Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes—especially now—a news story is not the news story. Sometimes what seems significant isn’t. All the time, stuff just happens and making meaning of all that stuff can be exhausting and confusing. (And, must say, New England’s disquieting, alarming, climate-changed weather—for months!—hasn’t helped!)
Just coming out of one of those confusing and exhausting times, I’m moved this morning to lift up three instances, recently, when Spirit broke through the fog:
Friday night, at our monthly Somerville worship-group gathering, a dear, long-time F/friend offered this query: “What do you yearn for?” Try it. Let me know if simply posing that question to yourself is grounding. Do you find that coming up with An Answer not that important? That it’s the process of asking yourself, opening yourself up to look at, to wonder about your deepest hunger, that matters? (Thank you, Chris.)
One of the things I yearn for, apparently, is declarative sentences about love. “Because he’s a twelve-year-old boy. Dogs love those.” (Thank you, Wes Anderson.) Bonus: this declarative sentence is voiced by a female.
Random, anonymous acts of beauty and kindness. Like three packages of Jello, each a different color, artfully arranged on front yard wall. (Thank you, Neighbor, whoever you are.)
A closer look at Ansarinia’s collage, created from two different newspaper articles cut into tiny, geometric shapes. (The geometric pattern she has used was inspired by the Shah Cheragh mosque’s mosaics, Shiraz, Iran.)
About those articles: Both newspapers had written about the same event from differing perspectives; the Iranian artist has interspersed her mosaic pieces so as to make the newsprint unintelligible.
Easily found in Ansarinia’s profound reflection on truth, however, is a head shot of Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad—presently being accused of gassing his own people. Again. (He denies this.)
Front page of the local section, The News & Advance, Lynchburg, VA, October 12, 2008
Dr. Lynda Woodruff, my mentor and friend, died last week. Hearing this awful news, I registered both gut-punched grief and that my first question—Did she die because she’d received inadequate healthcare?—came to me only because I’d been schooled by Lynda.
A woman of “grit and salt” (her words), Lynda schooled so many! My first tutorial with this fierce, brilliant woman happened after I’d mailed her a draft of a book manuscript which, eventually, with her guidance, became Way Opens. “Context!” she’d written in bold letters on that first, pathetic draft. Meaning: You neither know the backstory nor understand its implications. Meaning: You’re a clueless white woman. Meaning: Do your homework.
So I began. And, with Spirit’s guidance, keep on keeping’ on. (Although I already know I’ll earn a C+ at best. )
Something else I note with deep sorrow. “The burden of the race” resting on her shoulders since she was thirteen, over the years Lynda “just got tired.” (Her words.) Can you imagine how exhausting, how debilitating our current political nightmare must have been for her?
Maybe another foot of snow due tomorrow, maybe another opportunity to use our “neighborhood snowblower.” After a very snowy winter a couple of years ago, a bunch of us chipped in to buy one. The next year? It collected dust in our carriage house. But it’s been worth every collective penny this winter; that’s for sure. (Is it wishful thinking to believe that since that gas-powered sidewalk-clearer is shared by several households, our neighborhood reduces its carbon footprint? Anyone? Anyone?)
Who is my neighbor? Buying a snowblower together, sharing ripe tomatoes and zucchini together from the raised-bed vegetable garden in their (more sunny than ours) back yard. These are my neighbors. But what about that woman whose anguished, Haitian-Creole lament woke me up yesterday morning as she walked past my house? Isn’t she my neighbor, too?
“Dead End.” Street sign seen through my window during Nor’easter # 2 (of 3, so far.) March 8, 2018
New England weather such as it right now, I’m reading more. Needing to replenish my books-to-read queue, between storms I stopped by The Book Rack, a funky, used-bookstore in Arlington, MA. Perusing its chock-a-block “Classics” section, I spotted a paperback edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and, vaguely remembering something about its feminist pedigree, gladly paid a whopping $3.00 for Chopin’s “masterpiece”—as declared by its faded, blue, time-worn cover.
The Awakening was first published in 1899, shocking Victorian readers with its frank acknowledgement of female sexuality. So there’s that. Kate Chopin, born in 1851, is a stunningly beautiful writer. So there’s that. The Awakening details how wealthy, New Orleans-based Creole families vacation pre-air conditioning. So there’s that.
There this, too:
Madame Lebrun was busily engaged at the sewing machine. A little black girl sat on the floor, and with her hands worked the treadle of the machine. [Madame Lebrun] does not take any chances which may be avoided of imperiling her health . . .The sewing machine made a resounding clatter in the room; it was a ponderous, bygone make. In the lulls, Robert and his mother exchanged bits of desultory conversation. (p. 38, AVON BOOKS, 1972.)
What are we to make of this? Is that sarcastic remark regarding Madame Lebrun’s delicate health meant to elicit sympathy for the little black girl producing such resounding clatter? Maybe. A child performing a function most contemporaries of Madame Lebrun—who owns the resort where these Creole families vacation—would have performed themselves? Perhaps. So is Chapin slyly asking us to consider that child?
I wish I knew. Definitively. Because I so long to believe that this ground-breaking novelist saw her sewing room scene with woke eyes. But that Chopin supplies that little, black girl with the plainest of adjectives—I mean, c’mon! The sewing machine got fancier labels—but no name tells us something, I think. And that one family’s nanny is simply the quadroon says the same thing, too, I’m afraid.
But here’s the thing. Once I understood that a (probably very hot and thirsty and exhausted) little girl was in that sewing room, too, she participated in every paragraph I read. That nameless child started when, suddenly, Robert, a young man in his twenties, loudly whistled out the opened window to his brother, three stories below. Silently she took in Robert’s and his mother’s conversation—and, perhaps, gauged whatever they discussed in terms of more hardship for herself? She may have even noticed what Robert’s mother did not: that at the mention of Mrs. Pontellier—whose sexual awakening is what this book’s all about—the besotted young man blushed, maybe. Got flustered, maybe. (Chopin merely had him suddenly leave.)
I see you, little black girl. I see you, quadroon.
For decades I’ve been following a “kamish broit” recipe I got from an ex-husband’s step-mother, Sarah Lohman. (Got that?) These walnut biscotti are delicious and ridiculously easy to make. So, Friday, company expected and running late, I automatically pulled out Sarah’s recipe.
Sarah, I suddenly thought, grinding a half a cup of walnuts in my mini-cuisinart. (Which, with a couple of taps of my index finger, reduces the nuts almost to a paste—although her recipe merely calls for “chopped walnuts.”) Who was she? When I was married to her stepson, I never once asked her anything about herself; in my self-involved twenties, I wasn’t interested.
I am, now. A Google search produced a skimpy outline. Her maiden name: Axelrod. Her birthplace: Odessa, Ukraine. The whiff of a story: At age nine months, she and her mother, Ida, arrived in Quebec on June 2, 1907, and moved on to Toronto. (I’d actually remembered she’d grown up in “Canada.” Period. Canada.) And a picture:
So many questions I’d love to ask her. Did your father, Abraham, join you and your mother? (Well, she had two sisters so maybe he did?) Did you experience anti-semitism in Toronto? Tell me about that hat you’re wearing in this picture; what you’re wearing around your neck! What brought you to New York City and The New York Times? (Where she met and married Sidney, my ex father-in-law.)
But here’s another discovery unearthed by keywords and links: The words kamish broit tell another story. After the Diaspora, after years of migration, Jews who found themselves in Italy learned about twice-baked/biscotti. Subsequently, Jews in Eastern Europe made mandel broit or “almond bread”; Jews in the Ukraine made kamish broit or “rushed bread”—but it’s the same recipe! (Well, okay, as you can probably guess, mandel broit is usually made from almonds. Which I will certainly try the next time I’m rushing and company’s coming!)
So when Sarah served kamish broit every time my ex and I visited, she replicated a regional recipe from a country she never knew. I find that strangely touching. And other Jews now in the New World are making basically the same, well-traveled mandel/kamish recipe. (There are many such recipes on the Internet: word for word, Sarah’s follows.)
So when I next dip a kamish broit into milk or coffee, I will both thank Sarah Axelrod Lohman—whose parents’ names I now know—and consider the long journey that biscotti has taken!
Kamish Broit
1/2 cup oil
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups sifted flour
Combine ingredients in order given—flour last. Divide into two loaves [meaning two round, patted-down mounds about a quarter-inch thick each] and bake on cookie sheet in 350 degree over for about 25-30 minutes. Light brown color. Remove, slice while hot [meaning quarter-inch slices, top to bottom. You could make an equator slice, too, but my family likes their kamish broit long.] Put back into hot oven (turned off at this point.) for about 15 minutes. There you have it!
Sunday, chilled, rainy, very windy, I’d almost wished there’d been a fireplace fire in the meetinghouse fireplace. Surely a hearty blaze would brighten my spirits? But, no, I realized. If there were to be any cheering up going on that gloomy morning, it would have to come from within!
And I remembered something someone in my yoga class had said on Thursday. (Actually, this was at our pre-yoga class, when we discuss a poem someone has brought in, or the Sutras, or a piece of writing our gifted teacher wishes to share.) One woman talked about sadness, hard times, grief and loss; how we’re sometimes too eager to be happy. “There’s good reasons to feel sad,” she said.
So I let myself sink into despair. Not to “wallow in it,” as my father always cautioned when anyone in our family dared to be sad. (You were allowed to be sad in my family for about five minutes. Then you had to get over it.) But to be honest! To honor the countless reasons we all have to feel sad.
And, mysteriously, after way more than five minutes of sitting in silence and letting myself “feel the feels,” as my daughter, Hope (!) says, Something happened. As if something inside me had been decluttered, de-cobwebbed, dusted or lemon-oiled or rearranged. As if I’d cleared a space within me to hold this sadness. And it was okay. More than okay. It was exactly what I was supposed to do.
I visit a man in “Seg.” (as in Segregation) Aka “The Hole” or “Solitary Confinement.” (Once, on the phone, while making the required appointment to visit this man, I’d carelessly used the word “Isolation” and was quickly and firmly corrected.) Whatever its label, putting a human being in a tiny room all alone for long periods of time is cruel and unusual punishment. Period. And, yes, in the early nineteenth century, Quakers—and Anglicans—invented this form of punishment so, yes, of course, I feel personally responsible whenever I visit him. And am eternally grateful for the many activists working hard to abolish this inhumane punishment.
His story is his to tell, not mine, so I will offer only this: Let’s just say that because of the times we’re living in, when he’s served his sentence, another sentence will be imposed upon him. And, it seems, there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. (I’ve tried.)
But here’s what I want to report—and to marvel at. In the six months I’ve been visiting him, something truly wondrous has happened! On Friday, the angry, young man I met in September who’d rightfully demanded, “Why me?” shrugged his shoulders; he’s accepted that he cannot change his fate, as deeply unfair as it is. Indeed,he’s viewing his unplanned and unwanted future as, oh, my, an opportunity! Grinning, he struggled to remember the words but eventually nailed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Living well is the best revenge. And gestured as if to acknowledge to the cinderblock walls of the booth where we met, the glass and metal wall that separated us, the guards lurking outside the booth, the prison cells, the barbed wire fences; all that presently surrounded him.
And, yes, there’s a tiny, tiny part of me that wants to believe that those early Quakers and Anglicans were right! And that this man’s transformation was made possible by forcing him to be “penitent.”
But, mostly, I want to marvel at the human spirit. Again. Oh my.
Radcliffe College Alumnae Questionnaire; filled out by my grandmother on November 9, 1939
Yesterday, spurred on my my oldest daughter’s curiosity about my beloved “Grandma,” I spent a couple of hours in the Schlesinger Library perusing Florence Moulton Mirick Wild’s alum folder. (Some people go to spas for self-care; I go to the Schlesinger!) A “Special Student” at Radcliffe College from 1897 until 1899, Florence never graduated but, apparently, felt warmly enough about her college experience to at least continue filling out alumnae forms.
[Before taking a brief look at two ah-hahs from yesterday, a warm, hearty Shout-Out to the Schlesinger! Thank you, insightful and wealthy people, for realizing that the lives of women are important. And that women’s letters and ephemera and papers et al. should be preserved. Yes.]
“Number of servants.”Not sure what surprised me more; that Radcliffe College wanted to know—or that my grandmother reported in 1931, at a time of great financial struggle for millions of people, that the Wild family employed one servant. I am guessing that servant was female, young, Irish, “right off the boat,” as her son, my father, would say. And I wonder: where is this nameless “One”‘s story preserved? (Sadly, I think I know the answer.)
“Excellent for the times“: In my grandmother’s breezy response to a question about how much she earned as “Supervisor for Public School Music” (for the Webster and then the Worcester, MA school systems, 1907 -1912) I detect both her WASPy squeamishness to talk about money and her justifiable pride. How horrified my grandmother would be that in 2018—her first grandchild now a Grandma, too—when it comes to women’s incomes, there still is no parity.
(What would Grandma make of today’s #MeToo movement?)
“The Avenger” by Ernst Barlach. Bronze; cast in 1934. On display at the Fogg Museum, February, 2018
Sometimes I visit an art museum as if expecting to be tested. I study everything, read everything, skip nothing, dutifully walk in the direction the exhibit designers want me to go. Other times I randomly stroll through galleries until a color, a shape, a face demands my attention. Super Bowl Sunday afternoon at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, this face stopped me cold.
There’s a touching story behind that mournful face: Barlach, a German nationalist, created an earlier version of this sculpture from clay and plaster in 1914 as The War To End All Wars (ha!) raged. “As the fighting dragged on and disillusionment increased, however, Barlach envisioned war less as a noble sword-bearer and more as, in his words, ‘a hammer wielding butcher.'”* Years later he carved that same figure, this time from wood, recreating that avenger’s face to reflect his disillusionment, then cast the 2.0 version in bronze.
Quakers talk about “continuing revelation;” how Truth might be cast in stone but/and can also reveal itself in new forms, new ideas, new media.
Not a visual person and all too willing to lose myself in whatever movie I’m watching, at one point in my life having a daughter-as-set-designer changed how I see a film. Sitting in a movie theater I remind myself: “Someone’s daughter made a zillion decisions about what I see right now.” (Yes. I always think daughter. That’s what I do.) “So I better pay attention.” And I do.
So, recently, finding myself completely swept up in “The Post,” I coached myself again. And, oh my! Because what I saw was “The Female Gaze.” Written by Liz Hannah, this movie has women’s fingerprints all over it! Watch the trailer; pay attention to where the camera is, where Meryl Streep is positioned, what colors she wears, the pictures of her family in the background as she argues with Tom Hanks. The camera LOVES her! But, more important, wants us to walk in her pointed-toe pumps as she enters smoke-filled rooms filled with men. Did I love, love, love that the movie’s climax is announced by a women reporter? You betcha!
Sure, it’s a Hollywood movie; sure it’s cornball Capra-esque. Isn’t that why we go to movies? To experience multi-sense entertainment that will provide what we crave: romance, shoot-em-up, fantasy, or in the case of “The Post,” a period piece—oh, to hear Walter Cronkite’s voice again!—celebrating what’s best about this currently bedraggled and riven country.
That’s what I needed. That’s what I got—and, thank you, Liz Hannah—the unexpected joy to see what can happen when a gifted, young woman writes a screenplay!
Enough with the pussy hats! Okay? If we’re really going to smash the patriarchy, my sisters, if all who identify as women are truly going to stand, side by side, we have to do what that patriarchy rarely does. We have to listen. Listen to the voices who said last year—and, told us again this year—this pink pussy thing doesn’t work for me. So. Just. Stop. (Related: And, c’mon! Let’s show some sensitivity, huh? Some R-E-S-P-E-C-T? Jeez!) So many powerful and insightful symbols out there. Let’s find a symbol that women of color and transgender women will applaud.
And let’s get to work. As a sign at Saturday’s Cambridge Common Women March nagged: “The patriarchy isn’t going to smash itself!”
