Author Archives: Patricia Wild

February 27, 2011: Let Go, Let Surveillance

Another incident from yesterday’s rally on Beacon Hill in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin (I’m getting a lot of mileage out of that, aren’t I):

Coming home from the rally, I took the Red Line, getting on at Park Street. Waiting for the train, I heard a loud, agitated voice further down the platform; a stairwell blocked my view to see who was so upset. But just as the recorded voice announced that an Alewife train was approaching, an angry African American man (and, yes, his ethnicity is important to the story) ambled towards me, cursing, muttering, shouting, kicking trash.

He will come right up to me, I thought. I am a magnet for mentally ill T riders. Bracing myself—and hoping that train would come—I recalled a radio talk show conversation I’d heard a couple of days ago re mentally ill people and why in the world do we send such troubled people to jail? So when, indeed, the guy did come right up to me, shouting “They call me a nigger? They’re a nigger!” I was already in a place of compassion.

I smiled, I looked right into his eyes, I flashed the peace sign to him. He stopped shouting and began to talk. Earnestly. Like he really wanted me to understand him. Trouble is, I couldn’t make out what he was saying: it sounded like gibberish but maybe he was speaking a language I’d never heard.

The train rolled in. I pitched my voice low and as gentle as I could possibly be: “I wish you well. I really do. Take care of yourself. Please.”

The train doors opened. I stepped into a car. He followed me. So I stepped out of the car and began walking quickly towards the next car. The platform was, by now, empty.

Hey, if they shut the doors before I get to the next car I’ll just wait for the next train, I decided.

The doors remained open. Whoa! I realized. I’m being watched. The conductors or maybe surveillance cameras saw this whole exchange. This train’s gonna wait for me! So I slowed down, got to the next car, entered, the door shut behind me, and the train took off.

February 26, 2011: Let Go, Let Lucy (and Alice and Julia and. . . )

Like many  greater-Bostonians, I received countless e-mails these past few days encouraging me to show up at the State House today in solidarity with the workers of Michigan—and, of course, in solidarity with that populist spirit so abundantly manifested all over the world right now.

I’d already made plans to meet up with a group of Somerville Quakers at 2:00 to bowl and eat pizza (?!) so had decided not to go. After all, just how much fun can an aging Quake expect to squeeze into one afternoon, huh? Besides: Gotta save my strength for candlepins and building community, I told myself.

But the voices of Lucy Stone and Alice Stone Blackwell and Julia Ward Howe and their compatriots, those indefatigable abolitionist/suffragette souls I’ve been reading about lately , urged me to “show up.” (Some might view my willingness to listen to those long-gone voices as guilt—certainly bizarre. Trust me, after you’ve read Alice Stone Blackwell’s biography of her mother, Lucy Stone, you’ll totally get it.)

So I did. But had a disquieting experience.

Just as I arrived at the rally, the Second Line Social Aid Pleasure Society Brass Band—from Cambridge—began playing. And not just any song. They played the song I danced to the night Obama was elected.

And for the rest of the time I was there, I couldn’t shake my sadness. How well I remember my euphoria that night (the linked video shows me ever so briefly with a shit-eating grin). Remembering that dancing, joyful me let me truly grasp how disappointed I am, today.

But, hey. Lucy et al had these moments, too, right?

February 24, 2011: Let Go, Let Sheer Fantasy

Today’s musing/sheer fantasy is courtesy of two, seemingly random but inexorably-linked-in-mysterious-ways-that-we’ll- never-understand phenomena:

1. Oil is now  $100 a barrel.

2. The snow has melted sufficiently so that the city crap of the past three months is now blatantly, festeringly obvious.

So, today, walking to Inman Square and over and beside and around trash, trash, trash, I remembered during the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1963) when the Chinese people were exhorted to build backyard furnaces to create steel for all the new and modern Leaps Forward that required steel. (This homemade steel turned out to be pretty shoddy goods. For many reasons, including bad luck with the weather, the GLF was a bust.) And I looked at all the trash in Union Square and along Webster Avenue, 95% of which was made of plastic—a petroleum product, soon to become, perhaps, prohibitively expensive? And fantasized about some miracle technology that could transform all the coffee cup lids and Pepsi caps and plastic bags and the rest of that crap into STUFF WE ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY NEED!

Wild, huh? And here’s where it gets even crazier: Since We the People would be collecting this stuff to be  somehow transformed, WE get to say how this suddenly valuable commodity is used!

Okay, that’s nuts. But here’s a little something re trash that’s true and profound: Now that the Egyptian people feel that their country is theirs, trash has become a political statement. When the Egyptian people felt hopeless, they threw their crap on the streets.With a growing, collective sense of ownership and empowerment, the Egyptian people are reminding one another to clean up their mess.

Hmm.

February 23, 2011: Let Go, Let Justice

Last night at our Prison Fellowship meeting, we talked a little about how those working within the prison system, the guards, the administrators, the C.O.s, are just as much prisoners as the incarcerated. Today in this week’s New Yorker, I read an article by David Remnick, “The Dissenters, which makes much the same point. Only in this case, it’s what’s happening to Israelis’ souls because of The Occupation. And just now, I signed a petition distributed by The Color of Change. If you choose to watch their featured video—which is graphic—you’ll no doubt let go of the differentiation between “the bad guys” and “the good guys.”

Oppression poisons the oppressed AND the oppressor.

February 22, 2011: Let Go, Let Synergy

Tonight was another Prison Fellowship meeting. And, as always happens on the fourth Tuesday of the month, in the middle of a hard discussion I thought: “There is no place on earth I would rather be right this minute than sitting here with these hard-working, dedicated people, talking about the criminal justice system and what we’re called to do.”

February 20, 2011: Let Go, Let Time

Friday, a woman I know left a message on my answering machine: “Guess I haven’t been in touch for a while,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

The last time she and I had talked had been five months ago, shortly after my father died. I’d been bereft, of course.

“What can I do?” she’d asked.

“Check in with me from time to time,” I’d requested.

So today, I prayed over this complicated and frustrating relationship. (This is not the first bumpy incident between us. Oh, no.)

I’m stuck, I realized. And have no idea what to do or say other than same ol’—which hasn’t worked, isn’t working for me.

Now, usually, moments like these are pretty devastating, when I’m feeling helpless and, can-you-believe-it, humbled by my cluelessness. But today, for some reason, my sudden realization that I had no idea what to do was tremendously exciting!

So I’ll wait. I’ll “trust the process” as my dear friend Anne advises. In the fullness of time, Something will happen.

February 19, 2011: Let Go, Let Flow

Today I spent a couple of hours tabling at Somerville’s winter farmers’ market on behalf of Somerville Climate Change. (“That’s a verb?” my mother asked earlier this morning when I’d told her what I’d planned to be doing today.Yes, it is.)

Mostly we SCA folks talked with passersby about our “350 Challenge,” i.e. encouraging 350 Somerville households, neighborhoods, schools to take one positive action towards reducing Somerville’s emissions, encouraging sustainability, etc. And, as you might have expected, the sorts of people who shop at a winter farmers’ market were positive, curious, eager to do their part.

‘Course the “teutonic” me, the me that loves order and charts and graphs and checklists found these 350 Challenge conversations, lively as they were, a little frustrating. “How are we keeping track of who’s doing what? How do people register, so to speak, so their individual action can be counted? Huh?”

But, hey, it’s early days; this challenge is just getting started. So this accounting mechanism will happen. I have faith.

And, besides, the fact that one of the initiatives we’re pushing is around depaving should calm that teutonic me right down:

Fact: Somerville is 77% paved over.

Fact: We had terrible flooding last year.

Fact: Today, when I talked about rain water and “Where will it go?” I saw keen interest in the eyes of my listeners. Ditto, when I showed pictures of SCA depaving a Somerville back yard last fall.

So maybe I should let go of my need for record-keeping and just believe that this shared community concern of impassable streets and flooded basements WILL capture the interest of lots of people who, over time, will contact SCA for volunteer help, guidance, resources.

And when they do, . . .

February 18, 2011: Let Go, Let God?

Okay. True confession:

I’ve been reading The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson. Like Wilkerson, herself, and countless readers of that amazing book, I have completely fallen in love with Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, one of the three people featured in the book.

BUT: Having read of Ida Mae’s hard life from small child in Jim Crow Mississippi to great-grandmother in cold, racist Chicago, I know that much of the hardships she’s had to endure have to do with the color of her and her family’s skin. Yet when something terrible happens, Ida Mae always says, “God don’t make no mistakes.”

I am just having such a hard time accepting that.

February 17, 2011: Let Go, Let Nod

Today, after an embarrassingly easy Mohs procedure, I took a walk to Porter Square to get surgical dressing stuff for the incision and, why not, flowers. A beautiful, warm, sunny day, the florist had the door to her shop open it was so warm and the two of us oohed and aahed about the balmy weather.

“You’re going to get some customers,” I promised. “Because I’m walking home and I’ll be carrying these flowers and I’ll have a big ol’ smile on my face.”

A couple of doors away from the florist shop, bearing my cobalt-blue flowers—sorry, don’t recall their name—I walked past two young men in tee shirts who were sitting on their front porch, drinking beer.  Catching one guy’s eye, I grinned; he returned my grin with an all-incompassing nod.

You’re an old lady with a big bandage on your cheek and carrying flowers, that nod said. And I’m a young hipster. But, hey, isn’t this fantastic? We’re both so grateful for this day. And, hey, isn’t this fantastic? Neither of us have to say a word!

Let Go, Eat Chocolate

My most honest thinking often happens when I vacuum. So today, after a complicated and expensive and seemingly 4-eva session at my dentist’s to get a new crown over a broken tooth, in anticipation for some minor surgery tomorrow and therefore being out of commission for a couple of days, and knowing my beloved daughter and her husband arrive Friday, I cleaned.

Hey, I realized, vacuuming. I am in a really foul mood. And maybe need to just take care of myself before tomorrow’s Mohs procedure?

So tonight, instead of going to the prison circle/trying to be sociable but feeling ornery, after I finally could feel my upper lip (it had been completely numb for over 4 hours), I ate leftovers. Including Ben & Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream.

I believe I did everyone a favor by doing so.

February 15, 2011: Let Go, Let Democracy

Last night I watched “Return to Kandahar” and  today read of projected deep cuts to anti-poverty agencies here in good ol’ USA and wonder why we spend billions fighting in Afghanistan when the concepts of democracy and equal rights for women are free?! Do we really have so little regard for the preciousness of what we espouse that we must bludgeon, bomb, bribe the people of Afghanistan? Why can we not see what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Iran as expressions of the same Spirit, the same mighty “wind of change”* that has blown from sea to shining sea? (And still blows in good ol’ USA; I believe that.) Yes, the Afghani people have suffered greatly—but I believe that despite years of war, that Spirit bravely and courageously endures in that raped, mined, devastated country.


*[“The wind of change is blowing all over the world today. It is sweeping away an old order and bringing into being a new order,” declared Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963.]