Family – Patricia Wild

“Who Are You Wearing?”

“I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker” [Middlemarch.]

At first glance, I must seem a very bad Quaker. A member in fairly-good standing with a religious sect that espouses simplicity and claims a shade of gray for its very own, my palette is comprised of shades of red—which, felicitously, includes purple. But having just finished Sofi Thanhauser’s excellent Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, I am freshly reminded that my clothing choices—most bought at Goodwill or the Material Aid and Advocacy Program’s semi-annual tag sale—should reflect another Quaker value: integrity.

I remember the first time I thought about the history of my clothing, my cotton clothing: The waterfront director at a camp in the Adirondacks the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, while I lifeguarded up north my family moved from Lynchburg, Virginia to Huntsville, Alabama. At the end of the summer, I flew to “Huntspatch”; my parents, my two brothers and my sister picked me up from the airport. My family chattering around me, I stared out our minivan’s window at what seemed mile after mile of flatness slathered by mini-malls. When we finally turned off the highway we were surrounded by cotton fields. And Black teenagers, crouched low to the ground, picked that cotton, their long bags snaking behind them like contrails. I will never forgot my double shock at driving past this mid-sixties version of slavery—and that my family continued to chatter. In the brief time our New England-based family lived in Alabama they’d already become inured to the sight of underage workers picking cotton? What?

Did I stop wearing cotton? No. I’m not Lucretia Mott. But when I do, sometimes I remember to ask myself the same question fashion journalists ask on Oscar night as the glitterati parade by: “Who are you wearing?”

“(Mill)Dam!”

[Faulkner Mill, North Billerica, MA]

Where there is a mill there is a river. And a dam. Currently (no pun intended) interested in that mill—once owned by ancestors of mine*—I am therefore interested in that river: The Concord.

You know who else was? Henry Thoreau. Who, for a week in August of 1839, along with his brother, traveled along the Concord River. As the brothers’ dory approached Billerica, they noticed that the salmon, shad, and alewives had disappeared. Thoreau wrote this:

Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter. . . . Armed with no sword, . . . but mere shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause. . . I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?

The original mildam had been built in 1710; in 1721, another irate Concord resident, Dr. Jonathan Prescot and his buddies indeed took a crow-bar to that damned dam and nearby grist mill. (Was Dr. Prescot an eco-warrior? No. The dam had caused flooding on his property.) Subsequent reiterations of that milldam, its falls powering several mills, including the side-by-side Talbot and Faulkner Mills, prevailed. (The story of the Faulkner Mill—and the wealth it generated—is a story for another day.)

Until now.

Wouldn’t Thoreau—and all those poor salmon, shad, and alewives—be amazed!

* Keen eyes will notice that mill owner Luther Faulkner’s daughter was Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild. She was my grandfather’s mother.

“Beyond A Reasonable Doubt?”

When I was growing up, my family ate dinner at precisely 6:00. My father, who liked to remind us that a family is not a democracy, served as those meals’ moderator. If, God forbid, one of us should stray from daily, generalized check-ins to a personal, detailed, granular gripe, or recount at length some drama on the school bus or during lunch, Dad would interrupt: “Not of general interest,” he’d decree. And the miscreant would have to quickly change the subject. Or stop talking.

So, dear friends, knowing that what I am about to write about is probably not of general interest, you might justifiably ask, “Why?” And the (whoo hoo) answer is that, sometimes, I sense there’s Something I am supposed to better understand. And invite you to join me as I ponder.

Okay. I’ll begin with a confession: Sometimes, dear friends, I watch televised, IRL trials. Like, last year, Alex Murdaugh’s. And for the past couple of weeks, the trial of Michelle Troconis. Who, yesterday, was found guilty of conspiring to murder missing Connecticut mother Jennifer Dulos.

But is Ms. Troconis guilty? Although the State did a stellar job recounting the numerous instances where timing, lies, omissions, and her own statements point to “the socialite’s” guilt (and they’re probably right), two things concern me. One is a wonderful quote from Tara Brach: “Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.” It’s highly probable that Jennifer Dulos, a sunny, beautiful, doting mother of two sets of twins and a singleton, was viciously murdered by her ex-husband, Fotis Dulos—who committed suicide without confessing. Imbedded in Ms. Troconis’s resounding conviction on all counts, might we detect our collective grief not only for a loving, lovely young mother’s death but for the next-to-impossible-fact-to-accept that her body may never be found. To mention closure might seem hackneyed to some. Overdone. A joke. But closure is a genuine, human need, isn’t it? Fotis Dulos, the real perpetrator, is dead. But somebody “needs to pay,” right? On some primal level, is that not what we secretly believe? Is Michelle Troconis our collective, lazy-thinking scapegoat?

Daughter of that dinner-table autocrat and, like all women, no stranger to oppression, abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, or just plain fear and, like everyone believing they’re in a loving relationship, susceptible to the wiles of a charismatic partner, I have to wonder when Michelle Troconis, the owner of her own successful business, told the police, “I’m the stupid girlfriend,” (Not an exact quote. But close) she was telling the truth?

I know, I know, it’s a stretch. Watching the trial, most of the time I’d snort,” How could she possibly not know?” But not all the time. Sometimes I’d wonder if despite all her wealth and seeming competency, Michelle Troconis is a very special version of a battered woman. Especially when I watched the Connecticut police’s clumsy, almost ludicrous interrogation process! Several male officers and detectives (There might have been one woman) barraged; they threatened a woman whose first language is Spanish, a fearful woman, no doubt, who’d lived with a volatile, murderous man whose anger issues were at the heart of his contentious divorce. Yes, Ms. Troconis initially lied to protect Fotis Dulos. But because of the police’s clumsy treatment and her pervading fears, she’d then doubled down. And felt stuck. A feeling strangely comforting; known. And so, there she remained. (Another confession: I am also a huge fan of The Behavior Panel. I have watched skillful interrogations.)

Beyond a reasonable doubt?

(What’s reasonable?)

The Colors of White

“Group With Parasols” by John Singer Sargent

That mustachioed, opened-shirt guy with an umbrella? That’s my great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Wild; who’d preferred to be called Frank. (Did anyone ever joke, “Can you B. Frank, Frank?” I sure hope so.) The shyly smiling woman seated in front of him, who may be holding Frank’s boater, is my great-grandmother, Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild. Because I have seen other photographs of those people in those same clothes, I happen to know that they, like Sargent’s four snoozers, had actually been enjoying the out-of-doors the day this stiff, posed [studio?] photograph had been taken. Which means that Frank’s umbrella is actually a parasol! And, as his open shirt indicates, that day had been as indolent, as lovely, as deliciously warm as the snoring moment Sargent has so magnificently captured.

Sargent, who also sported a mustache, was born in 1856; Frank in 1853, Amy in 1858. Knowing a little about how their respective timelines overlapped, I’d walked through the current Museum of Fine Arts’ “Fashioned by Sargent” exhibit yesterday adding historical context to what I ogled. And the same questions.

I knew, for example, how The Gilded Age, a time of enormous wealth and equally enormous exploitation, had overlapped a fierce, post-Civil War battle: the suffrage movement. Who was to get the vote first? Women? Or African-American men? So when I looked into the eyes of one of Sargent’s exquisite women, for example, I could ask her the same questions I’d already asked Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild: Had you been a secret or even an open suffragette? Did you, like my great-grandmother, ever consider the workers who produced your wealth? For my great-grandmother, it would have been miners whose harsh, dangerous labor produced the coal her jaunty husband sold all over Greater Boston. Did she understand how those faceless miners made possible her mansion on Somerville’s Highland Avenue, her gorgeous summer home on Cape Cod’s Bass River, the family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery?

I’d like to think my shy ancestor did. But, knowing a little something about White people, I doubt it.

Sargent’s “Group with Parasols” is displayed with several other white-featured paintings; towards the end of his career, the great portrait painter became fascinated with white. And therein lies a profound difference between his subjects and my family: My ancestors may have been wealthy—but they hadn’t been rich enough to wear white to a picnic!

Such a vast scale of difference! It echoes the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.(The magnitude of difference between billion and million can be illustrated with this example of the time scale: A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.)

Oh.

What Am I Called To Do (with asterisks)?:

To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure

and discovery may be almost the greatest service

one human being ever performs for another.

Douglas Steere

As my father got more and more frail and his children and grandchildren had begun to take on the major responsibilities at family get-togethers, leaving him with nothing to do, he’d say, “Never mind. I’ll just sit in the corner and drool.” He didn’t drool. But sometimes a younger family member would pull up a chair, sit down beside him, and listen to his stories. Which were wonderful.

As I and the warring, climate-disrupted world we all inhabit get more and more frail, asking the Universe: “What am I called to do?” seems an existential/spiritual question with some asterisks:

* at almost-eighty.

* that doesn’t add to my carbon footprint if I choose to witness/show up/minister.

*that would actually make a difference yet which I, on a fixed-income, can afford.

(You get the idea.)

Lately I have been pondering some ways we potential droolers might be useful in this unimaginably challenging time. Let me count the ways (so far):

Like the wonderful Steere quote, we can listen as others share their grief, their fears, their suffering.

Like my father, we can share own experiences; we can offer a long-view perspective. No, let’s be clear, there has never been a time quite so fraught (my dad’s word) as this. Yet surely our stories contain some nuggets the present generations might appreciate? Dare I say learn from? (Some buy-in’s probably required. Someone willingly chose to sit beside my father. Someone needs to ask us to recount the time when . . ., right?)

We can speak to the non-binary-All because we, too have suffered. We, too, have experienced unmitigated joy. And here we are. Our breath of experience adds more to the spectrum of What Being Conscious Is About, the All of it, its spectacular, wondrous, terrifying, maddening, unlimited array of experiences.

And, finally, this: I have seen what Love can do. Love is thoroughly embedded in that All; Its all-embracing power continually takes my breath away. It feels naive—silly—to write that, now, as wars wage everywhere. Everywhere! Yet over a lifetime, in the midst of conflict, when I remembered to speak or to act from a place of Love, everything shifted. Improved. Softened. This I know at almost-eighty.

Where is Love in Gaza? Where is Love in Ukraine? Yemen? The streets of Haiti, the streets of vandalized San Francisco? That’s impossible to say. What I can say is this: some of us along Elder Path may want to listen to your grief, your rage, your fears. Grateful to be able to experience this “greatest service one human being ever performs for another,” we can hear you with Love.

Just There!

One morning years ago, wearily trudging down the basement stairs carrying yet another overflowing basket of dirty clothes, I distinctly heard a woman screaming, “Endless, endless, endless!” Was it my mother’s voice? Or my own? Wading through the mound of waiting laundry in front of the washing machine, I suddenly realized it didn’t matter which one of us had lost it. One of us understood something basic, fundamental, unequivocal: laundry happens. Deal.

“Galloping charlie,” a seemingly benign, scalloped green leaf just there, coyly nestled in my backyard grass, happens, too. (It’s really “creeping charlie” but such a formidable foe deserves a more imposing name, right?)

My endless, ill-fated battle with GC began in late April, early May, when my husband, recovering from open-heart surgery and still unable to garden (He’s fine, now), pointed out that what I’d thought a lovely, purple flower was actually a weed—and taking over our backyard. Oh.

Purple? One of my faves? Well-played, GC. First round: Yours.

So I began to pull up those lovely flowers. A newbie gardener, I actually believed that if I devoted enough time and energy, our backyard would eventually look like a tiny golf course. [Okay, seasoned gardeners. I hear you snicker. And those of you questioning this absurd goal?You’re right! I’ve clearly lost my mind.]

In my defense: Two things happened as I began. (Well, if you count all the rain we’ve had, making weeding that much more pleasurable, three.) One, I discovered the indescribable joy of battling an inventive, just-wants-to-propagate weed. Because, yes, it creeps. It creates an amazing network to spread, thrive, survive. After a while, my eager fingers learned what was grass and what wasn’t, what to sift through, and what to carefully follow, strand by strand, and then to gently, oh so gently tug up, twist to possibly engage even more strands, as I pulled. If I’m thorough enough, patient enough, gentle enough, a great, honkin,’ multi-tentacled weed emerges.

And if I’m not? Another GC win.

But that’s the take-away, right? GC’s inevitability. That Serenity Prayer’s acceptance thing. Which, as I sift, tug, twist, and lift, I contemplate again and again. And as another quiet weeding afternoon progresses, the relentless sun glaring on the other side of my house, immersed in this literally-in-the-weeds-spiritual practice, I am able to consider climate devastation’s inevitability. [There. I’ve admitted that. Let’s move on.]

The Second Thing: So far, our neighbors have been mercifully quiet. (One exception: Memorial Day weekend, one family sang along to Brazilian music. Delightful!) Circling swallows, butterflies, relentless bees, a gentle breeze tinkling our wind chime, the delicious shade of our japanese maple my companions, I am.

I win.

“And the days dwindle down . . . “

[It’s been a loooong time since I last posted. So: hello, again.]

Last week over lunch, a friend I’ve known since high school—Class of 1962—told me she hopes to live until eighty-six. What?

Her explicit, stark, and less-than-ten-years-left goal so rattled me I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. But a few days later, I am so grateful for this gift of reckoning she gave me.

Oldest of a large family, she’s already let her siblings know—”so they can get used to the idea,” she told me.

While touched by her thoughtfulness, it’s her specificity I find most startling. And yet exhilarating. Daughter of parents who’d called death The Inevitable and talked as much about end-of-life decisions as about their grandchildren, I had nevertheless not yet let a stark truth penentrate: like my friend’s projected number of years left to live, there’s a very specific number for me, too! And, yes, maybe that number could be less than ten?! Oh. (Since both my parents died at 95, maybe I’d unconsciously glommed down on that very optimistic, blurry, in-the-mists number? Maybe. But no more.)

Both my sister and sister-in-law died in the past eight months; never have I been so aware of The Inevitable. Never have I been so grateful for Life; never has it been more precious. This recent reckoning, though, asks a slight re-write of that wonderful Mary Oliver question, doesn’t it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild, precious, and dwindling life?”

Comin’ Around Again

When I was young I was very young. And the world I grew up in was a younger world, a world that told me, “When you grow up, you can be a secretary, a nurse, or a teacher.” So for many reasons that seemed relevant in those long-ago times, I chose teaching. Given that those times’ imposed limitations meant that my “choice” wasn’t much of a choice, turns out I am a pretty good teacher! Turns out, interacting with children gives me enormous joy! Turns out, I got lucky.

Over the years my teaching career swerved from teaching elementary school-aged children, as I’d been trained to do in college, to teaching deaf teenagers, to, for almost 20 years, working with adult learners in housing projects, homeless shelters, and at an adult learning center. But when my first book was published in 1998, I declared myself a writer—and never looked back.

Until now. A grandmother, I am once again teaching small children at my Quaker meeting. I’m again writing lesson plans. I’m again buying art supplies. I’m again talking with parents about their children’s needs. I’m again being schooled by insightful and loving co-teachers. And scraping play-doh off a rug. (Oops.)

And while sometimes this gig feels very automatic—”You know, we’ve heard some wonderful ideas from you. Let’s see if someone else has some good ideas, okay?”—something feels absolutely new.

This choice is so, so different, isn’t it! So realized. So informed. So much about joyously reclaiming a part of myself that, yes, I’d only dimly understood over sixty years ago (GASP) when I’d chosen Teacher. So whole.

To Have and To Hold

When I was maybe three or four, one of my favorite “toys” had been my mother’s button box. (What was that box’s backstory? Was it made of sturdy cardboard or metal? Had it once held candy or tea? Had it been a biscuit tin? I don’t remember.) I’d loved the susurration those hundred of buttons made when I slowly trawled the box’s contents with my hand. I’d loved the randomness; the not-knowing what I’d discover in my hand when I extracted one or two buttons. Would I hold a large, plastic, Art-Deco button from a thirties-era jacket?A tiny, opalescent mother-0f-pearl memento of my babyhood? If I dipped again, would I perhaps find a duplicate to my first haul? What I’d loved most, though, was to treasure whatever I held.

Sunday night, my sister’s vast collection of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, pendants, and rings covering my living room coffee table, I was reminded of those individualized and reverent moments. Randomly picking up an exquisite ring or a necklace, I held my fierce and brilliant sister Deborah, who died from pancreatic cancer on June 7th. With tenderness and care her grieving ex-husband and son have been slowly dispensing her things; Sunday night, thanks to my daughter’s cell phone’s texting capabilities, our extended family had the opportunity to pick and choose a piece of Deborah’s jewelry.

Because my sister had already specified she’d wanted me to have her silver charm bracelet, my brother-in-law handed it to me beforehand. What I slowly realized as I picked up and admired Deborah’s collection, one by one, was that her laden, tinkling keepsake would be enough. (Although I did chose a couple of pieces I plan to pass along to two dear friends who have held me as I grieve.) Like admiring my mother’s button box collection, I loved, loved, loved cherishing Deborah’s jewelry. And that charm bracelet is enough.

This understanding may have been made more clear for me, I think, because of my recent visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Over the past fifty years I have visited “Mrs. Jack’s” hodgepodge collection many times; this most recent visit stirred up some concern: What happens to someone’s soul when she owns so much cheek-by-jowl, impossible-to-keep-track-of beauty? How could Isabella Stewart Gardner possibly love the thousands of things she’d collected? At some point, had she become inured to her breathtaking possessions? Become deadened to such overwhelming splendor? After the crowds went home, had she ever strolled through her higglety-pigglety gallery rooms and randomly picked up something small and exquisite? Had she held it? Loved it?

I hope 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]

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!

“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?