Margotlog: My North Dakota Grandmother Augusta
When my sister visited from Boston last week, we dragged out the family albums and letters. Really, it's only one side of the family that's represented, and only one letter writer--our North Dakota grandmother, our mother's mother Augusta. We knew her not at all. But we knew the town of Hankinson, North Dakota quite well because our mother Maxine took us there, summer after summer, to stay in the big house where she grew up. It's still there, the house, being renovated by an enterprising family, after being broken into apartments, and generally neglected for years.
But that's another, more recent story. What my sister and I found, or more truly, read for the first time were a sheaf of letters written in our grandmother Augusta's fast, open hand during the winter and spring of 1928, the year our mother and her older sister Elinor lived together near the University of Minnesota. Their address was 1312 7th St SE, Minneapolis.
Sometimes Augusta addressed the letters to Elinor Maxine Wipperman, no comma between the first names, certainly no zip code. Each small envelope contained two, maybe three pages written on both sides of somewhat yellowed paper. Each sheet, not even as wide as my stretched out hand. But the pages are still intact. It was 1928: My mother was a junior at the University, her older sister Elinor a senior.
Augusta addressed my mother not as Maxine but as Mousie. Despite being shy, our mother would be the in-coming president of her sorority, Phi Omega Pi. She was making very good grades. But she was Mousie, her sister the older, less pampered Elinor.
You would never know from these letters that a handful of disasters had struck the family: Augusta suffered a nervous breakdown, the first or second year my mother went to the University. There's enough family lore to explain that without her children, she fell into depression and had to be hospitalized. There's also the whispered implication that her husband, my grandfather, at least 10 years older than she, beat her, probably trying to "beat some sense into her." Maybe she would not stop weeping.
The sprightly, loving tone of these letters gives a lie to such a tale, but I heard it in whispered conversations from my mother, though she never implicated her father in any way. I heard about that from my cousins who grew up in Hankinson. Their father was my mother's twin brother, Bud to our Mousie.
My mother idolized her father, a self-made man who'd come from Milwaukee to take a job in a mercantile establishment, married (his first marriage) the owner's daughter, and in time owned the company. He later acquired a handful of rental properties and quite a bit of farm land outside town, around Lake Elsie.
My mother's family was well-off by the time she was born. Years later, I experienced "Papa Max's house" as a mansion, but it wasn't that. Rather a well-built, spacious two-story prairie home with a full attic. Its shadowed rooms were lined with gleaming walnut woodwork, the upstairs bedrooms papered with cabbage roses or iris, a different design for each daughter's bedroom.
By 1928, the agricultural depression had preceded the stock market crash of 1932, and eaten into the well-being of local business. In one of her 1928 letters August comments that it was 100 degrees that May afternoon, but she had to bake a turkey because a farmer had come into town wanting to trade it for some flour. The turkey had to be cooked or go bad. "I served it cold with potato salad," wrote Augusta to her daughters the next day. "I plan to make 'chicken salad' tonight."
It's clear August was in charge of the household, and her mothering extended to the University and advising her daughters about clothes. "Mousie," she would write, "when you come home to keep house for Papa, bring a warm sweater--it's sometimes chilly in June. But buy a nice new voile dress in town, something peachy, and a pair of cotton knickers too."
In another letter she will make Mousie undies from "Papa's wedding suit...nice fabric and the silk lining is lovely. The suit is too small for him now." Even in our tight times as the professor's "girls" in South Carolina, our mother never considered taking apart an outgrown suit to make us undies. This difference hints at Augusta's need to contribute to her daughter's wardrobe in the most satisfactory way possible, using fine fabric and her evident skill as a seamstress. She could make what was needed for practically nothing.
Times were tight, but not that tight. Augusta would soon leave on the train for New York, "going east," as my mother used to say, to visit one of her older sisters, the one she called "Aunt Lena." What Lena was doing in New York I have no idea. But many of Augusta's May letters describe intricate plans for her train trip east. Mousie is to get on the Soo Line train in Minneapolis and ride with her mother to Saint Paul, where they'll "have a lovely dinner in the station." That would be Union Station which was beautifully renovated recently, perhaps to its original glory as the Twin Cities' railroad hub, where my sister, mother and I would also change trains years later, heading to North Dakota after our three days and two nights from South Carolina.
It touches me to hear how precise and insistent Augusta is about seeing her youngest daughter. If Mousie can't meet her on Monday, then she'll change her departure for Sunday. "You are to slide through the turnstile and some sit with me," August directs. Or, "I'll be on the observation platform when the train pulls in, watching for you."
I assume that this trip of six weeks to see her sister in New York would be therapeutic. She will not be lonesome, but active, involved, going to sit on the beach in her green sweater. Beach? This is not the New York City of skyscrapers and busy traffic I've envisioned. Perhaps beach means Long Island or Coney Island. No letters remain from Augusta's trip to explain.
She died when I was three months old, dying at home from stomach cancer. I know the small narrow room the family created for her illness, downstairs beside the front bedroom where Papa Max slept when we visited years ago.Even as a child, I sensed something closed and secret in her bedroom with its narrow cot and toilet. Standing in front of the dressing table mirror, I brushed my heavy dark hair with Augusta's soft bristled brush on the dressing table. The brush did nothing but glide across my heavy hair. It was hard to open the warped drawers of the tiny table. But the sense of her gentle, dusty presence remains with me. I wish I had known her alive, though the letters are probably the next best thing.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog
Margotlog: Sitting on the Porch with Cats, or Maybe a Dog
No matter how depressed I get, summer season only, there's an instant remedy--lifting one of our two (out of three) cats who'll tolerate a sit on the back deck, and carrying her (they're all hers) out with me. The deck itself stands rather high off the ground. The bench at the back of the deck (there's no roof or awning except the towering silver maple) at this time of year is wreathed with flowers--red hot pokers, purple pansies, yellow and gold marigolds, petunias (always some of the only kind that smell--midnight blue) and various spiky white and pink things whose names I forget the minute they're potted.
With Julia, the black and white, lying at my side, my hand stroking her from ears to rump and flicking off the gathered fur, I stare into the deep backyard, trying to make out what birds are on the mid-way "fountain" feeder, meaning arms that rise up like fountaining water, and carry with them various kinds of bird feeders. The two types of familiar woodpeckers--downy and hairy--push themselves up and down the center pole--don't ask me why--then flit to the suet and fruit cakes. Chickadees with their chick-a-dee-dee, undulate from the dying apple tree--kept especially for their staging area--snatch a seed from the round "just for them" feeder, and undulate back. Arguing finches--gold and purple--land in groups on the sunflower feeders.
Yesterday, Julia and I (she's named an honorary bird watcher) followed an intensely yellow goldfinch fly in, grab a seed, fly back to the apple branch where it met its wing-fluttering, whining offspring, who did not let the parent out of its sight. If the golden glow of the parent sped to the feeder and did not return within a minute, the gray-brown child followed, perching on the top knot of the feeder, doing its wing-flutter beg.
Are these creatures my real family? Or is their ability to charm and delight a factor of how little I resemble them, but how much I love them? Probably the second. How I came to the cat thing is not a surprise. When I was in first grade, I "rescued" a meowing baby tabby cat as I walked to school. Carried him to my teacher who had the sense to call my mother rather than insist I release the varmint outside. And my mother had the sense to walk herself and my smaller sister the seven long blocks on foot from the Old Citadel in Charleston, S.C., where we lived, to the three or four houses that the lower school of Ashley Hall used for early grades. This kitten grew into a cat, but didn't live long, as I dimly remember. Still he was my cat, my first rescue.
These days with "rescue" animals all around us, we are familiar with the obvious human (or maybe American) need to do right by wounded, lost, defeated, abandoned animals (usually domestic). But in the 50s when I was in school, such an idea did not exist. We might take in a vagrant cat or dog and make it our pet, but we did so as individuals. We could not join a group dedicated to such activities, as has my neighbor, a single woman with a house of her own, who has left corporate America to write for a rescue organization. Now she works at home with her two rescue dogs and various puppies she fosters toward new owners.
Yet my mother, who was far from sentimental except about Italian tenors (she married one), seemed to grasp my need for that cat I rescued. But she never fed the birds, though she appreciated the cardinals who sang in her Charleston back yard, the fifteen years she sat every evening with her "Chummie," a low-to-the-ground mutt, with crinkly fur and an entirely friendly manner. The fifteen years she lived alone after my father died. I do not live alone, but I need to foster, feed, watch, enjoy the birds I can draw to my yard, and we humans in our house love our three cats, even the ever timid Tilly who would fight any attempt to take her outside for a sit on the back porch.
No matter how depressed I get, summer season only, there's an instant remedy--lifting one of our two (out of three) cats who'll tolerate a sit on the back deck, and carrying her (they're all hers) out with me. The deck itself stands rather high off the ground. The bench at the back of the deck (there's no roof or awning except the towering silver maple) at this time of year is wreathed with flowers--red hot pokers, purple pansies, yellow and gold marigolds, petunias (always some of the only kind that smell--midnight blue) and various spiky white and pink things whose names I forget the minute they're potted.
With Julia, the black and white, lying at my side, my hand stroking her from ears to rump and flicking off the gathered fur, I stare into the deep backyard, trying to make out what birds are on the mid-way "fountain" feeder, meaning arms that rise up like fountaining water, and carry with them various kinds of bird feeders. The two types of familiar woodpeckers--downy and hairy--push themselves up and down the center pole--don't ask me why--then flit to the suet and fruit cakes. Chickadees with their chick-a-dee-dee, undulate from the dying apple tree--kept especially for their staging area--snatch a seed from the round "just for them" feeder, and undulate back. Arguing finches--gold and purple--land in groups on the sunflower feeders.
Yesterday, Julia and I (she's named an honorary bird watcher) followed an intensely yellow goldfinch fly in, grab a seed, fly back to the apple branch where it met its wing-fluttering, whining offspring, who did not let the parent out of its sight. If the golden glow of the parent sped to the feeder and did not return within a minute, the gray-brown child followed, perching on the top knot of the feeder, doing its wing-flutter beg.
Are these creatures my real family? Or is their ability to charm and delight a factor of how little I resemble them, but how much I love them? Probably the second. How I came to the cat thing is not a surprise. When I was in first grade, I "rescued" a meowing baby tabby cat as I walked to school. Carried him to my teacher who had the sense to call my mother rather than insist I release the varmint outside. And my mother had the sense to walk herself and my smaller sister the seven long blocks on foot from the Old Citadel in Charleston, S.C., where we lived, to the three or four houses that the lower school of Ashley Hall used for early grades. This kitten grew into a cat, but didn't live long, as I dimly remember. Still he was my cat, my first rescue.
These days with "rescue" animals all around us, we are familiar with the obvious human (or maybe American) need to do right by wounded, lost, defeated, abandoned animals (usually domestic). But in the 50s when I was in school, such an idea did not exist. We might take in a vagrant cat or dog and make it our pet, but we did so as individuals. We could not join a group dedicated to such activities, as has my neighbor, a single woman with a house of her own, who has left corporate America to write for a rescue organization. Now she works at home with her two rescue dogs and various puppies she fosters toward new owners.
Yet my mother, who was far from sentimental except about Italian tenors (she married one), seemed to grasp my need for that cat I rescued. But she never fed the birds, though she appreciated the cardinals who sang in her Charleston back yard, the fifteen years she sat every evening with her "Chummie," a low-to-the-ground mutt, with crinkly fur and an entirely friendly manner. The fifteen years she lived alone after my father died. I do not live alone, but I need to foster, feed, watch, enjoy the birds I can draw to my yard, and we humans in our house love our three cats, even the ever timid Tilly who would fight any attempt to take her outside for a sit on the back porch.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!
Margotlog: Summer Bliss and Summer Blah!
Here in fly-over land we've had a beautiful spate of clear, sunshiny days, low humidity, fresh breezes. The last few days especially, the sky has looked like a clear polished gem winding us around a god's finger. Monarchs arrived earlier than I've seen in years, flitting among the huge stand of milkweed populating our patch of boulevard. For a brief moment, I imagined the world was saved. Farms worldwide had outlawed neoniconicides, and soon all would be well with bees, butterflies, not to mention those of us on two legs who depend on water sources and soil and air.That fantasy dissipated as I walked down the block and found two car/trucks idling their engines as the occupants stood outside and gabbed. Where were the environment police?
Out back, high clouds of green have taken over the sky. I dream up into them, remembering "green, how I love you, Green" (Neruda) while beside me Julia hums her own purr of pleasure. From the bird feeders we catch chickadees' deep-in-the-throat gurgle, and gold and rosy finch chatter, and the squawks of many many woodpeckers stabbing at suet. Truly I've seen more downy and hairy woodpeckers than ever before at our summer feeders, while the dozens of finches pile onto the open-work sunflower cage like starving immigrants just off the boat.
I've been listening for birds that hide in the shrubbery--cat birds and wrens. They're back, just not where they were last year, but within range of my feet. Once I saw four wrens slice across a nearby alley and into a bush, chattering up a storm. They're so sassy, these little mites, but also hard to pin down, with nothing of a robin's sedate saunter from yard to yard.
No one has died, no one was struck by lighting, no one ran out of gas on the freeway. The daughter, for her birthday, is going to Sicily in October, on her mother's dime, and I, the mother, could not be happier. At first she and I talked about going together, but when I saw her excitement, meeting her friends in Western Massachusetts, I knew instantly who her companions should be. "It's a trip of a lifetime," she just wrote me from Minneapolis. Well, maybe not of a lifetime, but of this moment. She works so hard, and she's such a good "mom" to two dogs and two cats, not to mention such a good daughter to divorced parents. It's time to get away, so far away that until a few months ago she had never hear of the town where her tour will be based--Taromina, on the west coast of Sicily, above sun-bright sea with a real volcano rising in the distance--Mt. Etna.
But not all sudden visitations are so happy. Four days ago I woke with such agony in my eyes I felt sure they'd split open. The "layers of my cornea had come unstuck." This has happened before, enough times that every night, I apply eye ointment and every morning use artificial tears to help the lids open without dislodging the fragile layers with their bursts of pain. But this pain was not a burst. It was an eruption--wave after wave. I walked around with my head down and begged the gods for mercy. Next day the eyes were red, lids swollen. Pink eye. Common disease of kindergarten. Had I shaken the hands of any kindergarteners?
The nurse at CVS Mini Clinic knew just what to order. Now three days later, hours pass and I'm only minimally aware of being somewhat challenged by light, or wind or fatigue. Imagine a staple being suddenly driven into the eye, and you have the agony that was mine, but now has passed. I won't wish it on anyone. Except to wonder who wished it on me and spitefully plan ways to return the favor in spades once I find out.
Here in fly-over land we've had a beautiful spate of clear, sunshiny days, low humidity, fresh breezes. The last few days especially, the sky has looked like a clear polished gem winding us around a god's finger. Monarchs arrived earlier than I've seen in years, flitting among the huge stand of milkweed populating our patch of boulevard. For a brief moment, I imagined the world was saved. Farms worldwide had outlawed neoniconicides, and soon all would be well with bees, butterflies, not to mention those of us on two legs who depend on water sources and soil and air.That fantasy dissipated as I walked down the block and found two car/trucks idling their engines as the occupants stood outside and gabbed. Where were the environment police?
Out back, high clouds of green have taken over the sky. I dream up into them, remembering "green, how I love you, Green" (Neruda) while beside me Julia hums her own purr of pleasure. From the bird feeders we catch chickadees' deep-in-the-throat gurgle, and gold and rosy finch chatter, and the squawks of many many woodpeckers stabbing at suet. Truly I've seen more downy and hairy woodpeckers than ever before at our summer feeders, while the dozens of finches pile onto the open-work sunflower cage like starving immigrants just off the boat.
I've been listening for birds that hide in the shrubbery--cat birds and wrens. They're back, just not where they were last year, but within range of my feet. Once I saw four wrens slice across a nearby alley and into a bush, chattering up a storm. They're so sassy, these little mites, but also hard to pin down, with nothing of a robin's sedate saunter from yard to yard.
No one has died, no one was struck by lighting, no one ran out of gas on the freeway. The daughter, for her birthday, is going to Sicily in October, on her mother's dime, and I, the mother, could not be happier. At first she and I talked about going together, but when I saw her excitement, meeting her friends in Western Massachusetts, I knew instantly who her companions should be. "It's a trip of a lifetime," she just wrote me from Minneapolis. Well, maybe not of a lifetime, but of this moment. She works so hard, and she's such a good "mom" to two dogs and two cats, not to mention such a good daughter to divorced parents. It's time to get away, so far away that until a few months ago she had never hear of the town where her tour will be based--Taromina, on the west coast of Sicily, above sun-bright sea with a real volcano rising in the distance--Mt. Etna.
But not all sudden visitations are so happy. Four days ago I woke with such agony in my eyes I felt sure they'd split open. The "layers of my cornea had come unstuck." This has happened before, enough times that every night, I apply eye ointment and every morning use artificial tears to help the lids open without dislodging the fragile layers with their bursts of pain. But this pain was not a burst. It was an eruption--wave after wave. I walked around with my head down and begged the gods for mercy. Next day the eyes were red, lids swollen. Pink eye. Common disease of kindergarten. Had I shaken the hands of any kindergarteners?
The nurse at CVS Mini Clinic knew just what to order. Now three days later, hours pass and I'm only minimally aware of being somewhat challenged by light, or wind or fatigue. Imagine a staple being suddenly driven into the eye, and you have the agony that was mine, but now has passed. I won't wish it on anyone. Except to wonder who wished it on me and spitefully plan ways to return the favor in spades once I find out.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Margotlog: Secrets Told on the Lagoon
Margotlog: Secrets Told on the Lagoon
It takes a while for essential moments of a trip to become apparent. After returning from Venice six weeks ago, images of standing in the bottom of a vaporetto with my friend Chris, crossing the lagoon from Torcello, have come occasionally to mind. Now I know why.
Early this morning I found a gasping Polyphemous moth deep in the back yard. It lay on the ground, its wings rising and falling as it tried to lift. A beautiful, large moth, wide as my hand, its light brown body flounced with white, and two huge eye spots staring from its lower wings. I helped it into my hand and released it into the air. It fell back. The best I could do, then, was to settle it in a tall stand of mint. When I couldn't find it again, I knew our time together was over.
I don't see my friend Chris often, though she may be the earliest friend I have in Minnesota. Our first husbands were medical interns together, and Chris coached me on breast-feeding. And I? What did I give her? Continuation, perhaps. A link with earlier years, and the best, almost unqualified support anyone can give anyone else. Since she has lived in Michigan for many years, we don't see each other often, and there have been been long periods when we only exchanged Christmas cards. Now that we're older, we try to see each other more often, knowing that time is precious.
So we took the chance to visit Venice together. She knew I loved the city and her grandson had told her she must see it. Sharing a large room together, in a former convent not far from San Marco, we came to know each other's bodies more intimately. She's had both breasts removed. I watched her dangle a wonderful padded bra then turn her back and put it on. It doesn't matter if she wears it. She's learned how to dress to mask herself as a no-breasted woman. But it was a mark of our ease with each other that she showed the bra to me, though not the scared flesh where the breasts had been.
We visited Torcello because I said we must. This magical island in the lagoon lies quite far from Venice proper. It's magical because it's largely unpopulated, wild and golden and studded with trees, with a canal of course, and rose bushes beside cafes, and several expansive, low-lying, ritzy establishments. The earliest inhabitants of Venice settled on Torcello and when malaria drove them away, they left behind their 11th-13th-century basilica which most visitors now come to see. It is the oldest remaining church in the archipelago, filled with dusty, golden light, and mosaics that curve into its dome and send the fixed stares of saints and the Madonna down on us below.
Returning across the lagoon to Venice, Chris and I stood in the shadowed bottom of the boat, our hands around a pillar. How we got started on the subject of her breast cancer, I don't remember. But soon she was launched, talking about possibly being affected by a chemical called PBB. As the boat ploughed the gentle waves, she gave me a skeleton of a horrible truth. Between 1973 and 74, a Michigan chemical company unwittingly put PBB, a fire-retandant chemical, in bags that were shipped to feed mills where it was mixed with an animal-feed supplement. The cows that ate the feed almost immediately became ill--"gaunt and weak. Their hooves grew to ghastly proportions. Abscesses developed, and their hides went thick and elephant-like" (Robin Erb, Detroit Free Press).
Chris told me that milk, eggs, and meat for the state were soon contaminated by PBB. Eventually when the cause was identified, thousands of cows directly poisoned by the chemical, were shot. Many farmers lost their entire herds. Chickens, pigs, and sheep who'd eaten by-products from such cows were eventually also put to death. Burying this huge die-off of animals was not always done in ways to protect local water supplies or soil from contamination.
PBB is an endocrine disruptor--it causes cancers of many kinds but especially in organs like breast, thyroid, and uterus that produce or are affected by hormones. "The cows' hooves were curved up like rocking horse bottoms," I remember Chris saying. "They could hardly walk. And many calves were born dead." We had talked about how breast and pancreatic cancer occurred within generations of her family--her mother had died of pancreatic cancer and her grandmother from breast cancer. Her sister had the gene for breast cancer, and later developed the disease. Though Chris didn't have the gene, she had breast cancer, and for the first breast, a radical mastectomy. When it recurred two years later, she had the lumps cut out, chemo, radiation, and tamoxifen. Later when lumps also developed in the second breast, she got tired of having them cut out, and had the entire breast removed even though the lumps were precancerous.
In the semi-darkness of the vaporetto, standing together clutching the pillar, I felt overwhelmed and horrified by her suffering and courage, and by this environmental disaster, so insidious and unrecognized, so ugly in its manifestations for the cows who were the first to ingest the chemical, for the farmers who all of a sudden found their herds deformed, weak and ill, as if a malign genie had spread a poisonous but undetectable dust over the land. In many ways what happened was exactly like that--malign, incomprehensible, coming out of nowhere, and lethal.
Thinking about it, still makes my chest constrict and stomach hurt. Decades have passed. Michigan, which is not a wealthy state, has turned over the monitoring of people affected by PBB to researchers at Emory University, in Atlanta. Finally there will be a federal clean-up of the factory site where PBB was manufactured. Citizens who live in the small Michigan town near the former factory find dead robins in their yards every summer. The ground where the poisoned animals were buried is still itself full of poison..
And my dear friend? I consider her a lucky survivor. I think she does too. There is no direct evidence that her cancers were caused by PBB, but it's possible that her children grew up drinking milk contaminated by PBB. She hopes they will continue unscathed. Many of the children born to farmers whose cows were directly affected with PBB, these children, and some of the farmers themselves, died what we would consider an early death--in their 40s from leukemia or 50s from lung disease or thyroid cancer. Losing a child, after losing a herd and thus a livelihood, seems to me such a burden of loss, grief, and anger as to be almost insupportable. It is hard not to feel that no redress will ever be enough for such toxic negligence. Only a hope for forgiveness.
It takes a while for essential moments of a trip to become apparent. After returning from Venice six weeks ago, images of standing in the bottom of a vaporetto with my friend Chris, crossing the lagoon from Torcello, have come occasionally to mind. Now I know why.
Early this morning I found a gasping Polyphemous moth deep in the back yard. It lay on the ground, its wings rising and falling as it tried to lift. A beautiful, large moth, wide as my hand, its light brown body flounced with white, and two huge eye spots staring from its lower wings. I helped it into my hand and released it into the air. It fell back. The best I could do, then, was to settle it in a tall stand of mint. When I couldn't find it again, I knew our time together was over.
I don't see my friend Chris often, though she may be the earliest friend I have in Minnesota. Our first husbands were medical interns together, and Chris coached me on breast-feeding. And I? What did I give her? Continuation, perhaps. A link with earlier years, and the best, almost unqualified support anyone can give anyone else. Since she has lived in Michigan for many years, we don't see each other often, and there have been been long periods when we only exchanged Christmas cards. Now that we're older, we try to see each other more often, knowing that time is precious.
So we took the chance to visit Venice together. She knew I loved the city and her grandson had told her she must see it. Sharing a large room together, in a former convent not far from San Marco, we came to know each other's bodies more intimately. She's had both breasts removed. I watched her dangle a wonderful padded bra then turn her back and put it on. It doesn't matter if she wears it. She's learned how to dress to mask herself as a no-breasted woman. But it was a mark of our ease with each other that she showed the bra to me, though not the scared flesh where the breasts had been.
We visited Torcello because I said we must. This magical island in the lagoon lies quite far from Venice proper. It's magical because it's largely unpopulated, wild and golden and studded with trees, with a canal of course, and rose bushes beside cafes, and several expansive, low-lying, ritzy establishments. The earliest inhabitants of Venice settled on Torcello and when malaria drove them away, they left behind their 11th-13th-century basilica which most visitors now come to see. It is the oldest remaining church in the archipelago, filled with dusty, golden light, and mosaics that curve into its dome and send the fixed stares of saints and the Madonna down on us below.
Returning across the lagoon to Venice, Chris and I stood in the shadowed bottom of the boat, our hands around a pillar. How we got started on the subject of her breast cancer, I don't remember. But soon she was launched, talking about possibly being affected by a chemical called PBB. As the boat ploughed the gentle waves, she gave me a skeleton of a horrible truth. Between 1973 and 74, a Michigan chemical company unwittingly put PBB, a fire-retandant chemical, in bags that were shipped to feed mills where it was mixed with an animal-feed supplement. The cows that ate the feed almost immediately became ill--"gaunt and weak. Their hooves grew to ghastly proportions. Abscesses developed, and their hides went thick and elephant-like" (Robin Erb, Detroit Free Press).
Chris told me that milk, eggs, and meat for the state were soon contaminated by PBB. Eventually when the cause was identified, thousands of cows directly poisoned by the chemical, were shot. Many farmers lost their entire herds. Chickens, pigs, and sheep who'd eaten by-products from such cows were eventually also put to death. Burying this huge die-off of animals was not always done in ways to protect local water supplies or soil from contamination.
PBB is an endocrine disruptor--it causes cancers of many kinds but especially in organs like breast, thyroid, and uterus that produce or are affected by hormones. "The cows' hooves were curved up like rocking horse bottoms," I remember Chris saying. "They could hardly walk. And many calves were born dead." We had talked about how breast and pancreatic cancer occurred within generations of her family--her mother had died of pancreatic cancer and her grandmother from breast cancer. Her sister had the gene for breast cancer, and later developed the disease. Though Chris didn't have the gene, she had breast cancer, and for the first breast, a radical mastectomy. When it recurred two years later, she had the lumps cut out, chemo, radiation, and tamoxifen. Later when lumps also developed in the second breast, she got tired of having them cut out, and had the entire breast removed even though the lumps were precancerous.
In the semi-darkness of the vaporetto, standing together clutching the pillar, I felt overwhelmed and horrified by her suffering and courage, and by this environmental disaster, so insidious and unrecognized, so ugly in its manifestations for the cows who were the first to ingest the chemical, for the farmers who all of a sudden found their herds deformed, weak and ill, as if a malign genie had spread a poisonous but undetectable dust over the land. In many ways what happened was exactly like that--malign, incomprehensible, coming out of nowhere, and lethal.
Thinking about it, still makes my chest constrict and stomach hurt. Decades have passed. Michigan, which is not a wealthy state, has turned over the monitoring of people affected by PBB to researchers at Emory University, in Atlanta. Finally there will be a federal clean-up of the factory site where PBB was manufactured. Citizens who live in the small Michigan town near the former factory find dead robins in their yards every summer. The ground where the poisoned animals were buried is still itself full of poison..
And my dear friend? I consider her a lucky survivor. I think she does too. There is no direct evidence that her cancers were caused by PBB, but it's possible that her children grew up drinking milk contaminated by PBB. She hopes they will continue unscathed. Many of the children born to farmers whose cows were directly affected with PBB, these children, and some of the farmers themselves, died what we would consider an early death--in their 40s from leukemia or 50s from lung disease or thyroid cancer. Losing a child, after losing a herd and thus a livelihood, seems to me such a burden of loss, grief, and anger as to be almost insupportable. It is hard not to feel that no redress will ever be enough for such toxic negligence. Only a hope for forgiveness.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Dear Friend in Romania, thank you for telling me how you located my poem "Translate," via italianamericanwriters.com/Fortunato.html "Translate" is one of my favorite poems, but not one I
revisit often. So this has been a welcome reunion, poet and poem. It's also a delight to hear that you have included it in your undergraduate paper on English/Italian writers in the United States.
The " blue-eyed one" in the poem is a friend who like me was studying Italian. That's why I included the litanies of Italian words, to suggest our effort to learn the language, and free ourselves from fear about all kinds of other things, notably about our potential power to change or "speak in our key."
"Key" here is first a musical key--I was urging us to make our own music, not play the tired old tunes of repression. But key also unlocked parts of ourselves that were repressed or denied by the dominant, male culture. Some of this language sounds outdated now that feminism, in its many guises, has helped alter attitudes in the U.S. But when I wrote this poem in the 1980s, feminism in the U.S. was only beginning to take hold. Revolution of this kind takes a long time.
The poem was written during the years I was in my first marriage when I was attempting to break free of certain gender restrictions on action, speech, achievement, enjoyment, mistakes. Caution and constraint can be extremely limiting, and during this period of my life, it was my connection to other women who were mothers like me and also trying to claim their own emotions, ideas,and power to act--as I say, only through my connection to other women did I grow to trust myself and take leaps into independence. Those leaps were painful and jarring and, like my divorce, led to breakage.
Before we set a time to call, please tell me what town you live in, so I can look it up on a map.
When you think of me, think of a medium-sized woman, in a medium-sized city, with tree-lined streets, and one of the largest American rivers, the Mississippi, flowing through its downtown. That is Saint Paul, the capital of Minnesota. It is a lovely city with a beautiful, serene cathedral where I often stop simply to find my spirit rise into its welcoming dome and hover with the circle of soldier-saints, my favorite of which is clothed in green.
What soldier saints are doing in a Midwestern American cathedral probably has to do with the spiritual battles we all must fight, no matter what belief system we embrace. But those soldiers also link us to early days when Minnesota was a rough territory, populated by hardy settlers who could survive sub-zero (centigrade) winters and baking hot summers, with a few plagues of locusts thrown in. Minnesota also has a substantial population of Native Americans, some of whom have enough money via casinos, and some of whom do not.
Now I'm going to include the poem you're writing about, "Translate," for the simply joy of experiencing it again.
With all best wishes, Margot
TRANSLATE
1.
We played like children
scales on the keyboard
practicing Italian
subjunctives and dreams,
missing the flats
F sharp in G major,
the difficult plurals
da capo, staccato.
You told about failure,
long legs on the pedals,
you spoke in Italian;
long hair down your back.
2.
I have lived with husband,
marito, marito
who married again,
sposato, espoused
a woman he knew
prima, prima
he began making a garden
giardino, unsown.
I have painted the walls,
muri, muri
I have painted the walls,
grigio, grey.
3.
Last night we talked
without looking down,
your blue eyes sharp,
you played all the notes,
you spoke in our language,
you said it in English,
I learn to be single.
4.
Not lost in the courtyard
perdito, perso
chasing the sky
cielo, cielo
tramps in the garden
giardino, giardino
with outstretched hands
mano, mani
No longer the girl
stumbling, running
who could never be good
buona, bene
followed by tramps
with pockets bulging
followed by tramps
with misplayed scales.
5.
No! I hear you
in the language itself
pull the egg
from the snake's mouth,
pull words from the son,
frame daughter's slammed door.
I hear you, amica,
understand all the notes,
speak in our key.
From
THE ANNUNCIATION, Copyright © 2001
by Margot Fortunato Galt. All rights reserved.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Margotlog: Our Flanders Field
Margotlog: Our Flanders Field
For the British, the deaths in World War I struck hard. In that "war to end all wars," some in British coastal towns could see the flare of mortars and hear the firing of guns in Belgian. In that war of attrition, men dig into trenches equipped almost like houses with cots and kitchens. For weeks, months, years, British and Belgians dug in opposite their German enemies. The soldiers could smell each other's cooking, hear occasional voices raised in agony or song.
I imagine there is a double horror of war fought in such close proximity: fear for one's own agony, coupled with disgust and fear at the agony you cause. Erik Marie Remarque's quintessential war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, (193?) tells it best--the young German students conscripted to fight a war they don't understand, and don't want, who in mud and fear become crazed with waiting, until they rush over the tops into blind hatred and enemy fire.
Of my father and his three brothers, only the youngest, Frankie, went into combat in World War II. Whatever bloodshed he witnessed as he recovered from malaria in North Africa, once he was sent to Naples, his service became the rollicking events of an urban cowboy. He shooed whores into American officers' beds, requisitioed donkeys, bread, and wine. Since he spoke formal and dialectical Italian, he hinted that he's been part of an American/British contingent to urge the Pope to speak out against the war. Yet, even Frankie came home a changed man, refusing to visit his wife and daughter, divorcing and marrying a New York lawyer he'd met in the Army.
My father, called the "professor" by his more he-man brothers, was excused from combat because of poor eyes and flat feet. Instead he did war work at Kabuta in Pennsylvania--who knew what was being manufactured there. In the worker's cottage where we lived, my mother's tales created my first memories--of a doctor leaning over me as she held me down on the kitchen table for him to pierce my eardrum and let the pus drain. "Snow up to the top of the windows," she would say, turning my early memories into scenes from her North Dakota childhood, and making me a prime reader later of the Laura and Marie books.
It's been hard for me to bring war inside the family circle, that is, until this spring when I taught three veterans in a mid-level writing class. One never went overseas, one was a helicopter pilot in Iraq, and one spent a decade in the service, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The two who saw active duty both came home with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Now as I drive my husband to the airport a few days from Memorial Day, my husband, the Vietnam draft refuser who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary rather than escape to Canada or fight in Vietnam, my husband who does not talk about war, any war unless prodded, my husband who has his own kind of scars from his prison experience--he's on his way to play Scrabble in San Jose. But as I pause to study the rows of white crosses in Fort Snelling National Cemetery, I think of my three students, one who proudly described walking with his veteran grandfather among the rows of crosses, anticipating about his own burial there, who came home from Iraq, after flying the wounded from battle to hospital and could not shake the screams and terror from his memory, and the third who eventually trained U.S. soldiers to take their places in Afghanistan, surely one of the strangest wars American soldiers have ever fought.
These two wrote about returning home with a sense of terrified emptiness, becoming easily agitated and losing emotional control, of being unable to look for work or keep their hands from shaking. This is service that saps life for years after the battlefield. With help from the Veterans Administration, each man has found ways to help himself recover--talk therapy, hard exercise, weeping, writing, working with other vets. Whatever else I may think of President Obama, and I'm largely a supporter, I honor his efforts to keep the United States out of active combat in the implosion that is the near east. I honor this, even as I'm horrified at the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the breakdown of civilized decency. It is very hard to tell what will happen there, and what we may be called upon to do.
For the British, the deaths in World War I struck hard. In that "war to end all wars," some in British coastal towns could see the flare of mortars and hear the firing of guns in Belgian. In that war of attrition, men dig into trenches equipped almost like houses with cots and kitchens. For weeks, months, years, British and Belgians dug in opposite their German enemies. The soldiers could smell each other's cooking, hear occasional voices raised in agony or song.
I imagine there is a double horror of war fought in such close proximity: fear for one's own agony, coupled with disgust and fear at the agony you cause. Erik Marie Remarque's quintessential war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, (193?) tells it best--the young German students conscripted to fight a war they don't understand, and don't want, who in mud and fear become crazed with waiting, until they rush over the tops into blind hatred and enemy fire.
Of my father and his three brothers, only the youngest, Frankie, went into combat in World War II. Whatever bloodshed he witnessed as he recovered from malaria in North Africa, once he was sent to Naples, his service became the rollicking events of an urban cowboy. He shooed whores into American officers' beds, requisitioed donkeys, bread, and wine. Since he spoke formal and dialectical Italian, he hinted that he's been part of an American/British contingent to urge the Pope to speak out against the war. Yet, even Frankie came home a changed man, refusing to visit his wife and daughter, divorcing and marrying a New York lawyer he'd met in the Army.
My father, called the "professor" by his more he-man brothers, was excused from combat because of poor eyes and flat feet. Instead he did war work at Kabuta in Pennsylvania--who knew what was being manufactured there. In the worker's cottage where we lived, my mother's tales created my first memories--of a doctor leaning over me as she held me down on the kitchen table for him to pierce my eardrum and let the pus drain. "Snow up to the top of the windows," she would say, turning my early memories into scenes from her North Dakota childhood, and making me a prime reader later of the Laura and Marie books.
It's been hard for me to bring war inside the family circle, that is, until this spring when I taught three veterans in a mid-level writing class. One never went overseas, one was a helicopter pilot in Iraq, and one spent a decade in the service, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The two who saw active duty both came home with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Now as I drive my husband to the airport a few days from Memorial Day, my husband, the Vietnam draft refuser who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary rather than escape to Canada or fight in Vietnam, my husband who does not talk about war, any war unless prodded, my husband who has his own kind of scars from his prison experience--he's on his way to play Scrabble in San Jose. But as I pause to study the rows of white crosses in Fort Snelling National Cemetery, I think of my three students, one who proudly described walking with his veteran grandfather among the rows of crosses, anticipating about his own burial there, who came home from Iraq, after flying the wounded from battle to hospital and could not shake the screams and terror from his memory, and the third who eventually trained U.S. soldiers to take their places in Afghanistan, surely one of the strangest wars American soldiers have ever fought.
These two wrote about returning home with a sense of terrified emptiness, becoming easily agitated and losing emotional control, of being unable to look for work or keep their hands from shaking. This is service that saps life for years after the battlefield. With help from the Veterans Administration, each man has found ways to help himself recover--talk therapy, hard exercise, weeping, writing, working with other vets. Whatever else I may think of President Obama, and I'm largely a supporter, I honor his efforts to keep the United States out of active combat in the implosion that is the near east. I honor this, even as I'm horrified at the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the breakdown of civilized decency. It is very hard to tell what will happen there, and what we may be called upon to do.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide
Margotlog: Across the Racial Divide
When I was growing up in South Carolina--before contemporary civil rights, before Martin Luther King, Jr., before busing, white fight, and the recent police violence against black people in many U.S. cities--I lived in a block-long, castle-like fortress that was built to house the military academy that became The Citadel. My father taught at that college, which had moved north of downtown Charleston, to a lovely site on the Ashley River. Charleston, in its amusing sense of self, used to brag that its two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, came together to form the Atlantic Ocean.
I was a kid who walked to school, to an elite, all-white-girls academy called Ashley Hall. But I walked through neighborhoods where many black people lived. An old granny sat every day in her yard, her hair in a turban, a pipe between her lips. Above, on a long porch, little black kids, too young for school, looked down solemnly at me, as I looked up solemnly at them. It would never have occurred to me, or I suspect to them, that we might speak to each other. But we saw each other every weekday, and I wondered why they didn't have shoes, and why the old granny sat outside and smoked a pipe. I'd never seen a white woman smoke anything at all. As I say, I was very young.
My parents had come from the north, my mother from a tiny town in North Dakota and my father from Pittsburgh, where they met. Initially when we arrived, they had nothing to say about the dark-skinned people we called Negroes. I didn't grow up with a black woman who cooked or cleaned or took me and my sister to the park. My parents knew nothing about the intensely connected ways of Southern blacks and white. But first in my walks to school, then from our Old Citadel custodian, Shorty, and later from riding the city buses, and arguing with my father as civil rights heated up, I learned quite a bit about the complicated, often disheartening, and infuriating, and sometimes simply human ways that black and white people interacted.
Let's say I gathered a satchel of images and voices, attitudes and surmises. Only a few black people actually spoke with me--Shorty came by our apartment to fix a water faucet. He doffed his soft fedora, and with a polite, "Yes, Mrs. Fortunato, yes, ma'am," he entered our kitchen with his tools and stopped the drip. He also took our colored Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink or blue down and began to grow white pin feathers. "Can't have a chicken crowing in the house," my father informed us. Shorty touched the brim of his hat and kindly carted the growing chickens away. We considered it a favor. He probably did too.
Later when I was allowed to go home with some schoolmates from Ashley Hall, I met their "colored maids." These were uniformed women with strict requirements for hand washing and sitting at the table to eat our snack. They bustled like my mother in our Old Citadel kitchen, and they corrected my friends when they got boisterous. Their voices had authority, and my friends obeyed.
Even later, I sat in the back seat of my girlfriend's car while her boyfriend drove us to visit her former cook, now too ill to work. She and her family brought this woman boxes of groceries and, if I remember right, paid for her doctoring. They treated her almost like family, thought she clearly lived a different life, in a small house with a dirt yard, and her daughter's children swarming in and out with questions and childish troubles. This was not the lovely, serene house near the Battery at the end of Charleston where my friend lived. In fact, other than the slew of kids, the old cook's house was more like our own rather cramped dwelling, now that we had moved across the Cooper River to the small town of Mt. Pleasant.
Recently, I've begun to harbor a theory about race in north and south. It goes like this. In Southern towns where white families hired black men and women routinely, where these daily experiences of interacting taught them a range of shared emotions, from irritation to appreciation to obligation and resentment, it was harder to categorize the other race as the enemy, or as hateful. Daily interaction proved time and again that individual connections were rich, valued, and human. Yes, of course, there was racism. The city buses were segregated, and the same black women who worked hard in white kitchens were forced to trudge all the way to the back of the bus, passing me with an empty seat beside me, ashamed and baffled at a system that could extract such indignity from decent, hard-working women.
White people in many Northern cities, like Ferguson, and more recently Baltimore, and including Minneapolis/St. Paul, have systematically moved out of contact with black people. The phenomenon is called "white flight" and it accounts for the acres of white suburbs, while the core cities have become increasingly black. The race divide that did not exist in the Charleston of my childhood has fostered several generations of white people, including many police, who have not grown up knowing black people in a regular, everyday way. The teachers in schools are mostly white, and though they teach black students, they do not understand how their students' extended families work, how clan systems and churches take care of what in white culture is managed within a tighter family circle. I venture to guess they can't "read" black behavior, nor fully understand what black students say.
What they do know is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear engendered by racism, hardened by their black students' poverty. It is very hard to be comfortable when you're teaching students who are intractably poor. You can't grasp some of the essentials of their lives--the fast moves, the shifts from a parent to a grandparent, the ways black boys and then men make up for their degraded status via violence. Because along with "white flight" have gone jobs. Companies have moved from the center of cities to the peripheries.
It is harder and harder for black people caught in poverty to make their way out.
A very clear example is what happened in Minneapolis. About twenty years ago, I began hearing that when the steel towns in the east went bankrupt, leaving black men without the good jobs that had made it possible for them to support families, single black women moved with their children from Gary, Indiana, to Minneapolis, because there were generous public services here. That may have been true, but the communities they created, in North Minneapolis, for instance, have not been able to support their children and grandchildren. There is growing poverty and anger. Growing distance. It makes me sad and troubled. It makes me wish we could reclaim some of what was generous and interactive about southern life when I was growing up, what is now, an increasingly long time ago.
When I was growing up in South Carolina--before contemporary civil rights, before Martin Luther King, Jr., before busing, white fight, and the recent police violence against black people in many U.S. cities--I lived in a block-long, castle-like fortress that was built to house the military academy that became The Citadel. My father taught at that college, which had moved north of downtown Charleston, to a lovely site on the Ashley River. Charleston, in its amusing sense of self, used to brag that its two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, came together to form the Atlantic Ocean.
I was a kid who walked to school, to an elite, all-white-girls academy called Ashley Hall. But I walked through neighborhoods where many black people lived. An old granny sat every day in her yard, her hair in a turban, a pipe between her lips. Above, on a long porch, little black kids, too young for school, looked down solemnly at me, as I looked up solemnly at them. It would never have occurred to me, or I suspect to them, that we might speak to each other. But we saw each other every weekday, and I wondered why they didn't have shoes, and why the old granny sat outside and smoked a pipe. I'd never seen a white woman smoke anything at all. As I say, I was very young.
My parents had come from the north, my mother from a tiny town in North Dakota and my father from Pittsburgh, where they met. Initially when we arrived, they had nothing to say about the dark-skinned people we called Negroes. I didn't grow up with a black woman who cooked or cleaned or took me and my sister to the park. My parents knew nothing about the intensely connected ways of Southern blacks and white. But first in my walks to school, then from our Old Citadel custodian, Shorty, and later from riding the city buses, and arguing with my father as civil rights heated up, I learned quite a bit about the complicated, often disheartening, and infuriating, and sometimes simply human ways that black and white people interacted.
Let's say I gathered a satchel of images and voices, attitudes and surmises. Only a few black people actually spoke with me--Shorty came by our apartment to fix a water faucet. He doffed his soft fedora, and with a polite, "Yes, Mrs. Fortunato, yes, ma'am," he entered our kitchen with his tools and stopped the drip. He also took our colored Easter chicks down to his farm on Johns Island when they lost their pink or blue down and began to grow white pin feathers. "Can't have a chicken crowing in the house," my father informed us. Shorty touched the brim of his hat and kindly carted the growing chickens away. We considered it a favor. He probably did too.
Later when I was allowed to go home with some schoolmates from Ashley Hall, I met their "colored maids." These were uniformed women with strict requirements for hand washing and sitting at the table to eat our snack. They bustled like my mother in our Old Citadel kitchen, and they corrected my friends when they got boisterous. Their voices had authority, and my friends obeyed.
Even later, I sat in the back seat of my girlfriend's car while her boyfriend drove us to visit her former cook, now too ill to work. She and her family brought this woman boxes of groceries and, if I remember right, paid for her doctoring. They treated her almost like family, thought she clearly lived a different life, in a small house with a dirt yard, and her daughter's children swarming in and out with questions and childish troubles. This was not the lovely, serene house near the Battery at the end of Charleston where my friend lived. In fact, other than the slew of kids, the old cook's house was more like our own rather cramped dwelling, now that we had moved across the Cooper River to the small town of Mt. Pleasant.
Recently, I've begun to harbor a theory about race in north and south. It goes like this. In Southern towns where white families hired black men and women routinely, where these daily experiences of interacting taught them a range of shared emotions, from irritation to appreciation to obligation and resentment, it was harder to categorize the other race as the enemy, or as hateful. Daily interaction proved time and again that individual connections were rich, valued, and human. Yes, of course, there was racism. The city buses were segregated, and the same black women who worked hard in white kitchens were forced to trudge all the way to the back of the bus, passing me with an empty seat beside me, ashamed and baffled at a system that could extract such indignity from decent, hard-working women.
White people in many Northern cities, like Ferguson, and more recently Baltimore, and including Minneapolis/St. Paul, have systematically moved out of contact with black people. The phenomenon is called "white flight" and it accounts for the acres of white suburbs, while the core cities have become increasingly black. The race divide that did not exist in the Charleston of my childhood has fostered several generations of white people, including many police, who have not grown up knowing black people in a regular, everyday way. The teachers in schools are mostly white, and though they teach black students, they do not understand how their students' extended families work, how clan systems and churches take care of what in white culture is managed within a tighter family circle. I venture to guess they can't "read" black behavior, nor fully understand what black students say.
What they do know is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear engendered by racism, hardened by their black students' poverty. It is very hard to be comfortable when you're teaching students who are intractably poor. You can't grasp some of the essentials of their lives--the fast moves, the shifts from a parent to a grandparent, the ways black boys and then men make up for their degraded status via violence. Because along with "white flight" have gone jobs. Companies have moved from the center of cities to the peripheries.
It is harder and harder for black people caught in poverty to make their way out.
A very clear example is what happened in Minneapolis. About twenty years ago, I began hearing that when the steel towns in the east went bankrupt, leaving black men without the good jobs that had made it possible for them to support families, single black women moved with their children from Gary, Indiana, to Minneapolis, because there were generous public services here. That may have been true, but the communities they created, in North Minneapolis, for instance, have not been able to support their children and grandchildren. There is growing poverty and anger. Growing distance. It makes me sad and troubled. It makes me wish we could reclaim some of what was generous and interactive about southern life when I was growing up, what is now, an increasingly long time ago.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)