Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers

Margotlog: Hillary and My Foremothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look

Margotlog: Urban Foresters Take a Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

Margotlog: Why I Will Vote for Hillary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

Rag Queen: Gender, Generations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   What woman could resist such an invitation?

Margotlog: Taking a Long View

Margotlog: Taking a Long View

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

Margotlog: A Cuban Beside Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

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

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

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

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

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