Patricia Wild

I’d Like To Think So

[Stairs, “The Boiler House,” MA MoCA]

In the early 90’s, because the adult learning center where I worked had received a federal grant, I began teaching in what we’d called homeless shelters back then. And as stipulated in that grant, every quarter, all the Massachusetts programs receiving that same grant’s personnel were required to meet. So I’d dutifully shuffle off to Worcester or Roxbury or, once, to North Adams, a hellish drive—where, we were told by a local activist, amazing and wondrous things were about to happen. A modern art museum, to be housed in one of North Adam’s long-abandoned factories, was in the planning stage. This massive and exciting undertaking, he predicted, would have an enormous, positive impact on that post-industrial city’s economics. And, therefore, he’d intimated, the struggling, unhoused people of North Adams would benefit.

Oh so long ago, did I snort at his preposterous words? Did I mutter, “Yeah, right!” I’d like to think so. But the truth is, I’d probably experienced that small, vague, subtle, uneasy stop I can only now, decades later, acknowledge; identify. It’s the same stop I now pay attention to as I reread a passage I have just “finished,” for example. “Something’s missing,” I realize. Or “Something’s not right.”

Had I experienced the horrifying gentrification happening right now in my own post-industrial, aging New England city neighborhood, my disbelief at that activist’s naive and patently wrong predictions would have been well-informed—and vocal! But I had yet to live that clarifying experience. I had yet to more fully understand that them that has, gets.

But here’s the thing: Saturday I visited MA MoCA for the first time and after taking a brief moment to acknowledge the younger me who only saw through a glass, darkly, fell in love with the museum’s rusted, industrial aesthetic, its enormous and expansive spaces. I loved all of it. But especially The Boiler House and Kelli Rae Adams’ “Forever in Your Debt.”

Will my admission fee, what I paid for a delicious, hand-squeezed lemonade or the lovely gifts I bought in MA MoCA’s gift shop “trickle down”? No. Am I uplifted, moved, inspired from that experience? Yes. Will my experience somehow inform my ministry? I’d like to think so.

“Just Roll With It”

[Turner’s unfinished “Venice with the Salute”*]

Yesterday, in the collective silence of a Quaker meeting, I waited for whatever was to come to come. And was given: “You’re sad, sweetheart. Just roll with it.”

At first, feeling that acknowledged sadness weight my body, this somber, right-on message seemed enough. Full Stop. The End. But as I literally sat with that weight, sadness became A Thing, an opening, a possibility, a tool, a medium. “My palette,” I decided. Something to work with.

So I will. I am.

*”Venice with the Salute, about 1840-45 (Oil on canvas)

The monumental Baroque church of the Salute, with its great dome,

dominates the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal. Turner probably

focused on this landmark in hopes of finding a buyer.

He left the work unfinished, however, barely defining the buildings

on either side; water, land, and sky merge. The extraordinary,

shimmering forms evoke the paradox of dense fog on a sunny day.

[Explanatory notes, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, May 2022]

“Intensified Sky”

[Bird at the edge of the Grand Canyon}

I am currently going through an intense passage; Rilke’s poem speaks to me:

Ah, not to be cut off

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love It All”

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Exactly. Here’s what I am (barely functionally) struggling with: For those of us who wish to honor Lent, how can we both acknowledge this season of impending death and celebrate its fecundity, its sweetness, its abundance? How do we better celebrate Lent’s spring-ness? What ritual could better embrace this Lenten paradox? Because giving up chocolate for forty days doesn’t cut it for me any more. Nor had receiving pussy willows on Palm Sunday when I went to a Unitarian Sunday school. Nope.

In her remarkable memoir, Lost & Found: A Memoir,
Kathryn Schulz struggles with this, too. Still missing her beloved father, she marries the love of her life. And throughout her remarkable, seamless wedding day (well, okay, there had been a tornado warning), she was exquisitely aware of how she was experiencing both incredible grief and unadulterated joy. (Schulz has lots to say about and/&)

How do we hold two disparate ideas—and then get up the next morning to do it all over again? An answer came to me recently walking past a neighborhood grocery store which did not survive the shutdown. While grieving its loss, a “small, still voice” counseled: “Love it all.”

Sounds like a plan.

“Everywhere As Blue As Mine”

Recently, as bombs continue to hit civilian targets in Ukraine, someone posted this deeply moving video.

The last time I’d sung this version of “Finlandia” had been in 2008, in Cuba. A member of a small group of American Quakers visiting that beleaguered* country, our group joined the Gibara Friends Church congregation to sing this song of peace together—first in Spanish, then in English.

And I shall never forget, as we’d all sung the Spanish words to But other hearts in other lands are beating/ With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine, how one Cuban Quaker woman and I locked eyes. And nodded. And smiled.

THIS IS MY SONG

This is my song,
O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover- leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

To the melody of Finlandia — Lyrics by Lloyd Stone

*Beleagured much because of my country’s policies

This I What We Do Now:

Last night at a Zoom worship group we were asked, “How has this pandemic affected your world view?” Um—yikes?

In the silence as we collectively pondered, each inside our own little tile, what came to me was something like this: I calibrate differently, now. Living through this constant, relentless pile-up of disaster after disaster, my aging brain now nimbly juggles, judges, assesses, rates, ranks and re-orders the daily headlines. What’s worse now? (And where is my heart most called to hold, pray, feel most profoundly?)

Like this: I live in Somerville’s Union Square which means I live in a neighborhood where I can’t walk on its sidewalks anymore because they’re obstructed by lumber and steel and beeping trucks. A treeless, ugly, noisy, blocks-long and blocks-wide construction site which, until last week, I’d termed “A war zone.”

But: no. For the past two weeks we’ve all seen real war zones, haven’t we. My dismay at what’s happening to my beloved neighborhood has lost primacy in my mental list of Things That Suck. Forever. I’ve recalibrated. And, heartbroken, hold the people of Ukraine and all who offer shelter to its fleeing people in the Light.

Or this: Yesterday afternoon a dear friend worried aloud: “Is there another variant out there? Will we have to go back to another shut-down? What’s going to happen?”

And a mental video of the past two years unspooled. I saw her, I saw me, I saw us, all of us who have survived, just do it! Again. First we cry, scream, up our anti-depressants; wonder if we have the strength to get through yet another Shit Show? And then, because we have no choice, because we now know that much, much worse things could happen, have happened, we shrug our collective shoulders. We put on our effing masks again.

Because that’s what we do.

“In My Ears”

Getting older sometimes means you think you remember things—but then again, do you, really? As in being told my beloved granddaughter would perform “Eleanor Rigby” with her fellow string players—Ruby plays the bass—at her school’s concert this week. And instantly replying, “The Beatles’ original featured strings , too!”

But did it?I wondered two seconds later. Was what was playing inside my head real?

Yes, Reader. It was.

Here’s what intrigues me: Decades ago, when I first listened to John’s and Paul’s lament on loneliness, I hadn’t heard the strings. I’d merely heard unexpected orchestration; something cool. But this week when recalling that music, “in my ears” I heard the strings. My remembered listening to “Eleanor Rigby” proved much richer, much deeper, much more varied than, to quote another Beatles song, “when I was younger, so much younger than today.”

Cool!

Now, where did I put my glasses?

Through the Ether

My father were be astonished. Self-labeled “a merchant of death,”during the Cold War my definitely-analog dad sold General Electric-manufactured heavy military equipment to the government. Gigantic and metal and painted battleship-grey; such armaments were how the USA would win this war, Dad believed—who’d died decades before Twitter and Tik Tok and Spotify et al. How mystified my father would be to learn how weightless, colorless, relatively inexpensive, and transmitted-through-a-network-he’d-never-comprehended* misinformation can be and is destructive, disruptive, even deadly!

Who’s winning this Cold War 2.0 which weaponizes instability and fear and distrust? My sense is they are. But how would I know?!

I do know this: I believe in another weightless and colorless and mysteriously transmitted network. When this network broadcasts it’s called prayer. When we open ourselves to Spirit; i.e. when we click on our “radio” to signal to ourselves and to the Universe that we’re listening, something grounding happens. We’re hearing Truth.

*After World War II but before the Cold War, Dad sold GE radio and television equipment to stations throughout the northeast. Radio waves—aka microwaves—he’d understood!

In Honor of Dr. King:

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been working on other writing projects. But today, serendipitously, as we honor the all-too-short life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I began revising this passage, about a young, Black, LA Uber driver. His SUV in the shop, he decides to do something he’s never done before but needs his grandmother’s—and Dr. King’s benevolent spirit’s—help. So thought I’d like to post it:

The Sequoia’s still not ready—but today he’s almost glad. Like what’s he’s been wondering about all weekend can happen now.

But first he needs a ride. Can’t keep using Uber.

Pulling out of the Enterprise on Washington in a white Kia Soul, the only thing left on the lot, Darrell’s gravely disappointed to be driving this shitbox. Literally. It’s a box. A small and and white and weird box, ugly as sin.

Not him.

But maybe that’s okay, he speculates at the light. Because none of this is him. But if in fact he does discover his father’s name, an address, remaining incognito is smart.

And, besides, this whole search thing isn’t real. It isn’t him searching. He’s playing a role: he’s the man who would actually drive this piece of crap.

(Like many, attractive young men in LA, Darrell’s had a handful of on-camera day jobs. He’s been an extra. He’s been a Storm Trooper.)

He’s happy to be behind the wheel, the sport of it, the block by block one-upmanship, the freeways’ ins and outs. To celebrate, he briefly reroutes and maybe for good luck or maybe to make amends or to change up the Universe, give it something different to chew over, he stops at the Whole Foods on Lincoln for a half-gallon of Newman’s Own.

And even though Ghost Town isn’t what it once was, even though the gentra-fuckers—his word not Gran’s—have driven out most of the families he’d grown up with, still, even though it doesn’t register, not even to this young man so thoroughly inhabiting his beautiful body, when he turns onto Sixth Avenue every muscle tenses: Will I be stopped, frisked, harassed? Will an LAPD squad car follow behind? Just to remind me: Hey, boy. I’m here. And I’ve chosen to give you a hard time. Because I can.

Relieved to get to Gran’s without incident; without thinking he pulls into her driveway, which lies between her shabby, faded-peach bungalow and the looming, steel and glass cube next door. His arrival sets off the never-seen neighbors’ bichon frises who howl and madly pace back and forth from behind the floor-to-ceiling third floor window facing Gran’s bougainvillea-graced house.

In two seconds, strawberry-aproned, clutching a heavy, silver candlestick, his grandmother huffs out the kitchen door. One look at her furious, lined, regal face, her haunted eyes behind her smudged, gold-framed glasses, her usually perfect ‘do all crazy-whichways, and for a second he’s Pharaoh again.

But in head-drooped despair he catches sight of his elongated, gym-sculpted shadow on the driveway; his massive shoulders. And snickers.

You planning to throw that at me, Gran? Or just smash it on my head?

Whose car’s that?

The dogs quiet but stand, wet noses to the glass, as if waiting for his answer.

But Darrell will only ever answer every third or fourth of his grandmother’s questions— or whenever she says Darrell Marc Wiggins, that added middle name the unmistakable tip-off she’s super-pissed.

Tight-lipped, he follows her through the back door and into her kitchen. Her spotless and lonely and no-baking-smells-anymore kitchen.

As he hands her the paper sack he inventories, half-hoping he’ll discover something new yet knowing he won’t. Same, same. Same pale lime walls and glass-fronted cabinets, same chrome, black-handled electric percolator next to the strawberry cookie jar—Gran does love her strawberries—same scrawny cactuses in the same Mexican flower pots in the always-sunny window over the double, enamel sink, same strawberry trimmed valance over it, same strawberry-garnished ceramic napkin holder on the same grey-marbled formica and metal-legged table.

(He’d thought that table-top looked like clouds when he was a kid. One time he’d outlined some of those clouds with blue Magic Marker. And got swatted. Darrell remembers this. Gran does not.)

Covering that clouded relic are newspapers and a jar of Wright’s silver polish and the mate to that briefly weaponized candelabra—which belongs to Living Waters. (Gran’s got to be doing something.)

What’s this about? she frowns when she opens the sack.

It could have been okay, he realizes. Showing up like this, unexpected but family and tolerated, the expiating lemonade; he could have eased into why he’d come. What he wants. But that driveway mistake startled her. Even though this neighborhood is no longer “Ghetto by the Sea,” she’s still got bars on the windows, double-locks on the front door. She still remembers the Bad Old Days. He’d scared her.

Because she’s his Gran and obliged to and because she’s used to him evading her questions, she offers the lemonade. When he’s turned it down and she’s put it away in the same damned, round-cornered fridge he’d snuck popsicles out of when he was six, Gran slams its mint-green door to let him know she’s still not pleased and, as if deflated, as if exhausted, as if every one of her seventy-four years weighs on her, she plops herself down on a chrome and silver kitchen chair like an old, old lady and resumes polishing.

(So she won’t be looking at him. Perfect.)

What’s this about?

He sits beside her.

I should have thought, Gran. It’s a rental ‘til my car’s out of the shop. Sorry I scared you.

Nodding, lips pursed, she sighs as if to ask, Why, why do I expect anything different from you?

He remembers why he’d come.

And the right words come. And the right tone comes, too, so she can hear those right words. And since she’s always known this day was coming, she takes a moment to be surprised and to be grateful for the contrition she hears. That’s unexpected.

I know this is hard for you, he tells her in so many words. I know you don’t want to go there. But it’s time.

Truth is, I don’t know.

But you had your suspicions.

You’re right about that.

And she heaves herself off her chair, she washes her hands at the kitchen sink and, her back to him, she opens the top drawer next to the sink and pulls out the vintage, strawberry-embroidered dishtowel he’d given her for Christmas last year. The one she’d told him was much too nice, that she’d never use. Staring out the window, Gran slowly dries her hands.

He watches her shoulder blades rise and fall, rise and fall.

So when she turns, when she looks at him, although he cannot read her imperious face, never could, he knows to keep quiet; to follow her into her drapes-shut bedroom and to so acutely anticipate what will happen next that when she gestures under her pillows-strewn double bed he’s already on his knees.

Because he’s always known this Bullocks hatbox has been under here. At ten, he’d peeked under Poppa and Gran’s bed looking for Christmas presents, but got queasy thinking about them in bed, so never opened it.

He also knows that this Uncovering must happen, not in this darkened, cramped, sweet Annie smelling bedroom. It must happen seated side by side in Gran’s living room, on Gran’s davenport, the hatbox arranged on her coffee table next to her white Bible, opened to Psalm 27, and blessed by the framed photo of Dr. King.

As if they were nothing, she rummages through her capable daughter’s elementary school artwork, Shayla’s awards and citations, her spelling bee trophies, her hand-written essays with oversized, exultant As on top; with her long, knowing fingers Gran delves through all these treasures to clasp a Venice High School, 1991 Yearbook at the very bottom of the box.

Darrell, who got his GED in juvie, wants to read every name, study every picture; every extravagantly-penned, i-hearted inscription, but Gran impatiently thumbs through the thick, glossy pages like she’d always had a hunch but today, buttressed by him and Dr. King and Psalm 27 and that gift of lemonade, is acting on it.

And there, unmistakably, in the Faculty section, there he is, about the same age as Darrell is now. Even with most of his Roland Gift-look-alike face obliterated by his “Best Wishes, Shayla,” Darrell recognizes himself.

And for a moment, he thinks, This is it. Here’s the end of the line. This is all I need. His face. His name. I’m done.

But he’d made a plan. So no, no sudden U Turns, now.

Mark Braithwaite, he reads aloud, silently marveling at that Mark; at his spelling-bee winner mom’s little joke. That name mean anything to you?

But it’s her turn to ignore a question. I need to lie down.

“Land Acknowledgement Day”?

This year at my house, Thanksgiving Day will look pretty normal. Our menu will feature indigenous entrees like cranberries, corn, squash, maybe even turkey. (Some years we’ve served chicken with figs to rave reviews.) There will be several pies, yes, and family, yes, and between the main course and all those pies, we’ll go around the table and each of us will say what we’re thankful for. Like I said: normal.

But in my heart, ahh, this year will be radically different. This year, silently, I will celebrate this tiny patch of Somerville real estate I call “mine.” I will celebrate the land beneath me. As I savor my made-once-a-year cranberry sauce or baked squash, I will celebrate the fruits of The Land. I will remember the Massachusetts people who’d once trod upon this land. I will hold them in the Light, a prayer without ceasing.

Perhaps you will, too?

Lean Back, (Lean In)

Who shows up for a climate justice demonstration in Boston’s Back Bay on a Friday afternoon? Its organizers,* students, and old people—like the elderly protestor whose excellent sign said it all: “A fossil for a fossil free future.”

In a critically important time when aging White activists like me are being reminded, again and again, to listen, heed, support, and get out of the way of Indigenous, People of Color and White young people, Friday’s demonstration showed me what “Lean Back”** actually looks like. (Spoiler alert: pretty damned amazing!) A day of action nationally, Boston’s demonstration targeted two financial institutions, Liberty Mutual and JPMorgan Chase. For, as Fossil Free Future, who’d organized these nationwide demonstrations declares: “Climate finance is climate justice.”

Taking the T downtown, a trip I hadn’t taken in almost two years, required “beginner’s mind” and proved an excellent spiritual practice for leaning back. To discover that, Wait! What? Lechmere’s tracks are gone? To walk past the desolate, empty storefronts on once-thriving Boylston Street? To march past Wait! What? skyscapers that have mushroomed throughout downtown Boston seemingly overnight? I experienced my hometown as if for the first time.

The demonstration began in front of Liberty Mutual and then became a march; organizers, BIPOC, young people go first. Shepherded and protected by much-appreciated marshalls, we fossils chanted and sang and chatted as we all walked from Back Bay through the Theater District to our final destination, Downtown Crossing.

It was here, in front of a Chase branch, when I was eldered by an organizer young enough to be my granddaughter. Two middle-aged White women standing next to me suddenly threw themselves onto the ground; “Join us,” they invited me. Oh, I thought. We play dead at demonstrations, now? Okay. And so I joined them on the pavement.

“Get up!” I was immediately commanded. “You’re part of a large group! Why are you drawing attention to just yourselves? I don’t think so,” the organizer declared before stomping off.

Lean back, Patricia.

*This event was organized by a coalition of Indigenous, youth, and climate groups, including the Native American Indian Center of Boston, United American Indians of New England, Indigenous Environmental Network, MA Youth Climate Coalition, Boston Latin School YouthCAN, XR Youth Boston, Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, Sunrise Boston, Climate Finance Action, 350 Massachusetts, Climate Courage, Massachusetts Teachers Association Climate Action Network, Our Climate, Future Coalition, Tufts Climate Action, Rainforest Action Network and more.

** Advice sometimes given to groups: “If you’ve been speaking a lot, consider leaning back. If you’ve been quiet a lot, consider leaning in.”

Light A Candle

[Mom’s 95th birthday party, Neville Center, Cambridge, MA, 2018]

This has been a week of anniversaries: my mother died three years ago this week, my father died eleven years ago this week, and yesterday my Quaker meeting held its twelfth anniversary, all-meeting silent worship in front of Raytheon Technology Corporation. [“Raytheon wins $2B contract for new nuclear cruise missile,” July 6, 2021] Seated on folding chairs and holding signs declaring “Quakers praying for peace,” about twenty of us sat on Cambridge’s Concord Avenue’s sidewalk; an equal number sat across the street—in front of the long-term-care facility, Neville Center, where my mother had died. Alone.

For several years every third Sunday of the month, rain or shine, members of my meeting have been faithfully worshipping in front of Raytheon (and before that, in front of Textron, maker of cluster bombs.) But since my mother died, I had not felt able to show up on Concord Avenue. Until yesterday.

Sitting in delicious, warming, October sunshine and gazing at the three-story Neville Center across the street, I prayed for peace and held my mother in the Light. Is there something, I wondered, besides this little patch of Cambridge real estate, that connects my disparate prayers?

And what came to me is this: I am not alone. Seated here, my prayers for peace entwine with others’. But for many reasons, most not of her own making, rarely did my mother experience this delicious interconnectivity I feel right now.

Such sadness to realize this and yet such gratitude for my faith community; a community I might add, I sometimes struggle with.

So today, as this anniversary week ends, feeling all the feels, I light a memorial candle.