For whatever reason, Friends Journal re-issued an article I wrote in 2018. Not light reading! But timely, I think. So am making it available HERE:
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Guest Author, Irene F. Ficarra (1912-1993): “What I Remember About the Molasses Tank Explosion”
[While delving into my “Women’s Writing” file* recently, found this horrifying, first-hand account written by Irene F. Ficarra, one of my writing students back in the 80’s. As I have been exploring how better to lift up forgotten women’s voices, I’ve decided to “publish” Irene’s recollection of January 15, 1919 this week.]
Trigger alert: Gruesome details.
“I was about 7 years old and the memory of it all is very vivid. My father worked for the Western Electric Company which was located in South Boston at the time. My mother worked as a “chocolate dipper” for a candy factory called Lowney’s which was situated where the Coast Guard Station was later located. We lived right off Commercial Street opposite the chocolate factory. My mother came home for lunch that day and heard the noise of the explosion; the screams of the excited Italian neighborhood brought everyone to the street.
My mother announced that she should call my father’s place of work and tell him to come right home. When he got home everything was in total confusion and rush. Fire engines and ambulances kept a steady line to and from the molasses tank. I remember seeing one of the ambulances going by and the bodies were stacked on the floor of the vehicle. One of the heads was almost severed from the body and molasses and blood were mixed. It was an awful sight.
An extension of the MBTA then known as the Boston Elevated Railway passed along Commercial Street on its way to Rowes Wharf. Steel girders supported the tracks. The force of the escaping molasses caused these seemingly invincible uprights to bend.
The father of a friend of mine worked in the Boston Navy Yard. In spite of the fact that the Navy Yard and the molasses tank were separated by the Charles River, there were casualties at the Yard. He was one of the casualties.
It was a day that I will never forget.
*Where I found “Lowell Offering,” a collection of poems and essays written by “mill girls.” More to come from those forgotten voices!
“Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free”*
Tuesday, having spent some wonderful time with our Tarrytown, NY family, my husband and I explored that part of the world a little on our own. Driving north, the broad, magnificent Hudson to our left, we’d gotten off Route 9 to wend our way through the side streets of another charming, perched-above-the-Hudson village much like Tarrytown; the village’s name not quite registering until lo, unmistakably, there it was. The thick, grey walls and guards’ tower of Sing Sing. (So, yes, we were literally, “up the river.”)
Surprised to willy nilly stumble upon such a famous prison, it took a moment or two for us—who both visit people in the Massachusetts’ Department of Corrections system—to adequately take in what we were seeing. Because, well, for starters, unlike the DOC sites we know, isolated and inaccessible and surrounded by razor wire, this prison is surrounded on three sides by a low-income residential neighborhood. Like directly across the street! And, like a Rockerfeller mansion, its position right on the river allows a beautiful view! (But who inside is able to see that view? Enjoy it? Take solace from it?)
Another cognitive dissonance: A ground crew was working outside one portion of the prison, this portion not surrounded by a thick, stone wall but, instead, by a very tall chainlink fence. And like good neighbors, two crew members, one on one side of the fence, one on the other, were having a cozy chat—both under the watchful eye of the squad car parked nearby. But, still. It all seemed so, well, benign. Neighborly. Normal!
But then, praise Spirit, the same horror I experienced as a child every time my family drove past the prison near our house hit me. And the same, horrifying thought that gave me bad dreams for nights when I was eight: There are people locked up, being held inside those formidable walls.
Thank you, Light. May I, with your guidance, never, ever normalize our prison system!
*Fannie Lou Hammer
God Language 2.0
Sunday, I found myself on my feet at meeting for worship to praise a “benign, loving, transformative, regenerative force” that I felt so powerfully that spring morning, a force another Quaker in another time described as “a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things.”*
A few more adjectives I might’ve added on Sunday: Non-anthrocentric. Restorative. Grateful. Mysterious.
Yes, mysterious. Because here’s A Thing, as my godson would say: on Monday, after doing several errands, I was walking home and had turned off busy and congested Somerville Avenue to walk along a more quiet side street near my home. A street lined with trees delicately in bloom. And tulips or daffodils or forsythia or flame-colored quince bushes in their full glory.
And, suddenly, I felt that force all-around me and so powerfully it brought tears to my eyes. “Welcome home,” that loving force seemed to say to me. “We’re grateful that you understand how we’re all in this together, aren’t we? We’re all connected. And inter-dependent. Yes.”
Oh, my.
*James Naylor, October 20, 1660; on his deathbed.
“Listen” by John Fox
When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
you are loved.
When someone deeply listens to you
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!
When someone deeply listens to you
your barefeet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.
How It Ends
After listening to WellingUp.net’s podcasts, my daughter questioned an important, fundamental decision: “Why did you begin the story with Rocco’s death,” she wondered. “Wouldn’t it be better to tell the story chronologically?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t think so.” And recalled a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. biography I’d read that begins with King’s assassination. “I felt like the book was way more powerful because I’d been reminded from the git-go that this wonderful man would be murdered, ” I told her. “And besides,” I continued. “This story is another version of the Jesus and Mary Magdalene story. And what do most people seem to remember about Jesus? How he died!”
I’ve been thinking about that conversation this past week as I read over my 2018 journals, a sobering, humbling end of the year/beginning of the year ritual I’ve performed for a few years, now. What? I did that stupid thing again? And again? And . . . Jeez! Every mention of my mother, who died in October of 2018, leaps off the page. Every conversation. Every health concern. Every interaction with a staff person at her long-term care facility. It’s all so precious.
So many excerpts I could share but here are few moments I’m so glad I recorded:
May 24, 2018 . . . Had a wonderful moment with Mom when she talked about dying and how it won’t be hard because she’s had such a wonderful life—and I told her how lovely it is that she told me that because her leaving will be less painful, knowing that. A sweet, lovely, who-would-have-predicted moment . . .
May 26, 2018 . . . Took Mom down to Black’s Nook where pond life is beginning to thrive. Water lilies, a frog, lots of birds—but no heron or geese—and Mom was pretty lively, herself. Reached over to touch a young man’s arm so she could look at his tattoo more easily. I teased her about touching strange men and she said,”If he’s brave enough to have tattoos he should be able to deal.” Or words to that effect . . . .
June 16, 2018 . . . Mom had lots to say about “A’s” [another resident she’d disliked] sudden death. Guilt, maybe. We talked a little about how, maybe A really was in a better place, not heaven, necessarily, but not in pain or angry or frustrated any more. A talk I again appreciated having with my mother.
Oh, yes!
Muscle Memory
[Patsy Cline’s salt and pepper collection, Patsy Cline Museum, Nashville, Tennessee]
A wonderful surprise happened in 2018: I made two new, wonderful friends, both in their seventies, too. Over tea last week with one, a fellow peace activist and feminist, we discovered that although we’d grown up in very different parts of the country, our families’ respective religions differed, and she’d grown up with more siblings than I, in one respect, her parents and mine were exactly the same. She and I, who’d both grown up in the fifties and early sixties, had both taken piano lessons. And ballroom dancing!
We snickered. And agreed that learning how to waltz or foxtrot was not something young people ascribed to anymore. She quoted that famous line: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did—only backwards and in high heels.” And I shared a story from my thirties, when my then-husband and I—probably chemically enhanced, shall we say?—had crashed a big, fancy, neighborhood party one summer night, a party held in a tent and with a live band. Boldly I’d invited a neighbor I really, really admired to dance with me. Kind of shy, not a dancer, he’d hesitated: “Don’t worry, darlin’,” I’d assured him. “I’ll make you look good.” And I did. Because from my ballroom-dance classes, I knew how to balance my weight on the balls of my feet; how to lightly rest my left hand on my partner’s shoulder in order to sense whatever direction he would go, and in a split-second, feet poised to respond, to accommodate that movement—wherever!
What a dated, horrifying story! But it begs me to wonder: Do I still do that? Do I still, in ways I don’t even realize because it’s just what I was trained to do, do I still wait, poised to move in response to someone else? Do I accommodate? Dedicate myself to making someone else look good?
Hmmm.
Can We Talk?
Last week, after visiting a prisoner I see once a month, I was being escorted by a Department of Correction guard back to the prison’s entrance when I found myself engaged in a remarkable conversation!
First, let me set the stage: Imagine a hot summer sun shining on the utter desolation, the eerie quiet of no trees, no flowers, no humans, no birdsong; imagine a football-field sized space with nothing but tall, grey walls and barbed wire and chainlink fences and a long row of exercise cages, each attached to a cell, presumably. Got it?
The guard, having volunteered that he was due to go on vacation soon, prompted me to ask what his plans were. His answer revealed where he lived and, knowing his hometown has a very lively Quaker meeting, I revealed that I was a Quaker in hopes that we might know the same people—something we could talk about.
“Oh!” he responded. And began the Matthew 25: 35 passage “. . . when I was ill you came to my help, when I was in prison you visited. . . ” which I ended with “. . . whatever you do for the least of these you do for me.”
“And how about Isaiah 53?” he asked.
“The planted in—” but he interrupted me. “No, no,” and quoted a bit from that amazing, Old Testament account of The Suffering Servant that most spoke to him. Which he may have garbled; I certainly didn’t recognize what he said. (It’s a long passage containing lots of verses Handel’s “Messiah” fans will recognize.)
Here’s the thing: Isaiah 53 does begin with “He [the suffering servant] grew up before the Lord like a young plant whose roots are in parched ground.” Which I, living in a city with plenty of rain this year but where multiple natural gas leaks are killing or weakening our community’s sidewalk trees, a community whose trees are being decimated to build a light rail extension, find so poignant! In other words, Isaiah is saying: this servant’s sufferings are not his fault. Blame the parched/toxic/inconveniently-located soil. What a metaphor!
Here’s the other thing: Isaiah 53 also contains an incredibly moving passage, the centerpiece for my prison ministry: “Without protection, without justice, he was taken away; and who gave a thought to his fate, how he was cut off from the world of living men . . . ?”
Here’s the last thing: Whatever verses most appeal to us, that guard and I have both been moved by the same biblical passage, the same prophetic voice—who later declares he’s been “sent to bring good news to the humble, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to those in prison.”
Hallelujah!
Peachy
I will be on vacation next week so will not be posting. Am hoping that this coming week gifts you with some lovely, summery treat as delicious as these first peaches of the season—especially tasty since, last summer, we had no local peaches because a late frost killed New England’s just-blooming peach blossoms.
Enjoy.
Go Figure!
[Exhibit, Harvard Museum of Natural History; December, 2016]
What a species we are! We give the exalted name “Splendid Fairywren” to an iridescent, Australian bird—yet kill it and stuff it and put it in a glass case so others of our species may marvel at it! Splendid, indeed!
What Righteousness Sounds Like
“Someone Has To Cherish These Tiny Little Heads”
[“After Supper at Family Camp,” Frost Valley YMCA, 2013]
This is a mull/discern week; whatever it is I might be led to write isn’t fully formed as yet. Instead, I offer this amazing poem which arrived in my InBox a few weeks ago when I’d participated in a poetry chain letter.
Mr. Pate’s Barbershop
By Major Jackson
I remember the room in which he held
a blade to my neck & scraped the dark
hairs foresting a jawline: stacks of Ebonys
& Jets, clippings of black boxers —
Joe Frazier, Jimmy Young, Jack Johnson —
the color television bolted to
a ceiling like the one I watched all night
in a waiting room at St. Joseph’s
while my cousin recovered from gunshots.
I remember the old Coke machine, a water
fountain by the door, how I drank
the summer of ’88 over & over from a paper
cone cup & still could not quench my thirst,
for this was the year funeral homes boomed,
the year Mr. Pate swept his own shop
for he had lost his best little helper Squeaky
to cross fire. He suffered like most barbers
suffered, quietly, his clippers humming so loud
he forgot Ali’s lightning left jab, his love
for angles, for carpentry, for baseball. He forgot
everything & would never be the same.
I remember the way the blade gleamed
fierce in the fading light of dusk & a reflection
of myself panned inside the razor’s edge
wondering if I could lay down my pen, close up
my ledgers & my journals, if I could undo
my tie & take up barbering where
months on end a child’s head would darken
at my feet & bring with it the uncertainty
of tomorrow, or like Mr. Pate gathering
clumps of fallen hair, at the end of a day,
in short, delicate whisks as though
they were the fine findings of gold dust
he’d deposit in a jar & place on a shelf, only
to return Saturdays, collecting, as an antique dealer
collects, growing tired, but never forgetting
someone has to cherish these tiny little heads.