Author Archives: Patricia Wild

August 28, 2011: Random Reading, Musing

True Confession:  Every winter, I randomly pull down a Dickens novel from a set my grandmother once owned. This past winter I read—with some gritting of teeth—my least favorite: Martin Chuzzlewit. So I read this past week’s Jill Lepore article in “The New Yorker” re Dickens, which gave deep background to much of the writer’s oeuvre, including MC, with great interest.

Another confession: I’d like to believe that I dislike MC for its tedious structure, its weak plot and the unconvincing redemption of its main character. But maybe Dickens’ novel, in which he unabashedly and vigorously bashes the United States, makes me very uncomfortable. (Go figure!)

Curiously, although Lepore, as usual, wrote a fascinating article, she only peripherally elucidates one of the most compelling reasons why Dickens was so disgusted with this country. Slavery. (Not difficult to understand that, is it?)

Last confession: Sometimes I fear that the toxic and soul-killing effects of slavery will destroy this country.

But as Hurricane Irene pounds my windows with rain, I again muse on how we collectively and metaphorically wash ourselves clean. And again am reminded of this poem:

Empire

by Susan Lloyd McGarry

Guaman Poma, native to the Andes, wrote to the King of Spain in 1615: If you knew what they are doing

in your name, you would cry such tears, enough tears to cleanse the world, to start again.

The King did not reply.

Brothers and sisters, friends and children, neighbors: if you only knew what is being done in our name, the suffering, the hunger— but you do know and so do I. But we don’t know how to stop. And now there’s more talk of war.

Maybe if we really heard the stories, let them into our bodies, we could let our tears fall and fall, we

could be clean, there might be a way to start again.

August 19, 2011: Random?

Today I’d planned to attend Frank Soffen’s parole hearing. In Natick.

One small problem: I never made it. God knows I tried!

Google maps seriously led me astray, instructing me to drive along congested, mall-heavy Route 9 (so there seemed no point to stop at a Big Box/chain outlet to ask directions) before making a right onto Mercer Road. Easy, right? Wish it were so. (Upon coming home, I consulted some other sources which showed I’d been real close. And also showed that Google maps was nuts!)

But here’s the thing: As the 10:00 hearing time came and went and still circling the general area a few more times (Route 9 is a divided highway so “circling” is a challenge!), I felt myself sinking into the mindset Bobby Delello had been trying to explain to me earlier this week. Bobby, co-author of When The Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition, is a returning citizen (my favorite euphemism for a formerly incarcerated person), a major leader of Walpole’s short-lived and amazing reformation story of 1971, and prison reform activist. He’d agreed to meet with me Tuesday to give me some background info for a novel I’m working on.

But what he really wanted me to understand was this: the whole system is rotten to the core. The Powers That Be will never give up control. The Department of Correction et al “play games,” i.e., mess with your mind. (He also had some truly sobering thoughts on surveillance.) So while vainly looking for Mercer Road, the paranoid, confused, frightened (I’d just passed a nasty accident so was feeling vulnerable) Me whispered: “They don’t want you to find it.” (Turns out the “They” was Google maps. NOT the Parole Board.)

So very briefly, in an air-conditioned Volvo, I experienced that paranoia, that powerlessness, that confusion experienced by incarcerated people every day, every moment. Was it a random act that there’s no street sign for Mercer along Route 9? Or a conscious effort to keep people like me from finding the damned place?!

What is Spirit asking of me, I wondered, as I finally got back on the Mass Pike.

Maybe, to write this?

So I have.

August 11, 2011: YES!

[Thanks be to e.e. cummings, of course]

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

August 5, 2011: Random?

Wednesday afternoon I needed to do errands in Porter and Davis And Union Squares (distance ultimately walked–three, four miles) so got to pass a series of Somerville/Cambridge summer scenes at a leisurely, on-foot pace. It had poured the night before, a glorious thunder and lightning show, which had driven off the heat and mugginess; being outside on an August afternoon proved joyful.

In my travels, however, I witnessed three people of color in terrible shape: Two men, one on Summer Street a block of so away from where I was walking, another in front of the T station in Porter Square as I passed by on the other side of the street were, apparently, having psychotic episodes. They screamed, cursed, yelled, roared, paced; the man at Porter Square was so upset he kicked a sign over. The woman, in a straw hat and cotton dress, sat motionless on the sidewalk across the street from Central Hospital—half a block up Central Street as I walked past on Somerville Avenue—while a slew of para-medics and firemen swarmed around her.

What’s going on, I wondered. (Things in three always seem significant to me.) My astrology-touting friend had told me that Mercury would go into retrograde Tuesday— the day before. So my first attempt to make meaning of these events was, shall we say, something Shakespeare might have wondered about? There’s something in the stars, perhaps? My second  attempt to make meaning of this trinity was ridiculous—and when I say ridiculous—well, judge for yourself: “Oh,” I thought. “Their behavior is a delayed reaction to yesterday’s debt ceiling drama!” (See what I mean?)

But maybe I had to think stupid before I could think smart. Because I finally realized what was really going on (and, surprisingly, the debt ceiling drama does play a role.): Right now, the incredible mess this world is in environmentally and economically is most felt, most experienced in communities of color. Ditto: violence and mayhem and incarceration. Black people are truly suffering. Some are going crazy. Some sit motionless on the sidewalk. If lived in Roxbury or Dorchester I would witness that suffering daily. But Wednesday, simply because I was in more neighborhoods that I usually walk through, I had more opportunities to witness my brothers and sisters.

Random. And yet not.

July 27, 2011: Homecoming

Just got back from a terrific, 5-day trip to LA to hear that the son of someone in our Wednesday night’s meal-and-sharing circle has been murdered.

Another dear person in our circle’s sister was recently murdered in a murder-suicide in western Massachusetts.

Four years ago, when a group of us from Friends Meeting at Cambridge considered beginning a sharing circle for “the formerly incarcerated and those who care about them,” did any of us anticipate how profoundly the violence and tragedy people of color routinely experience would touch our lives?

I certainly didn’t.

July 19, 2011: from Behind the Walls 4

This morning, copying what follows, the (crumbling, hopefully) Murdock Empire very much on my mind, grokked how pervasively sick our mainstream media is.

For those of you just joining us: What follows is another excerpt from a letter by an inmate currently incarcerated in a MA prison to Michael Rezendes of The Boston Globe.

What about the 141 lifers paroled in the last five years who are law-abiding, tax-paying citizens? Or the 340 lifers currently under parole supervision? What about the ones who are drug and alcohol counselors, or run programs that help ex-offenders reintegrate into society? . . . Where is the footage and sound bites from their hearings? Where are the front-page articles about them? You yourself were  quick to bring up accusations against Charles Doucette, knowing full well that he was acquitted of those charges. [Emphasis added]

July 14, 2011: from Behind the Walls 2

Apparently the last posting, a 3-page letter by an inmate at a Massachusetts facility, to Michael Rezendes of The Boston Globe, had been scanned originally—certainly the document has proven impossible to copy and paste.

But because the letter IS worth reading, I’ll post a few excerpts here:

[From page 1] I have watched for two decades as rehabilitative, educational and job-training programs have been systematically eliminated from the prison system; I have watched the percentage of inmates in higher security triple and [the] number of correctional officers double as the rules, regulations and the enforcement grew increasingly draconian; and equally predictable, I have watched the recidivism rate triple and DOC [Department of Correction] budget quadruple — all of this ushered in by Governor Weld’s “joys of busting rock” philosophy in the wake of the Willie Horton scandal.

Want more? Stay tuned.

July 4, 2011: “Mirror Logic”

One of the things I love to do on the 4th—don’t know why, exactly—is to read the Declaration of Independence on The Boston Globe‘s editorial page. (Yup; they print it every year.) No longer a home subscriber (Yup; finally gave up), it took me a little while to actually find it online but eventually, there it was. (Yup; reading that lofty document online does give me that same mysterious thrill!)

Like other online articles, The Globe’s annual Independence Day offering included the opportunity for comments. And although an inward voice screamed, “Don’t do it, Patricia!” I did read a few. Not surprisingly, given the deep, deep divisions in the good ol’ US of A right now, many nasty, “vitriolic” comments were there to marvel over. (Apparently, Patriotism really means Freedom to Own Guns. I had no idea!)

One commenter, wasting a perfectly lovely summer day to sit at his/her computer arguing with another commenter at some length, used the words “Mirror-logic.” Which, I take it to mean, interpreting the world—or, in this case, an historical document—from one’s own (limited/flawed, all too human. . . ) perspective.

Loathe to waste a perfectly lovely summer morning sitting at my computer AND eager to address my residual fearfulness re riding my bike in the city (what better opportunity to get my bike mojo working than on a holiday when all the traffic’s on the Cape?!), I strapped on my helmut  and took to the bike lane on Somerville Avenue. And eventually to the bike path out of Davis Square. Final destination: Spy Pond.

Seeing my Somerville-Cambridge-Arlington world from my cushy seat ( a HUGE consideration when I’d bought my Trek Allant for my 65th birthday), I saw connections and patterns and features I would otherwise never be able to see.  How the wetlands near Alewife T Station relate to nearby ponds, for example. Or how a couple of co-housing developments celebrate their  bike path access.

And, I gotta say,  I thought I saw The Beginnings of Something Working Right. That in the current course of human events, when dependence on the automobile MUST be severed,  we are declaring our, well, not independence, but Getting Ready.

Huzzah!

June 29, 2011: Talkin’

Whitey Bulger’s surprising, out–of-the-blue capture last week’s got me thinking: I need to deepen Welling Up. Why? Because one of the two main characters of my novel, which I thought I’d finished last summer, is a former member of the Winter Hill Gang.

While  All Souls tells Whitey’s sad/maddening/horrific tale best, it’s a House of Representatives’ report, written in 2004 that’s inspiring me to go deeper. Specifically, it’s the title: “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers As Informants.”

Everything secret degenerates. Feels like an open invitation to probe, seek, TALK!

June 20, 2011: Talkin’ Trash

Just got back from a wonderful family visit to Brooklyn where I spent sweet time with my grandson and grand-daughter and their terrific parents. And experienced my first Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.

Coney Island, classic Last Stop on a Subway Line—with attendant amusement park and miles of beach to attract weekend ridership—vigorously holds on to its tawdry past. Not with its crumbling buildings, freak show/side show attractions, cheap thrills, overpriced souvenirs, faded, iconic billboards , incessant noise. And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about the bare-breastiness of the Mermaid Parade. All these are, arguably, charming!

I’m talkin’ trash. On the face of it, aside from Nathan’s Famous, Coney Island’s business owners seem to have made a conscious decision: We will not provide trash cans. (Kinda skimped on adequate rest rooms, too.)

God knows, if you’re walking around holding an empty Styrofoam cup for blocks and blocks, you begin to really wonder: Should I have ordered that pistachio-chocolate swirl softserv in the first place? (Answer: maybe I should have ordered a cone!) God knows, if you’re seated in the outdoor seating area right next to a Nathan’s Famous trashcan so can observe how often a sweaty employee empties the thing, one’s awareness of the sheer magnitude of  disposable crap intensifies.

[BTW: Spectacle Island, one of Boston Harbor’s islands, has a no trash can policy: Visitors have to remove whatever crap they’d brought or bought from the island. AND THERE ARE SIGNS EXPLAINING THIS!]

But, hey. While I’m always overwhelmed by the Big Apple’s muchness, I am also always impressed by its Let’s Make This City Work energy. If NYC kids are currently reading comics starring The Green Lantern, comics which tout (hector?) responsible electricity usage—and they are—surely another Super Hero spouting Disposable! Recyclable! Bring Your Own Utensils! is already in the works.

June 9, 2011: Can We Talk?

Went to my 45th Wheelock College reunion last weekend—an abbreviated, spend a few hours on Saturday version.

Beside the fact that I live just miles from my alma mater (so going on a Duck Tour is not going to be the highlight of my reunion), my reasons for this abbreviated version are complicated and not worth going into here.

What, courtesy of the Internet, I would like to share is this:

Spending time listening to other women talk about their lives is fascinating. (Until it becomes so overwhelming that I gratefully hop on the T and go home!)

This year, I had two opportunities to listen: my class’s traditional, post-luncheon get-together, when the twenty or so of us go around the circle and share. And I also attended a workshop on “Transitions,” open to anyone attending her respective reunion, so the chance to listen to younger and older women was especially rich.

Because I want to respect privacy and confidentiality, I’m going to be a little elliptical: One woman talked about an incredibly difficult situation in her family and then said, in effect: “I, of course, would not have wished for this nightmare. But this horror has allowed me to be fully alive;  a fully present participant in what is really the human condition.”

See why I went?