Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Margotlog: Nothing Gold Can Stay

It is a most glorious, glimmering morning, with maple leaves turning from green to gold, and I am
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.

 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!"

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.

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.

Margotlog: How "Weeds" and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, Us

Margotlog: How Weeds and Dirt Can Save Birds, Insects, and Us
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
and kill those devil "weeds." Turns out, according to many rather dire reports from arborists and
ornithologists, the glorious, manucured, "one size fits all" LAWN is killing birds, not to mention hordes of insects which birds need to survive.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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!

A White Squirrel in the Rain

A White Squirrel in the Rain

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,

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." 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I felt as if a part of a mystery had been solved.

A Sudden Hush

A Sudden Hush

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

"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.

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."

Margotlog: 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.

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."

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.

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."

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. 

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).

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.

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.

Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

Margotlog: Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.