanese bird-watchers, cross and recross the road. A sign at the beginning of the refuge warns against getting too close to the resident foxes: they may have rabies.
"If we but knew when we delve and hew..." sings Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Irish poet. Mary Rockcastle's novel is set in the Wisconsin woods and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. It's always curious and strange to read the works of friends--there are familiar names and places (such as the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus) which are lifted from their usual associations and burnished in a fictional world. The family in Rockcastle's novel is struggling with multiple accidents and diseases, yet their world is lush with artistic discovery, creature comforts, and with Rockcastle's evocation of Upper Midwest woodland plants and climate, as well as the fate of Captive Island near Fort Myers, Florida, after a hurricane.
I honor her work, subtly revealing how choices to hack and hew have long-term effects on health and happiness. Carl, the father, has torn open the woods in front of the elaborate edifice he, as an architect, has built for the family in Caddis Woods. There he's planted what could pass for an English garden, full of roses. Casually year after year he sprays the roses with pesticides and herbicides. As the novel opens, he's beginning to experience the onset of Shy-Drager, though we don't find out what's really wrong with him until the middle of the book. With consummate skill, the author takes us into his disintegrating yet fantastical world with its whisps of recurring ghosts, its strange blackouts and its sudden weakness. Before he loses sight and speech, his experience of the natural world becomes acute, beautiful, and strange. What is certainly at heart a cautionary tale becomes also an evocation of an altered state, the last gift of life to a talented artist.
When he and his wife, a poet, tear out the rose garden and resoil and seed the plot with native prairie plants, I breathe a sigh of relief. Yet, the author withholds judgment. She is a tender chronicler of their troubled yet enduring love, as well as the many attendant family lives they touch. By the end, a project of remediation--to render useful a dump named Pig's Eye on the Mississippi--becomes another reminder of human skill at curing what humans have deeply tainted.
As I drive away from Delaware and catch Highway 95 toward the Philadelphia airport, I'm reminded of efforts to initiate "fracking" in the Delaware River basin and Chesapeake Bay. Fracking is shorthand for extracting natural gas from shale buried deep in the earth. The process not only destroys the surface growth and soil--thousands of acres of boreal forest have been upended in northern Alberta, Canada--but it uses an enormous amount of water, which then becomes tainted with heavy metals and other contaminants. I'm completely and utterly opposed to this process anywhere, but especially in a rich tidal ecosystem such as the Delaware River Basin and Chesapeake Bay. I want Bombay Hook and its birds and animals to enjoy a healthy rest stop, and I want my loving Eleonore to live our her days without the threat of new environmental contaminants. Not to mention the young men and women who take care of her, and their children, and children's children.
We need a stronger, more ecologically sound energy policy, here and globally.
It's not a Star Wars character, nor the name of a deep sea creature. It's a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the central autonomic nervous system. It's caused (as much as is known) by long exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It's a major player in Mary Rockcastle's new novel, In Caddis Wood.
Over the weekend I dipped into DuPont land, better known as Delaware. Beautiful country with flat plains and copses of trees, plus one of my favorite bird-watching spots in the country: the National Wildlife Refuge called Bombay Hook. There my adorable oldest living relative Eleonora and I watched hundreds of ducks and Canada geese paddle in tidal pools, a few great blue heron hunch at the edge of swift-flowing tidal creeks, and a weird fox, surrounded by wary Japanese bird-watchers, cross and recross the road. A sign at the beginning of the refuge warns against getting too close to the resident foxes: they may have rabies.
"If we but knew when we delve and hew..." sings Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Irish poet. Mary Rockcastle's novel is set in the Wisconsin woods and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. It's always curious and strange to read the works of friends--there are familiar names and places (such as the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus) which are lifted from their usual associations and burnished in a fictional world. The family in Rockcastle's novel is struggling with multiple accidents and diseases, yet their world is lush with artistic discovery, creature comforts, and with Rockcastle's evocation of Upper Midwest woodland plants and climate, as well as the fate of Captive Island near Fort Myers, Florida, after a hurricane.
I honor her work, subtly revealing how choices to hack and hew have long-term effects on health and happiness. Carl, the father, has torn open the woods in front of the elaborate edifice he, as an architect, has built for the family in Caddis Woods. There he's planted what could pass for an English garden, full of roses. Casually year after year he sprays the roses with pesticides and herbicides. As the novel opens, he's beginning to experience the onset of Shy-Drager, though we don't find out what's really wrong with him until the middle of the book. With consummate skill, the author takes us into his disintegrating yet fantastical world with its whisps of recurring ghosts, its strange blackouts and its sudden weakness. Before he loses sight and speech, his experience of the natural world becomes acute, beautiful, and strange. What is certainly at heart a cautionary tale becomes also an evocation of an altered state, the last gift of life to a talented artist.
When he and his wife, a poet, tear out the rose garden and resoil and seed the plot with native prairie plants, I breathe a sigh of relief. Yet, the author withholds judgment. She is a tender chronicler of their troubled yet enduring love, as well as the many attendant family lives they touch. By the end, a project of remediation--to render useful a dump named Pig's Eye on the Mississippi--becomes another reminder of human skill at curing what humans have deeply tainted.
As I drive away from Delaware and catch Highway 95 toward the Philadelphia airport, I'm reminded of efforts to initiate "fracking" in the Delaware River basin and Chesapeake Bay. Fracking is shorthand for extracting natural gas from shale buried deep in the earth. The process not only destroys the surface growth and soil--thousands of acres of boreal forest have been upended in northern Alberta, Canada--but it uses an enormous amount of water, which then becomes tainted with heavy metals and other contaminants. I'm completely and utterly opposed to this process anywhere, but especially in a rich tidal ecosystem such as the Delaware River Basin and Chesapeake Bay. I want Bombay Hook and its birds and animals to enjoy a healthy rest stop, and I want my loving Eleonore to live our her days without the threat of new environmental contaminants. Not to mention the young men and women who take care of her, and their children, and children's children.
We need a stronger, more ecologically sound energy policy, here and globally.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Margotlog: Parent Substitutes
Margotlog: Parent Substitutes
When the primary ones are gone, those lucky of us find subsitutes. Mine is a 94-year-old second cousin which means she is my father's first cousin, younger than he by eight years, and much much longer lived. Eleanora has been Eleanor to her lifetime American friends, but since she's reached her "maturity," she's allowed the final Italian "a" to reappear as it was on her birth certificate in 1917. Born to my great aunt Josephine, my grandmother's youngest sister, Eleanora was the oldest of three sisters (the girls) who lived down the street from my father and his three brothers (the boys). In fact, Eleanora's earliest memory is of sitting on the curb in front of her house with the youngest of the "boys," Frankie, and telling him, "I have another sister." Since my earliest memory is of staying with her and her mother, Aunt Josephine to me, when my sister was born, I count us as linked by the strange convolutions of family memory as well as blood.
Eleanora is one of the most "with it" people I know partly because she was a nurse and retains the savvy that comes from staring down doctors, admirals, generals. Working in various governmental agencies in Washington, she did indeed treat these higher ups, while her youngest sister Sadie typed documents in the Office of the President through four administrations: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Eleanora and Sadie lived together for more than fifty years, moving from the center of our nation's capitol, to Arlington, Virginia, then to Silver Spring, Maryland, and finally to Dover, Delaware, where Sadie died in January of 2009. Typically, their fortunes peaked when they were in their fifties, and their huge apartment of 3 bedrooms in Arlington used to amaze me with its two bathrooms and living room/dining room you could almost roller skate across. It was there that I brought my first husband and young daughter to meet the "cousins and Aunt Jo."
They never had to discipline me, but their models of generous and rollicking adulthood (including their tiny mother Aunt Jo who had a smile as broad as a ball field) helped subdue my distress over my own father's wildness when I saw that they also rolled their eyes at his racist comments, and held hands in the back of his car when his driving threatened to send the car into the drink. (Here I'm remembering driving with him over the old Cooper River Bridge connecting downtown Charleston, South Carolina, with the suburb of Mount Pleasant. My parents moved to Charleston when I was four and never left its environs.)
Talking to Eleanora has also taught me a fair amount about forgiveness and facing the inevitable, but I think the biggest influence she's had on me, she who never had children, is as a model of adult guidance. She connects me to an era without television or cell phones, with only one family car driven to work daily by the father of the family, leaving the others to take the bus. When there was a huge snow fall in Pittsburgh one year and electricity and water service went out in the city, her parents dug a hole in an enormous snowbank and put their perishables there in a covered container. "We also made nightly visits to another part of the yard and hid our 'waste,'" by which she means the contents of the slop jar. "Everyone on the block tried to do that when no one else was looking."
I've also had my share of emergency situations when lights and water are knocked out, but for some reason, Eleanora's examples stick with me. Not to mention her intense desire to find a calling, thwarted by the Depression and the War. She wanted to become a doctor, quite unusual in the post World War I era, but the family couldn't afford to keep her in college and she had to find a job, which wasn't easy. She married in the late 1930s, but her first child died soon after a very difficult birth. Then her husband Dick was killed at the tail end of World War II. How she recovered her self-possession after these losses and talked her way into nurses training as a student ten years younger than all the others, is another story of a desire to serve tempered with an awareness of her differences. She requested a private room through her training, and unless a fellow nurse came to her in confidence, her classmates always called her Mrs. B.
Now when I teach young teachers, some of whose students are immigrant or African-American migrants from the south (with several stops along the way), I remember Eleanora and her "tribal" family, with its close intertwining of two large families, and the way they were raised not just by their own parents (her father was a tyrant) but also by the two model parents of Aunt Rose and Uncle John (my grandparents) down the block. We like to think we all have nuclear families, but it ain't necessarily so, now or then. Often relatives are as important to our lives as our own parents. Especially when they're the only ones left.
When the primary ones are gone, those lucky of us find subsitutes. Mine is a 94-year-old second cousin which means she is my father's first cousin, younger than he by eight years, and much much longer lived. Eleanora has been Eleanor to her lifetime American friends, but since she's reached her "maturity," she's allowed the final Italian "a" to reappear as it was on her birth certificate in 1917. Born to my great aunt Josephine, my grandmother's youngest sister, Eleanora was the oldest of three sisters (the girls) who lived down the street from my father and his three brothers (the boys). In fact, Eleanora's earliest memory is of sitting on the curb in front of her house with the youngest of the "boys," Frankie, and telling him, "I have another sister." Since my earliest memory is of staying with her and her mother, Aunt Josephine to me, when my sister was born, I count us as linked by the strange convolutions of family memory as well as blood.
Eleanora is one of the most "with it" people I know partly because she was a nurse and retains the savvy that comes from staring down doctors, admirals, generals. Working in various governmental agencies in Washington, she did indeed treat these higher ups, while her youngest sister Sadie typed documents in the Office of the President through four administrations: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Eleanora and Sadie lived together for more than fifty years, moving from the center of our nation's capitol, to Arlington, Virginia, then to Silver Spring, Maryland, and finally to Dover, Delaware, where Sadie died in January of 2009. Typically, their fortunes peaked when they were in their fifties, and their huge apartment of 3 bedrooms in Arlington used to amaze me with its two bathrooms and living room/dining room you could almost roller skate across. It was there that I brought my first husband and young daughter to meet the "cousins and Aunt Jo."
They never had to discipline me, but their models of generous and rollicking adulthood (including their tiny mother Aunt Jo who had a smile as broad as a ball field) helped subdue my distress over my own father's wildness when I saw that they also rolled their eyes at his racist comments, and held hands in the back of his car when his driving threatened to send the car into the drink. (Here I'm remembering driving with him over the old Cooper River Bridge connecting downtown Charleston, South Carolina, with the suburb of Mount Pleasant. My parents moved to Charleston when I was four and never left its environs.)
Talking to Eleanora has also taught me a fair amount about forgiveness and facing the inevitable, but I think the biggest influence she's had on me, she who never had children, is as a model of adult guidance. She connects me to an era without television or cell phones, with only one family car driven to work daily by the father of the family, leaving the others to take the bus. When there was a huge snow fall in Pittsburgh one year and electricity and water service went out in the city, her parents dug a hole in an enormous snowbank and put their perishables there in a covered container. "We also made nightly visits to another part of the yard and hid our 'waste,'" by which she means the contents of the slop jar. "Everyone on the block tried to do that when no one else was looking."
I've also had my share of emergency situations when lights and water are knocked out, but for some reason, Eleanora's examples stick with me. Not to mention her intense desire to find a calling, thwarted by the Depression and the War. She wanted to become a doctor, quite unusual in the post World War I era, but the family couldn't afford to keep her in college and she had to find a job, which wasn't easy. She married in the late 1930s, but her first child died soon after a very difficult birth. Then her husband Dick was killed at the tail end of World War II. How she recovered her self-possession after these losses and talked her way into nurses training as a student ten years younger than all the others, is another story of a desire to serve tempered with an awareness of her differences. She requested a private room through her training, and unless a fellow nurse came to her in confidence, her classmates always called her Mrs. B.
Now when I teach young teachers, some of whose students are immigrant or African-American migrants from the south (with several stops along the way), I remember Eleanora and her "tribal" family, with its close intertwining of two large families, and the way they were raised not just by their own parents (her father was a tyrant) but also by the two model parents of Aunt Rose and Uncle John (my grandparents) down the block. We like to think we all have nuclear families, but it ain't necessarily so, now or then. Often relatives are as important to our lives as our own parents. Especially when they're the only ones left.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Margotlog: Life at Its Most Lush
Margotlog: Life at Its Most Lush
The magazine, I mean. Life Magazine as a large weekly magazine, with glossy paper and often full-page ads, came into existence in 1936 when Henry Luce bought the name from a smaller-scale humor "rag." Throughout World War II and the 1950s, Life brought images of war and peacetime prosperity into millions of American homes.
Why do we care? The ads! Better than any photograph (and the legion of outstanding photographers working for Life includes Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa), Life ads show the United States undergoing an enormous transition. Pages 2 and 3 from June 22, 1942: on the right a full-page ad for the Bell Telephone System with a drawing of a lovely young lady with cameo pin and soft curls at the back of her neck, speaking into a receiver of an telephone with a "cradle." "When war needs delay your call...let's put the blame right where it belongs--on the war." The subtext is that beauty and romance in its old-fashioned guise will be delayed, but accepted with a smile because of the war.
On the adjacent page, a young man rises in pencil drawings from a sailor to a chief petty officer. Though often at sea, his Arrow Collar make him so irresistible that Genevieve believes him when he boasts:
it won't be planes, ships or cannon
that will win the war, he'll do it
single-handed.
Note: Davy drags home knocked-out German, Italian, and Japanese, each caricatured so deftly they're unmistakable. His puss is ready for Gen to kiss.
By June 14,1943, Graduation graces the front cover of Life, but inside it's very much war business: Pages 44-45, Western Electric sends an "Uncle Sam-clothed" arm pointing to a plane flying above the clouds: "Radar puts its finger on our enemies," while on the facing page "Romance begins when Five O'Clock Shadow Ends," and the sailor with a cute snub-nose grins as he's surrounded by a bevy of pretty girls. It's an ad for Gem razor blades.
Is there any text on these pages: Yup. A thin column of pretty girls in backless dresses, the newest summer fashion. Begins the article: "Since many women will not be getting to the country or shore this summer, country fashions are going to the city." The implication is that everyone makes sacrifices for the war, but there are dandy compensations.
Finally from April 30, 1945, in the last year of the war, "Life's War Artists" are on the cover Inside there are pages of vivid images from war artists: note Bruce Mitchell's drawings from Iran where American soldiers and sailors off-load a ship with supplies for Russia, and trucks deliver Lend-Lease supplies over 750 miles of "frying desert and brutal mountains" to Karzin. But for my money, it's still the ads that tell the truest story: on the back cover, "Just like old times...Have a Coca-Cola," and in the midst of a soda fountain scene, with pretty girls in pageboy hairdos, the pipe-smoking father points over his soldier's shoulder to the two bars of ribbon. A footnote says, Our fighting men meet up with Coca-Cola many places overseas where it's bottled on the spot."
From this sampling, here's what strikes me: the "can-do" hearty goodwill and success of U.S. troops; the "can-do" and willing sacrifice of folks back home. This is commercial propaganda at its best. I'm serious. World War was brutal; hundreds of thousands of Americans died or were injured. But the war boosted the United States out of the Depression, gave it humming industry and purpose, united the country (at least on the surface), and pushed into existence social changes, like allowing African-Americans and Japanese-Americans into the military, which would have been hard to win otherwise. Not only that, it put women to work in industries where before they would not have been welcome. To incorporate these changes fully into peacetime society would take decades. I can't help but thrill to the sloughing of prejudice and willingness to work together for a truly momentous purpose which these issues of Life recognize.
Do we still have such energy and focused purpose? I won't answer that except to say, I pray that some galvanizing event will rouse us from our contentious lethargy and selfishness to create an all-out determined assault on the energy crisis which burns just below the surface. It's our war of the worlds today.
The magazine, I mean. Life Magazine as a large weekly magazine, with glossy paper and often full-page ads, came into existence in 1936 when Henry Luce bought the name from a smaller-scale humor "rag." Throughout World War II and the 1950s, Life brought images of war and peacetime prosperity into millions of American homes.
Why do we care? The ads! Better than any photograph (and the legion of outstanding photographers working for Life includes Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa), Life ads show the United States undergoing an enormous transition. Pages 2 and 3 from June 22, 1942: on the right a full-page ad for the Bell Telephone System with a drawing of a lovely young lady with cameo pin and soft curls at the back of her neck, speaking into a receiver of an telephone with a "cradle." "When war needs delay your call...let's put the blame right where it belongs--on the war." The subtext is that beauty and romance in its old-fashioned guise will be delayed, but accepted with a smile because of the war.
On the adjacent page, a young man rises in pencil drawings from a sailor to a chief petty officer. Though often at sea, his Arrow Collar make him so irresistible that Genevieve believes him when he boasts:
it won't be planes, ships or cannon
that will win the war, he'll do it
single-handed.
Note: Davy drags home knocked-out German, Italian, and Japanese, each caricatured so deftly they're unmistakable. His puss is ready for Gen to kiss.
By June 14,1943, Graduation graces the front cover of Life, but inside it's very much war business: Pages 44-45, Western Electric sends an "Uncle Sam-clothed" arm pointing to a plane flying above the clouds: "Radar puts its finger on our enemies," while on the facing page "Romance begins when Five O'Clock Shadow Ends," and the sailor with a cute snub-nose grins as he's surrounded by a bevy of pretty girls. It's an ad for Gem razor blades.
Is there any text on these pages: Yup. A thin column of pretty girls in backless dresses, the newest summer fashion. Begins the article: "Since many women will not be getting to the country or shore this summer, country fashions are going to the city." The implication is that everyone makes sacrifices for the war, but there are dandy compensations.
Finally from April 30, 1945, in the last year of the war, "Life's War Artists" are on the cover Inside there are pages of vivid images from war artists: note Bruce Mitchell's drawings from Iran where American soldiers and sailors off-load a ship with supplies for Russia, and trucks deliver Lend-Lease supplies over 750 miles of "frying desert and brutal mountains" to Karzin. But for my money, it's still the ads that tell the truest story: on the back cover, "Just like old times...Have a Coca-Cola," and in the midst of a soda fountain scene, with pretty girls in pageboy hairdos, the pipe-smoking father points over his soldier's shoulder to the two bars of ribbon. A footnote says, Our fighting men meet up with Coca-Cola many places overseas where it's bottled on the spot."
From this sampling, here's what strikes me: the "can-do" hearty goodwill and success of U.S. troops; the "can-do" and willing sacrifice of folks back home. This is commercial propaganda at its best. I'm serious. World War was brutal; hundreds of thousands of Americans died or were injured. But the war boosted the United States out of the Depression, gave it humming industry and purpose, united the country (at least on the surface), and pushed into existence social changes, like allowing African-Americans and Japanese-Americans into the military, which would have been hard to win otherwise. Not only that, it put women to work in industries where before they would not have been welcome. To incorporate these changes fully into peacetime society would take decades. I can't help but thrill to the sloughing of prejudice and willingness to work together for a truly momentous purpose which these issues of Life recognize.
Do we still have such energy and focused purpose? I won't answer that except to say, I pray that some galvanizing event will rouse us from our contentious lethargy and selfishness to create an all-out determined assault on the energy crisis which burns just below the surface. It's our war of the worlds today.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz
Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz
The first that belonged to me was a small tiger cat who probably wandered into the courtyard at The Old Citadel and was adopted. I remember this tiger car more in losing it than in its care. But lost, it haunted my walks to school. I must have been in the second grade.
My calls echoed down narrow Charleston streets--Vanderhorst, was the one I remember, notable as much for its long and non-English name, as for what it took me past--the side of a large white church whose front had stout white columns; many ramshackled "narrow end to the street" Charleston houses, which hadn't been painted in almost a century.
All kinds of stray dogs and cats wandered that long street to the "lower school" of Ashley Hall. I called and called over many days, until one morning a little tiger cat, barely grown from a kitten, came bounding up to me. Though, even then, I sensed it was not the same cat, I scooped it up and carried it to Mrs. Watkins, my beautiful second-grade teacher with the white pageboy. She like my mother was a "Citadel professor's wife." I couldn't keep the kitten in the classroom, she said, but we could take it to the principal's house and the principal would call my mother. When I came home that afternoon, there it was in our huge Old Citadel kitchen with the dark brown painted floor, waiting and mewing its little pink mouth.
Only now do I imagine what my mother had to do to retrieve it: first, leave my younger sister with the neighbor across the hall, then walk herself down long Vanderhorst street, across the playing fields of Ashley Hall behind the row of two-story little houses where the "lower school" classes met, then stepping up onto a raised copse of trees, she entered the principal's little house. What was her name, this formidable woman with the iron grey hair pulled back in a bun, and the steel spectacles? Maybe it will come back to me. Whether she actually lived in that little house--dark green with white trim--or merely had her office there, I don't know. Only one other time did I take notice of it. That was in sixth grade. By then I had moved upstairs to the second small house and become one of the "big girls" in the lower school. For some reason my teacher then, Mrs. McCrae, sent me and another girl across the playing fields to the principal's house. I couldn't help myself: there on her desk (in her absence) stood stacks of achievement tests.
This was way before the years of No Child Left Behind--that Bush-era mandate for frequent standardized testing which so bedevils educators today. But Ashley Hall did test its students toward the end of every year, and I, one of the known "smart girls," had a yen to achieve so strong that I overstepped the boundaries between what was right and what was wrong: I looked at the ranking of the girls in my grade. There was my name, right at the top. As far as I can remember, it was the only strictly illegal thing I did until much much later.
The Catz kept coming, though not after a doggie period when we moved to Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River Bridge, and owned first a red hound named Rover, and then a stray pooch my sister named Missy. Missy was sweet, with a round belly, and black ears and tail; her body tan like a Siamese. One afternoon I shashayed home in my starched crinolines and there in the shed, my sister sat with Missy and four puppies. My sister, with her soft heart, was weeping: she had seen the birth. I WAS way too far gone into teen posturing to pay much attention.
The first that belonged to me was a small tiger cat who probably wandered into the courtyard at The Old Citadel and was adopted. I remember this tiger car more in losing it than in its care. But lost, it haunted my walks to school. I must have been in the second grade.
My calls echoed down narrow Charleston streets--Vanderhorst, was the one I remember, notable as much for its long and non-English name, as for what it took me past--the side of a large white church whose front had stout white columns; many ramshackled "narrow end to the street" Charleston houses, which hadn't been painted in almost a century.
All kinds of stray dogs and cats wandered that long street to the "lower school" of Ashley Hall. I called and called over many days, until one morning a little tiger cat, barely grown from a kitten, came bounding up to me. Though, even then, I sensed it was not the same cat, I scooped it up and carried it to Mrs. Watkins, my beautiful second-grade teacher with the white pageboy. She like my mother was a "Citadel professor's wife." I couldn't keep the kitten in the classroom, she said, but we could take it to the principal's house and the principal would call my mother. When I came home that afternoon, there it was in our huge Old Citadel kitchen with the dark brown painted floor, waiting and mewing its little pink mouth.
Only now do I imagine what my mother had to do to retrieve it: first, leave my younger sister with the neighbor across the hall, then walk herself down long Vanderhorst street, across the playing fields of Ashley Hall behind the row of two-story little houses where the "lower school" classes met, then stepping up onto a raised copse of trees, she entered the principal's little house. What was her name, this formidable woman with the iron grey hair pulled back in a bun, and the steel spectacles? Maybe it will come back to me. Whether she actually lived in that little house--dark green with white trim--or merely had her office there, I don't know. Only one other time did I take notice of it. That was in sixth grade. By then I had moved upstairs to the second small house and become one of the "big girls" in the lower school. For some reason my teacher then, Mrs. McCrae, sent me and another girl across the playing fields to the principal's house. I couldn't help myself: there on her desk (in her absence) stood stacks of achievement tests.
This was way before the years of No Child Left Behind--that Bush-era mandate for frequent standardized testing which so bedevils educators today. But Ashley Hall did test its students toward the end of every year, and I, one of the known "smart girls," had a yen to achieve so strong that I overstepped the boundaries between what was right and what was wrong: I looked at the ranking of the girls in my grade. There was my name, right at the top. As far as I can remember, it was the only strictly illegal thing I did until much much later.
The Catz kept coming, though not after a doggie period when we moved to Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River Bridge, and owned first a red hound named Rover, and then a stray pooch my sister named Missy. Missy was sweet, with a round belly, and black ears and tail; her body tan like a Siamese. One afternoon I shashayed home in my starched crinolines and there in the shed, my sister sat with Missy and four puppies. My sister, with her soft heart, was weeping: she had seen the birth. I WAS way too far gone into teen posturing to pay much attention.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky
Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky
I thought I'd never forget my outrage at Richard Nixon in the presidency (1969-74), but so I have, until now, when listening to Barbara Tuchman's occasional pieces brings his astonishing depredations roiling back. Yet, he was in office when some of the cornerstones of our contemporary era were put in place: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, even abolishing the draft and putting in place an all-civilian army. He also visited China and shook Mao's hand, the first American President to do so, which signaled to Russia that we were cultivating another Communist power, and may have furthered the rounds of talks to limit American and Russian nuclear arms proliferation.
Two things stand out in Tuchman's incisive considerations: that the U.S. as a whole was just emerging from its Communist "witch-hunt"--she cites such activity as a recurring strain in the American character--all the way back to the Massachusetts witch trials in 1690. Nixon had risen to prominence in the House Un-American Activities Committee which helped finger Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He also created a "pink sheet" against his opponent in the 1949 California Senate campaign. This kind of suspicious sniffing around, along with a taste for undercover politics helped fuel the three major mistakes that led to his forced resignation (rather than impeachment). First as president, his tape-recording daily notes about his "agents," and then these agents' dirty tricks: bugging political opponents, harrassing activist groups, and breaking into Democratic party headquarters to steal supposedly incriminating papers--the Watergate affair. Finally his undercover bombing of Cambodia and Laos, once it was exposed, not only enraged the legions of anti-war activists but also added to Nixon's reputation for going underground to proceed outside legal channels.
I remember loathing him. But it was more for the man's weasel looks and his sneaky "smile-in-your-face" while stabbing you in the back behavior that I remember. We shouldn't blame the weasel, after all, who is no more than a small predator trying to sustain itself in a narrow environmental niche. Barbara Tuchman, writing in the 1980s, suggests that the American presidency under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had risen above its supposed limitations to act outside the checks and balances forged in the constitution. Now, when our various heads of state--Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton or our country's president Barack Obama--are so mightily opposed and stymied by gridlock in Congress or state legislature, when the legislative branches of government seem unable to reach consensus and pass necessary measures to reduce a mountain of national debt--I muse back on this era when presidents operated with sweeping powers, and wonder what the heck we can expect next. For all-out brawls, just this side of civil war, it's hard to imagine anymore more wild than the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 or the various occupation of capitol grounds and flight of legislators in contemporary Wisconsin. Political theater at its wild and wooliest. I guess I'd rather have the conflict out in the open rather than, as Nixon tried, secretive and illegal. But when it means an obstruction of necessary government, I'd like to dispense with both.
I thought I'd never forget my outrage at Richard Nixon in the presidency (1969-74), but so I have, until now, when listening to Barbara Tuchman's occasional pieces brings his astonishing depredations roiling back. Yet, he was in office when some of the cornerstones of our contemporary era were put in place: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, even abolishing the draft and putting in place an all-civilian army. He also visited China and shook Mao's hand, the first American President to do so, which signaled to Russia that we were cultivating another Communist power, and may have furthered the rounds of talks to limit American and Russian nuclear arms proliferation.
Two things stand out in Tuchman's incisive considerations: that the U.S. as a whole was just emerging from its Communist "witch-hunt"--she cites such activity as a recurring strain in the American character--all the way back to the Massachusetts witch trials in 1690. Nixon had risen to prominence in the House Un-American Activities Committee which helped finger Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He also created a "pink sheet" against his opponent in the 1949 California Senate campaign. This kind of suspicious sniffing around, along with a taste for undercover politics helped fuel the three major mistakes that led to his forced resignation (rather than impeachment). First as president, his tape-recording daily notes about his "agents," and then these agents' dirty tricks: bugging political opponents, harrassing activist groups, and breaking into Democratic party headquarters to steal supposedly incriminating papers--the Watergate affair. Finally his undercover bombing of Cambodia and Laos, once it was exposed, not only enraged the legions of anti-war activists but also added to Nixon's reputation for going underground to proceed outside legal channels.
I remember loathing him. But it was more for the man's weasel looks and his sneaky "smile-in-your-face" while stabbing you in the back behavior that I remember. We shouldn't blame the weasel, after all, who is no more than a small predator trying to sustain itself in a narrow environmental niche. Barbara Tuchman, writing in the 1980s, suggests that the American presidency under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had risen above its supposed limitations to act outside the checks and balances forged in the constitution. Now, when our various heads of state--Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton or our country's president Barack Obama--are so mightily opposed and stymied by gridlock in Congress or state legislature, when the legislative branches of government seem unable to reach consensus and pass necessary measures to reduce a mountain of national debt--I muse back on this era when presidents operated with sweeping powers, and wonder what the heck we can expect next. For all-out brawls, just this side of civil war, it's hard to imagine anymore more wild than the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 or the various occupation of capitol grounds and flight of legislators in contemporary Wisconsin. Political theater at its wild and wooliest. I guess I'd rather have the conflict out in the open rather than, as Nixon tried, secretive and illegal. But when it means an obstruction of necessary government, I'd like to dispense with both.
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