Back to School

The persistence of memory in battle time flashbacks

In many red states, anyway, because that’s how they roll, a lot of kids are going back to school this week, rather than after Labor Day, as is the case in most blue states. I always think September is perfect for heading back—right before fall, since after all the hot months, you’ve had time to develop a feeling of restlessness that makes school’s return a little more appealing. (And to the proponents of “year-round school,” you must be high.)

And, as your Miss O’ does, I got to thinking again about this sweet teacher colleague—I’ve written about her before, the one who got pushed out at age 65 when she couldn’t handle the new computer attendance system. Her dismissal was mid-year and cruelly done—she was hounded out by the administration—and really insupportable in the meanness of the process because she herself was a kind, loving human. Kind and dear as she was, however, her mirth drove me to distraction in the years before I had a classroom of my own, because of which situation, I could not escape her in the common English faculty office during teacher work weeks (the library was always in use for large meetings). I’d sit at a table, aborting my work amidst her chatter, and seethe.

I told you my greatest flaw, according to a writer friend, is that Miss O’ has too great a capacity to enjoy. If that is indeed my flaw, my colleague up there had that same flaw to the point of asylum-ready. She’d stand at her wedge of a desk in the “pod” (the 1970s term for the open-classroom, clear-windowed faculty office, groovy-vibe building; and twenty years on, you saw this design for the cheap and loud it was), and she’d unpack boxes, pulling out first a rubber chicken, “Oh, look!” and proceed to walk around and throw it at people, laughing her smoker’s rasp of a laugh with wild abandon when we’d jump; or she’d find a poem a student wrote, start to cry, and read it to us all. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she’d enthuse. She especially loved to throw these bursts of joy my way, the laughs and tears, because I was for so many years her sole audience when our colleagues scurried off to their private classrooms.

More than a few times each of these weeks of workdays I had to excuse myself to the ladies room so I could have a good cry, a shoulder-shaking sob fest, because I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get anything done. (Before you say, “Miss O’, why didn’t you talk to her?” I put up my hand in your face. You think I didn’t? Seriously?) And she really was such a nice lady. She always called me “Lo,” was maternal, compassionate, and joyful, which made it especially terrible that my only desire on seeing her each new school year was to kill her.

If you’ve never taught school, you might not know how much there is to do. At my public high school, on Day 1 of the teacher work week, after all the “how was your summer” greetings, I would

  • Learn my room assignments (the rooms I’d use while the teacher owners were on planning periods, meaning as a “floater,” unfortunate name (as I was for I think four, maybe five years of my twelve) I had to prepare three or four classrooms with my “corner”;
  • Receive my rosters of 150 students for the five sections of three courses I was tasked with, called “preps”; usually I taught some configuration of Humanities 10, English 10, English 9, Speech and Drama I, Speech and Drama II, and Theater Production. Once I had an English 11, the year I had four preps);
    • [NOTE: a prep means you have a full preparation of lesson plans, quizzes, tests, exams, and State Standards to meet for one particular course (English 10, for example). You also need each of those listed items for each “prep” you are assigned. Most teachers of high school English in our department had one prep, two at most. I always had three, and those drama electives were serious courses with a lot of grading, a lot of planning, just like any other class. Some teachers had the newspaper or the literary magazine as elective classes, for example, with four other sections of English 11 or 12, say, while others had five sections of one course, such as English 9. So if you are going to talk about “merit pay,” start with the number of preps. -ed.]
  • March to the department book room with a library cart to collect enough copies of my courses’ textbooks to carry off to each of my assigned rooms (back-breaking work), where after stacking along a cinderblock wall, I’d pull out a Sharpie marker and copy paper sheets, write “O’HARA” on them, and scotch tape a sign atop each stack of books for my particular class in that particular room;
  • Oh, and attend meetings.

On Day 2, I’d

  • Set up my paper gradebook (I taught from 1987-2003) with all the names, last and first, in alphabetical order, knowing that I’d have to redo all these rosters by end of the first quarter, and often again at the end of each of the four quarters (I wish I’d saved copies of all my rosters; might jar memories);
  • Sit in the front of each of my assigned classrooms and draw desk-arrangement diagrams in order to create seating charts [side note: anyone who tells you not to make seating charts is a dope; you have to learn their names] with each kid’s name on a square that represents a desk; these I triple-hole punched into my gradebook with each corresponding class;
  • Collect my allotted department-issue school supplies (gradebook inserts, official planner, chalk, file folders, pencils, pens, stapler and staples, markers (!), highlighters, post-its, fresh tardy book, fresh official hall pass pads, official detention forms (with carbons), and the like); and make a list of needs before heading over to Staples, where I typically spent about $300 out of pocket annually to supply students with paper, notebooks, pens, etc., when they didn’t have the money, or supplies for the drama students to draw from, like tape measures, rulers, fabric scissors, or folders for color-coding work and an industrial hole punch for myself; you really just never knew. (I have always loved school supplies.)
Before I had my own room, I had a giant LL Bean canvas tote bag to carry around my class folders, gradebook, teacher’s edition of my textbook, lesson plan book, curriculum notebooks, and supplies. All day. All over the school. I look back on this life and don’t know how I did it.

At the macro-level of Teacher In-Service Week, there were additionally faculty meetings; lesson plans to write for the year and quarter and turn in to the assistant principal; class sets of novels to request for certain weeks of the months of the year, to get your turn in (given to the department co-chair); computer room schedules to set up down in the computer lab; library research week requests to put in with the librarian.

In micro, you had to take the Guidance Dept. forms, on yellow, green, and pink paper, place them with your first period (homeroom) class roster, and prepare to list the students who were no-shows for the first three days, by color; collect the correct number of Emergency Cards for your first period (for students to take home, have parents/guardians complete, sign, and return—I had to keep a list of who didn’t bring them back to let Guidance know whose were missing); makes 3 class sets of the English Department Rules, as well as Miss O’s rules, to distribute, taking signatures that the kids had received them; and make photocopy packets of any other subject area lesson needs for the first week of school. At least. Remember instruction?

The final day, the last hours, before the first day of students, you’d find me assembling packets of all the school forms (Emergency Cards, School Code of Conduct, assorted optional insurance forms for anyone participating in sports, School Calendar wallet cards; other stuff like locker assignments and combination codes I’d give to students one at a time during the week, once they’d brought back those Emergency Cards—extortion is the American way), all attached with a paper clip to place on the desks of my homeroom, which even when I was floating, I could do ahead of time. (Fellow colleagues taught me this efficiency.)

And that is Week One.

And no kids have arrived yet.

My sweet colleague who got hounded out always blamed me and the department co-chairs, for we’d tried to help her learn the computer attendance program, and failed, and she thought we’d “reported” her. But the truth was, she was getting some kind of dementia—students of hers who trusted me came to tell me that she was giving out quizzes for things they hadn’t studied, telling one of my former students, “Oh! Darlin’, I’m so sorry—go to the file cabinet and get out the test I mean!” And the kid would fumble in the drawer and find a folder labeled, “King Arthur Test,” and ask, “This one?” Kids’ parents started complaining that their children’s grades didn’t make sense. (As it turned out, once she left, mid-year, and used her Medicare to get a proper physical, it turned out her carotid arteries were clogged; she had them scraped, the blood flow returned, and with it the oxygen needed for healthy brain function; and she enjoyed a great ten years of retirement in Florida.)

She never forgave or forgot the betrayal she felt from me, though. Nor did our colleagues forgive me for saying aloud what we were all thinking that first August teacher work week without the rubber chicken, “It’s so quiet for a change,” and I couldn’t conceal my relief; they looked at me (if they weren’t looking away) as if I were a monster. I guess I was.

Karma is real, though, for when I left my teaching career and this school for my new life in New York City, there were no kind words for me from any but a very few colleagues, even though I left after twelve years and massive contributions; no cards, no party, no send-off beyond the collective one for me and two first-year teachers—only, you guessed it, relief that I was going. No one tried to hide it. I didn’t blame them. I’d become deeply unhappy, and it showed.

I’m only a couple of years younger now than my old colleague who couldn’t keep up was, when she left; there’s no way in hell I could teach now. No way. I’ll tell you this, and I know this from my own work in educational publishing now, and it’s that computers don’t make anything in education easier. Not by a long (and nonexistent) chalk. Schoolteaching is and always will be a hard career (see: parents who are assholes); my old colleague left sad and afraid and confused and angry; I left frustrated and lonely, and afraid, too, but I was leaving to something, while she was driven out of a life she’d always loved.

And one more thing, for good or ill or just can’t help it:

We are ever changing, life is ever surprising. Keep kindness in your heart. It’s something I work on, too. For those of you heading back to the classroom this year, bless and keep you. And thanks for all you do. But for the love of god (cue Joan Crawford), “No rubber chickens!”

The Power of Our Myths

Waxing a little philosophical in the heat

This morning being cool-ish and tolerable after last night’s storms over New York City, I walked to the farmer’s market early, picked up a few things at the grocery store, came home and make hummus and tabouli with the fruits of my purchases, and sat down at the ol’ desk to do a little art—the past few months, I’ve taken to making bookmarks using Kleenex box pull tabs as a base. It takes a while to gather materials, so no rush. Did I tell you this already?

Bookmarks by LO’H, 2026.

While working on those last two up there, I turned on PBS, where I found a rebroadcast of Bill Moyers’s wonderful 1988 series, The Power of Myth, with Joseph Campbell. I came in where Campbell is explaining that the desire of our lives is not meaning, or shouldn’t be, but rather “the experience of being alive,” and that this is the source of myth, “that which cannot be named”—“some call it God.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about something a content creator (there’s a weird title) said recently, that humans have a need to make, to create, and not merely to consume—we need to feel alive—and this connects to Joseph Campbell, too. (I think this is why, for example, we march when we feel helpless after consuming all that independent news content—and why we build cathedrals and temples and even office buildings, when we aren’t crafting little bookmarks—we have to make to feel alive.)

Campbell talked, too, about our Western trap of living in dichotomies:

Good and evil

Male and female

Being and nonbeing

Right and wrong

Dead and alive

Knowledge and ignorance

To which one might add…

Republicans and Democrats

Patriots and Fascists

The Old Man and The Sea

I told you about that fallen urinal divider at Bread Loaf, the Writer’s Conference and School of English in Vermont—some literary type started a trend that others followed, with a situation that looked something like this:

Author’s rendering from limited memory; my male friend who told me about it realized that the game had devolved past help with that last one.

Dualities—we love them in our literary titles as much as in our myths.

Man, Campbell points out, is “in the field of time”—good and evil are temporal (and some of us would like to move our awful times along already, but it doesn’t work that way), but our mythology is rooted in this duality—it’s ethical at its base, sin and atonement, right and wrong (the word versus apparently lives in our marrow); it all begins with us humans as creatures: god and man start out the same; man and woman eat of the tree of knowledge; god becomes God, and man and nature then become opposed, man and woman are opposed, God is against man—all this against-ness; we are not in accord: we fight with nature, we fight amongst ourselves (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam)—all of ourselves is corrupt; nature is corrupt—this myth of opposition has determined all of our Western civilization. (There is something to sit with.)

This oppositional view of being alive on earth, Campbell notes, is counter to all the Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism), as well as to Native American religions, to take only a few examples. In Japan, for instance, there’s no idea of “a fall of man”—natural impulses are not to be defeated or fought but only acknowledged (at best) or sublimated (when hurtful or not useful).

We have only to look around America in 2026 to see where opposition as a lifestyle has gotten us. That’s all I could think as I tore up a map, opened the Mod Podge, took a paint brush, and started one more bookmark collage.

This life in the West, Campbell says, “is an opera”—we all choose the roles we play in it; and that this life is, in reality, our eternity; if you don’t get it here—“it” being whatever experience you will have as a being—you won’t get it anywhere; this life is a poem, our acts and adventures; a poem connotes something transcendent.

We have to acknowledge that this life is our only shot. Then what would mankind do? Imagine.

As Moyers questioned the validity of faith, Campbell insisted that every mythology and every religion is true—but don’t let it “get stuck in the metaphor”: Jesus didn’t physically ascend to heaven, he went into the heart, and to read that story in any other way is to get stuck in prose instead of transcending through poetry, Campbell says, getting caught in “denotation instead of connotation”—poetry gets past the concept of “reality”—it’s about connection.

And in the United States, we Americans have lost our connection, our mythology, and so, our moorings. I think this is why The Odyssey (which I still haven’t seen, but my classicist brother, Mike, went today and called it “good stuff”) is currently capturing the national imagination. We’re starving for a solid mythology.

Campbell, a true teacher and lover of learning and travel and discovery, says we are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness—the Gospel of Thomas (deliberately excised from the original Bible) says this, too— that we find the Jesus inside ourselves; heaven and hell are within ourselves; and the Upanishads said this in India, centuries ago—there are energies within us, in conflict with one another—brain wants one thing, heart another, intestines demanding attention. There are oppositions enough inside each human without adding oppositions to one another and to the earth.

At one point, Moyers talked about how Conservatives (and this was filmed during the end of Reagan’s presidency, remember) were demanding a return to old time religion, “a fixed star,” Moyers calls it; but times have changed—science and medicine changed the myths, and the moral order, Campbell says, must catch up with the moral necessities. There is no going back. What I heard is that we can’t let go, let God, but instead we have to look at the actual crisis of the climate that we humans are creating, for example, and solve for that. We live on a big planet now, and we can’t pretend we don’t: for most of human existence, most human centers around the world were unknown to one another—the Egyptians didn’t know about Aztecs—so of course, the more we learn, the more we affect one another, the more we change. We have to change.

The three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—fight because they “won’t give up the metaphor” and accept the need to find the truth, and to separate that metaphor from what Campbell calls “the temporal inflection,” our reality. Campbell notes that new metaphors are needed—Star Wars, for example, (kin to The Odyssey before it, with the focus on the father and the son, the hero’s quest and a people’s future) addresses the big question, Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity? Darth Vader, more machine than man, is playing a state role, Campbell says, not a human role—when unmasked by his son, he is revealed to be a worm, really, unformed, malformed, no longer recognizable or powerful. We need metaphors to access truth—not to cling to a metaphor (Vader as machine of the state) for its own sake.

So I think we have to ask, today: Are corporations serving us, or are we serving them?

Machines are our new mythology, and there’s no turning back. Campbell and Moyers talk about President Eisenhower visiting a room-sized early computer. Eisenhower asked the computer, “Is there a God?” After a few minutes of lots of noise and beeping, a slip of paper printed out: “Now there is.”

The creation of computers, Campbell acknowledges, is astonishing, but there is “a determined code,” one we make. He finds a metaphor here: each religion is a kind of software—but a lot of codes won’t talk to each other. We have to talk to each other.

Our new mythology, whatever it is, has to incorporate the machine—not act the other way around, where the machine incorporates us. But as Campbell points out, while the world is changing too fast to have myths, still we can’t survive without them. This leaves all the work to the individual. And the artist.

Above all, myths serve “a pedagogical function”—they teach each of us how to live a life as a human. Watching this show again, I (a former teacher) was reminded how desperately we need teachers. At The Butcher Block this morning, I saw a New York Post headline that infuriated me—telling the Teacher’s Union that they had no business asking for raises when the kids can’t “reed.” And I was telling my friendly cashier what I did for a living and why headlines like that enrage me—that the problem is the goddamned technology forced on all of us by Big Tech, that all the studies show kids learn best with print books, pen, and paper; reading on screen affords almost zero comprehension—but Zuckerberg forbid we listen to actual reading experts.

We have a whole culture that attacks the educated, attacks the experts—Dr. Fauci is but the latest and most absurd example (the grandstanding Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) not bothering to show up for the “contempt of Congress” vote he forced, his big show of knowing stupidity being over). Interestingly, we know this sort of thing happens because the ignorant are not only not curious, they are terrified of what they don’t know. Yet I have to point out, these same folks ironically embrace a fairy story in a book from 2,000 years ago, set in a totally different landscape and time, featuring no real technology beyond basic tools, ink and parchment, and the wheel, and call it reality. They say they hate being told what to do (wear a mask, distance socially), while demanding all of us follow their Ten Commandments, even as they all defy the very Commandments they say they revere—comfortable with molesting children, abusing wives, committing adultery, being greedy; to say nothing of the stuff in the red letters, like throwing those stones. How does anyone keep up with this?

I really like how Monte Mader explains about the myth that AI, that there really is no such thing as “artificial intelligence,” but only “human made intelligence,” fed into machines of human design (for corporate profit). As you saw if you watched the video, that is what true desecration looks like—the rape of our sources of knowledge, spine by spine, and tossed and lost forever like so much trash by Big Tech. And to what end?

Mythology—its creation and keeping—now is the job of artists—Campbell points out writers such as Joyce and Mann, artists such as Klee and Picasso, not a woman or non-European named, or anyone more recent than early 20th century, but you see the idea. And I was telling my dad, Bernie, only this very morning that I was thinking about how grateful I was that he and my mom Lynne were always creating—whether it was growing spring vegetable seedlings collected in containers set on a card table in the little upstairs living room at the bay window; or going to the nursery to buy shrubs for the yard; or building our toy boxes out of orange crates from his job at Safeway; or Mom making decoupage plaques and footstools for household art, and creating our Halloween costumes by hand; or even their cooking our meals from scratch, and me baking cookies—we were surrounded by making, always. And out of our making, we O’s became.

Thanks, internet.

Keep making and telling your stories, Americans. Make us US.

Sending love among the ruins,

Miss O’

Sanctuary

On libraries, reading, and living itself

I look around my kitchen, my living room, and I think, “You should leave this place to the world as a museum.” Because wow, are we going downhill fast.

Ray Bradbury predicted the end of civilization in the AI-anticipating 1950 nuclear bomb classic story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the title for which is taken from a 1918 Sara Teasdale poem (and takes place on August 4, 2026—wow); as well as his book-burning classic novel Fahrenheit 451, which I chose not to teach, favoring the Holocaust memoir Night, hoping to generate some empathy in my students. I guess I should have taught both, but world enough and time. You know.

I know I told you about that study I read, that having a library makes you smarter: by merely looking at the spines of books you have read, your brain recalls the book, details of its subject, and it stimulates memory. Though I haven’t read a study to this effect, I have no doubt the same is true of homes with collected objects vs. the past decade’s trend toward antiseptic white, neutrals, engineered wood, and surfaces devoid of objects. Built-ins, should they exist, house a few solid-color vases from a Marshall’s housewares section. Simple, simple, so as not to interfere with the stimulations from our phones.

As we eschew craftsmanship in everyday objects and our built environments and allow tech companies to plunder and destroy our antique and rare books, I freak out, to be simplistic about it. And it makes me wonder if we are being made smart with our smartphones or merely overwhelmed and anxious—and controllable. The constant flashes of phone “content” are ever new, require split-second processing, and cause our hearts to race. This is the opposite effect, I’d say, of the friendly nature of personal libraries and memory-filled collected objects.

Too much?

For years at my publishing job, a poster hung in the area of my cubicle that talked about the “reading food pyramid” by genre, of which Nonfiction was the base, with Poetry at the tippy top. I told an executive that that was wrong, it was the inverse: Poetry should be the big, solid base (think nursery rhymes and Shel Silverstein, to Shakespeare) followed quickly by Fiction (Dr. Seuss to YA to Dostoyevsky), with Nonfiction near the top. “But Common Core says,” and it does—that 70% of all reading in high school Language Arts should be nonfiction (as if social studies, science, and math weren’t enough); but it turns out Common Core was influenced by corporations who wanted their employees to make charts and feed data into systems; corporations don’t want empathetic, abstract thinkers. See? It’s why the people who work for Big Health Insurance feel nothing denying life-saving care; they only see bottom lines.

My dad, Bernie, a retired meat cutter and high school dropout, once asked his daughter the actor, director, and high school English teacher, “Why do I have to read Shakespeare?” And I said, “Dad, if you can read Hamlet, you can literally read anything.” This is true. What is missing most in our world, I think, is philosophy—and as smart as my dad is, he could very easily have become a MAGA without the education and influence of his wife and second daughter. I’ve always wondered why I have to occasionally pull him back from that rightwing abyss, and yesterday I happened on this video by scientist Lucas Bean, who explains on his Substack the key difference between MAGA brains and Liberal brains:

Lucas Bean Daily

Why the MAGA Cult Thinks Like 10 Year Olds

Before the age of 11, the human brain cannot think abstractly…

Listen now

5 days ago · 510 likes · 45 comments · Lucas Bean

So you see what it is: children and adults who read poetry, philosophy, and challenging fiction, and who think critically and question, are more discerning and just plain smarter humans. And when people say, “You can’t change them,” referring to the MAGA-minded, the teacher in me knows (and the study Bean cites bears out) that given the freedom to unplug, to read poetry, to listen to music, to form an opinion or new idea in conversation with others, that “can’t” doesn’t have to be true. I also know that it’s never “one and done”; though my dad has read everything from the daily paper to Steinbeck to L’Engle to Bronte, he has to be continually challenged when he happens on rightwing pundits and even the president he despises. Trump always sounds so sure—the way our little toddlers are so sure they can do whatever it is. I told you that story, the way I went weak in the knees and doubled over laughing watching my then 3-year-old nephew peddling his trike for all it was worth down the sidewalk in front of us, and when his mom asked what was so funny, I said, “Like he knows where he’s going!” I see now that this is the appeal of Trump—we do love the confidence of toddlers, and too many of us confuse confidence with competence; sadly, we are about to lose life on earth because of our pleasure in being entertained by an idiot. Yesterday, (soon to be ex-) Rep. John Cornyn (R-TX), who has been screwed over by Trump but continues to do his bidding, said that there’s nothing anyone can do to stop Trump (he moves on you like a bitch). Congress should be the parental adult in this situation, but he’s just so darned cute, and threatening, that the parents are letting the psycho baby run wild.

To refresh our collective memories of the danger before us now, I’ll leave you with a timeline of Trump’s Covid Days, shared by Lucas Bean, from which I could not look away, even as I lived it for years here in New York City. You look too:

Lucas Bean Daily

Trump’s Failed Response During Pandemic: A timeline

The Timeline They Don’t Want You to See…

Listen now

a day ago · 484 likes · 69 comments · Lucas Bean

Given all this, it’s astounding to me that everything for MAGA remains the Black president’s fault, immigrants’ fault, Biden’s fault, abortion’s fault. It’s pitiful, really, when it’s not fucking deadly. But we can’t give up teaching.

My Rob Brezsny horoscope last week asked me to think about the word sanctuary and what it means to me. And I’ve thought about that: The most peaceful and hopeful and whole I’ve felt in my life occurred over a few summers I spent in Blacksburg, Virginia, at Virginia Tech, in summer school, working the Summer Arts Festivals, and living on my own off campus. I was young and healthy, studying subjects I loved; knew what I was going to do with my learning—teach English and direct a drama club in a Virginia public high school; I had money enough to buy food (though I have no memory of eating—that is how lucky I was); my parents, siblings, and extended family were alive and well; I was surrounded by adults whose knowledge and company I relished; and I felt I was living in a big green hug from the New River Valley. Life has never felt better than that—as good, amazingly enough, yes, sometimes. But that was peak sanctuary. Gladly would I learn and gladly teach.

Fridge moment.

What is sanctuary for you?

And while you are thinking, how do we get out of this mess?

Wondering about stuff: something light

This morning I got to looking at my sideboard, a gateleg flip-top table, probably mahogany, maybe cherry, certainly hardwood; a fifth leg swings out. It was used in a barn as a sawhorse—you can see it it in marks all over it. I have this piece because it was in an apartment where I lived with a prickly roommate, whose previous roommate (a glorious human) got it from her mom’s thrift shop and told me I could have it. It’s at least 200 years old, full of damage (scotch staples held part of the top together till they fell off in the last move, and I put glued pencils in where pegs used to be underneath—it was an emergency fix when Rina from India was staying with me, and Mark and Steve and Flynn were coming over from New Jersey for a St. Patrick’s Day feast and I had to get us around some kind of table, and Rina said as I assessed, grabbled, and glued, “I am in awe of you right now”), not really practical, and surely not worth much money, but I love it. It’s the object I’d bring to Antiques Roadshow just to learn more about it.

When you watch Antiques Roadshow—and if you don’t, I recommend it, as it’s interesting, educational, curious, and also restful, so human and hopeful—do you look around your place and start wondering about things? What would you bring?

Antiques, a roadshow of the mind

This has been hanging over my mantle

I inherited this from my grandmother

These were in my mother’s attic

A man offered us a thousand for this set

This ring

This doll

These books

This sword

This poster

In a barn

This rug

In the garage

This

uniform

painting

embroidery

etching

lamp

vase

At a thrift store

Hopefully we can find out something more about it

Do you remember how much you paid for it?

The artist

The owner

Was born in 1888

Late 1920s

Late 1930s

Joined the militia at seventeen

The (pick a) war

The expedition

It’s a charming story

In the original box

We’ll obviously keep this

Bowl

Bracelet

Federal style table

Rookwood Pottery

It is Tiffany

A salesman’s sample

Tomb Trade Simulator

I’ve had it for about 30 years

The maker’s mark

At the folkart table

Not Tiffany

He was a coal miner turned photographer

She was a debutante turned painter

He was a mapmaker for the government

She was an itinerant artist at a time when

I heard they

Lived in France

Japan

Bali

Alaska

Massachusetts

Auction records are scarce

Look

glass

original frame

platinum gold copper

Great patina

The watch and the chain are like nothing I’ve seen

The sales receipt is incredibly complete

Intact

Like new

A diamond set in the center

It’s perfect

Not polished

A little wear which is to be expected

Something of this age

It’s unsigned

Not popular as it once was

Any idea of value?

For insurance purposes

And you hear the stories and the insurance appraisal

and you see the vintage episodes and hear the up or down sound effect

and sometimes you just want to step back and imagine it

As it once was

And the who had it

And the where it came from

That’s the value—

the pleasure of its company.

Here’s to Sunday.

Calling All Librarians (and Readers)

Hi, Friends—

Not to be an alarmist in a country filled with every manner of horror, but I share an emergency call out here for my readers and book lovers. According to reporting from Aaron Parnas, AI companies are buying up as many antique and RARE BOOKS as they can find, as fast as they can find them, and once scanned, DESTROYING THEM.

I gather that this is so that AI can be used to scan historical and scientific texts of old in order that 1) they might be altered if it’s expedient; as well as 2) hidden at will.

It’s diseased. We live in lunatic times.

Please alert all your bookseller friends, put out the alert to every reader you know. We have to save our books.

We are at Brave New World level now.

I guess we also need some kind of plan for saving our own personal libraries. Share your ideas. We don’t have much time.

Meanwhile: We have tens of thousands of ICE thugs, police officers, and rogues going around killing indiscriminately and without consequences. We have concentration camps up everywhere. People are being arrested for SHOWING UP to meetings to protest data centers. Data centers are demonstrably drying up rivers and ground freshwater sources. It’s full on dystopia.

Don’t think just because we are, you know, keeping our doctor’s appointments and stocking up at the grocery store that our nation isn’t eroding all around us. I scream this with love.

And on August 3, Kentucky’s governor’s time expires to call a special election to replace Mitch McConnell, so no doubt Mitch’s death will be announced August 4. You heard it here first.

I am prepped for the onslaught of more flooding rains to fill my basement—can only hope for the best.

This is really hard—all of this. We have to figure this out. We have to.

Sending love,

Miss O’

In Recovery: On social media and addiction

In 2009, a dear friend of mine died unexpectedly. Her teenage sons asked Miss O’ to please please please get on Facebook so we could keep up; two longtime friends from grad school, a couple, had been pestering me about joining it since it launched ca. 2004, even though I saw them on a fairly regular basis. Finally, five years later, I joined, but I didn’t feel good about it.

I do not truck, as they say, in regret. (A dear writer friend told me that Miss O’s greatest flaw—I told you this—is that I have “too great a capacity to enjoy”; hers is unending regret, from deeds in the past to the restaurant she should have gone to as you are ordering appetizers in this one; her flaw is tougher for her than mine is for me, though I have been working on dialing back my big energy.)

But on reflection, since I left Facebook after Donald Trump’s “election” in 2024, I have fallen into depression, the sole cause of which I assumed was the daily erosion of democracy, institutions, and rule of law; and the transparent coup d’etat ignored by Congress; along with the death of my mom. And all that would be enough.

This morning, waking as I do now at 2:00 AM at least once of week, I began thinking about social media and its effects, realizing that I’ve spent a year and a half “coming down” from Facebook, with delirium tremors manifesting in doom scrolling my phone for “news.” And that led me to recall that growing up, we got news in two waves: the morning paper and the 6 o’clock news. It was the bookend of a day; you might also get a weekly magazine, or a twice-weekly local paper, too, but on a daily basis, assassinations and earthquakes notwithstanding, and a news break at noon on a local channel, the events of the nation and the world didn’t figure into our moment-to-moment lives. You simply lived, and that was hard enough.

With Facebook, I found myself checking in all the time—the site doing to me what it was designed to do; I never had the app on my phone, fortunately, but then Instagram was born—a cheerful place for photos until that, too, became all news all the time. I no longer post on Instagram, instead using it to amplify activist content that oligarch-owned television news and newspapers no longer touch or actively suppress. I’m miserable all the time, just as I was with Facebook, which I should have quit—and here’s where the regret kicks in—after Obama’s second inauguration in January of 2013. In 2012, I self-published my little eBook, Easier to Live Here: Miss O’ in New York City, a compilation of my daily posts, the ones limited to 140 characters, as requested by my friend Becca. That was a fun collaboration with my designer Magda (whose course in making eBooks caused her to ask me if I had material) and illustrator Lisa. And I could have said, “Cheers, friends,” and been free.

Still, good connections came out of it; the price was the loss of many deep friendships. No one had time for that anymore—skimming and scanning, dipping in and out, that’s all we could do, what with 700 friends, 3,000 or 4,000 even for some people I knew. I can’t tell you how often a version of, “How are you?” to a friend was met with, “Don’t you read my Facebook?” I couldn’t do that for 700 people every day, can you? Maybe it’s me.

What she said. I’ve had to learn to focus on books again.

There’s something more, though: as the nation shifted full-throttle is a race toward fascism, white supremacists led by Trump revving like monster trucks in their rage over a successful Black president, my engagement with social media became less about storytelling and more about soapboxing. I didn’t like who I was becoming, and who I became. And with the reboot of the whole shitshow, I knew my rants and raves and facts and arguments were less than useless: they were obnoxious. America was not mine to fix. It was arrogant and idiotic of me to think otherwise.

Via today’s TikTok (which app I do not have) and Instagram, I’ve found an array of genuinely informed and connected media people known as “influencers,” each with a special lens, and many are confident and caring and informed and wonderful without being arrogant or idiotic or obnoxious. Social media is not my medium, creatively. I’m still not sure what is.

Meanwhile, I’d like to think that a year and a half later, I’m nearly on the other side of that 15-year cycle of addiction; the next phase is to get off Instagram, but unfortunately, that’s where I get most of my news. Substack, where I publish this, has long been rumored to be a fascist platform, pretending to support independent thought so that dissenters will be easy for the regime to target and jail, because that’s here now. I remember my youngest brother’s friend Joe, whose father got out of communist Hungary, the USSR, intoning in a thick accent in imitation: “Trust no one, Joe, not even your best friend,” and you’d laugh. It’s not funny anymore.

I don’t truck in nostalgia, either, because my good times came alongside other people’s horrors, but I do miss not being in “breaking news” moments ad nauseam, miss feeling that smart, responsible people were running things, miss having the energy and imagination and drive of a creative life, barefoot and on swing sets, too, while I’m dreaming.

Sunflower surprise, Queens. No reason.

The sun’s up now.

So, how are you?

Sending love,

Miss O’

Department of the Interior: Reflecting on our built environments

“Architecture needs more doodads. (That’s what my mom says, and she’s very aware of her built environment.)”

~ LuAnn Keller, Virginia Tech MFA theater grad student, on a flyer (I wish I’d saved) for a theater workshop she conducted with architecture students, ca. 1986

I always feel guilty when I’m not sharing political rage, but on this Sunday morning celebrating Pride in NYC I’d like to indulge a little in my personal interests, to share with you something on art and literature, knowing it will all lead to politics here in the end (and already has, look at that).

As a fan of HGTV—primarily because (and all due respect to the late Julia Child n PBS and the teaching of cooking and baking) it’s the only network that shows how nothing becomes not only something but also how it will now be inhabited (consumed, so to speak) by real people and for life—I have spent over a decade noticing how interior design became “Pottery Barn-inspired” as opposed to “collected and curated.” With the profound exceptions of Home Town and the lamentedly canceled Bargain Block, designing has become about creating neutral-feeling “spaces” rather than “rooms,” spaces that, sans walls, act more like furniture showrooms than homes. The “neutral” craze of whites, creams, and light wood tones, with the occasional splash of black in a feature wall or trim is not so much a backdrop for, say, colorful art (no walls means no art), as a merely open, blank canvas that will remain blank, if sometimes messier, for years to come. No amount of the show hosts saying, “Look how warm and inviting” will change the fact that every bathroom, bedroom, and living room—sorry, “space,”—is designed to mimic an impersonal hotel. I personally find the designs clean, sure, but sterile; there’s no question that what the hosts (the Property Brothers, Dave and Jenny Marrs, the Kleinschmidts, pick a show) create for homeowners is certainly nicer in the end than at the beginning, everything “updated” and tidy, “tons of storage,” etc. But you can’t help noticing that the people they are designing for will most likely never put any art on the walls that do exist (walls that sometimes get wood slats for “architectural detail” to fill the void), or set precious objects on the shelves, when there are shelves. And I can’t help wondering why.

Never to be seen on HGTV. All of my friends have homes like mine, some far more sophisticated for sure, but all with the same feeling of life. I find this comforting.

I know I’ve talked about this—people either love Miss O’s apartment on entering or get instant hives; there’s really no middle ground. I have lost my way, I think, in my collecting—now more cluttered studio than a home for hosting, but generally it works for me. This is because there’s not a single book, object, work of art, or furniture piece that is not the center of story. There’s no, “Oh, I bought that at IKEA” only; there was a specific time, reason, need, or person involved. Each piece is a memory, and I can tell you about it. I can’t really understand living any other way, and my way is definitely not trending. So what am I missing?

In my YouTube travels, when I’m not watching interviews with favorite musicians, I enjoy occasional episodes of HomeWorthy, wherein an unseen host takes viewers on guided tours of fabulous New York City apartments, led by the owners/renters themselves (who are collectors, designers, and artists). Their astonishing money-to-buy-stuff notwithstanding, even their paint color choices are inspired by, say, some historical place or painting; each object has a story. “I picked this up in a market in Bali in 1973,” a story begins, or “The creator of this piece was was a young weaver who…”; or “I bought these chairs at an auction in 1990, and they came from an estate in New Jersey; I needed a small sitting area, and look how perfectly they work by the window.” The people in these NYC apartments create rooms within rooms, areas for conversation, for office work, along with a bar, a library, hidden storage. No living room has only one function, what with space at a premium.

Miss O’ can relate. I can also relate to all the stories. I would love someone to film me giving a tour of my apartment as if I were a very important person; maybe it could inspire the white-walled, clear-spaced neutral people to reconsider their choices.

Ask me about my kitchen pass-through view.

Why do I say this? Come on, Miss Judgy O’Judger, I hear you say, shouldn’t people get to choose the way they live? Of course, as long as it is a choice, a conscious one, and brings joy. (I’d like to pause and judge one thing: I loathe and despise random and incessant gilding and calling it style. It’s not political.) What I’ve come to suspect is that the quiet, neutral furniture showroom aesthetic is a direct response to the little device we hold in our hands, the overstimulation that is doom scroll chic. They can look up from the screen and see blessed emptiness. I think even trees are too much for people anymore, and that’s just tragic.

In my travels around my own doom scrolling, I saw this video on Instagram the other day:

Not only does this analysis acknowledge my questions, it also affirms some of my suspicions and adds more to my understanding of the way people live now. Here’s a comment on this same video:

So I can see the two-screens, various devices thing, the shorter attention spans of today, as part of this. But I got to wondering more about the role that story plays, or doesn’t, in our current culture. I know streaming and binge watching of fictional shows is wildly popular, but the reading of fiction (to say nothing of poetry) has dropped precipitously. I look at our educational system to point one finger: Common Core State Standards for ELA (English Language Arts) dictate that by the end of elementary school and into Grade 12, all reading in language arts classes should be 70% nonfiction.

Who decided this? I’ll tell you who: corporations (aligned with Christian Nationalists—oh, politics, are you never not around?). Why? Because the reading of fiction—even audio books, which is totally relevant as reading because humans were oral-based storytellers for millennia, and reading print has only been fairly commonplace for a century—creates empathy. As a student, for nonfiction I recall only humorous essays by Twain, say, or philosophy by Emerson and Thoreau; as a teacher, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” and Elie Wiesel’s Night were about it. The rest was short stories, novels, poetry, and drama. And here I am today, a big, educated, worldly heart. Fuck that?

Here’s another Instagram post on just this educational issue, and I could not agree more:

What the corporation head will say is that, today, they need readers who can process data. (Gee, what did we ever do without…data?) They need “readers” who can think critically about complex scientific, historical, and social problems.

They are lying.

What they really want are bored drones who generate revenue for invisible shareholders. They want brains that don’t work, eyes that don’t see, hearts that are empty. Lack of compassion makes workers easy to control. Here, buy this device, watch this show, hell, watch two or three at once. Wear beige. Turn all your books so the spines face the back. See how pretty that looks? Punch that laptop. (I learned all this from reading the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World as a sophomore in high school. Dangerous, see?)

Oscar Wilde for Pride Weekend. Spines facing out, thanks.

I know I’ve said this before too—I’m old; I do a lot of that—but I’ve read (!) that fewer and fewer people have physical libraries in their homes, the wisdom being that if you’ve read it, why do you have to look at it? Books only collect dust. But I read some study that showed that people who have libraries (spines out) are frankly smarter than people who don’t. The reason is not based on IQ, but rather on the fact that seeing the books reminds your brain of what you read, when you read it, and what it was about, and as a result, neurons fire. You are simply more alive.

I think this must be the same for everyday living in homes (not spaces) with collected objects. Each picture, rock, vase, sculpture, card, tea tin reminds me, for example, of where I got it, who gave it to me, why it has meaning. I create and recall life narratives in my mind just by living in my house. You can’t do that in quite the same way with white walls and warm wood with an empty countertop, with built-in shelves that hold a white ceramic vase from Pottery Barn and maybe a plant next to a phone charging station.

This really isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about what happens to our souls when our minds and homes are sterile. For people who are poor, who are just starting out, who are scraping by, none of what I’m saying sounds like anything but privilege; but I’d argue that the same results of emptiness apply to anyone.

When I was a tiny child (the year the Voting Rights Act was signed into law), my parents, Bernie and Lynne, scraped up $50 for a house downpayment, because if you had a regular labor job (and were white—here comes more politics), you could do that. The house’s downstairs walls were white cinderblock for many years; the floors tan and black asbestos tile, no rugs; we had a round red-wood coffee table my mom bought when she was in the navy, and a couple of mid-century modern rope chairs. In the first year, together they bought a vinyl-covered loveseat, a wooden rocker, and an vinyl-covered recliner, and a small black and white TV along with a pressed wood end table for a stand. And that was our living room for at least five years.

But what I remember more than that is the portable hi-fi and record albums always playing on it; the Puerto Rican Pottery ashtrays, the diablo mask, the black Wedgwood tea set, the Israeli brass ashtray, the painting of a watchmaker upstairs, and volumes and volumes of books (the first thing they spent serious money on was a big custom bookcase for the otherwise empty upstairs living room, an odd feature of their house model)—all things Lynne had collected as a single woman in her twenties. I asked about all of them. I learned their stories, and also, then, the story of Lynne’s life before me, before marriage and children. (By contrast, my dad’s entire life fit into a small brown suitcase when he moved to marry my mom.)

It’s the objects, the books, the stories—it’s not about stuff for its own sake; not about constantly clean surfaces and a living room that looks unused and “ready for entertaining” in the abstract. It’s nice to have a tidy home, but a home—not a space—is to live in, to arrange memories, to build new ones. To be alive in.

A library, even a small one, matters. Novels are important. Poetry is important. Having volumes around you makes you a better, by which I mean a more feeling and aware, human. Remembering that our lives—all our lives—are connected stories is key to our humanity.

Our interiors reflect our interiors, if you see what I mean. Both interiors inform the way we curate our democracy, our earth, too. It must. I know I can’t control the world, can’t stop all the atrocities, but I can curate my stories, maybe share them, hope to spread a little encouragement for all of us to do that for ourselves, for each other. If you want.

Sending love and hopes for a better tomorrow,

Miss O’

So I went into my family photo album, and would you look at that accuracy of memory? (I’d forgotten the little bookcase—three painted versions later, it sits in the exact same spot by my dad’s chair today.) In terms of function, the room served as entertainment center, nursery, and laundry. Ca. 1965.

The Bias Cut

Fashion of the moment and what lasts

Last week as part of a month-long retrospective of the career of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) (think The Shop Around the Corner), Film Forum here in New York City showed two screenings of the movie Trouble in Paradise, starring Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis. But wait, there’s more.

The Film Forum lobby ad card for the retrospective.

At both the 12:15 PM and the 7:00 PM showings, my old friend and colleague, Howard Gutner, introduced the film and showed slides of photos from his latest book on Hollywood’s Golden Age, Banton of Paramount, a deeply researched study of the work of costume designer Travis Banton (1894-1958), whose protegee, Edith Head (1887-1981), was the eight-time Oscar-winning designer of films such as All About Eve (1951, in the Black and White category, which category ended in 1970) and The Sting (1974, her last). Banton never won because awards for Best Costume Design weren’t introduced until 1949, and by that time his alcoholism got him forced out of studio work; I’d never heard of Banton until Howard told me about his book coming out.

Howard was my work supervisor for many years, and we collaborated on many projects. Several former colleagues showed up across both showings, and our reunion made us look like groupies or the In crowd. A very old In crowd.

Howard’s introduction, which was delivered with real command of the material, a great voice, and wit and warmth, included slides of two gowns from Trouble in Paradise (which is just terrific, by the way): one worn by Miriam Hopkins shows a character who does not come from wealth, and the other, worn by Kay Francis, shows a temptress character with riches to burn. Both gowns, Howard explained, were sewn on Banton’s signature bias cut, where cutting the fabric on a 45-degree angle causes the dress to hug the body, thus showing a body’s true shape. Ah, the world of Pre-Code Hollywood. And this new knowledge, as it turned out, shaped the way I watched the movie—a new lens, if you will, that enhanced my viewing pleasure by heightening my awareness of craft beyond plot.

In addition to pitching Howard’s book, and I am, I want to praise the writers and archivists who keep our artistic histories alive. Howard’s other two books, Gowns by Adrian (long out of print, I see that Simon and Schuster is going to reissue it in November of 2026), about MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian (you know him, yes you do, because he designed The Wizard of Oz), and MGM Style, about the work of MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons (The Wizard of Oz and so many more), along with the new book on Banton, provide backstories that had not been told; prior to Howard’s book, there were no books at all on Banton, for example. Following Howard’s lead, there are now other books on Adrian, but those writers didn’t get to interview Katharine Hepburn personally (as Howard did) as part of the research (Adrian designed Hepburn’s costumes for The Philadelphia Story). So important was Gowns by Adrian in design circles, I even caught a glimpse of it while watching 2024’s documentary about Bob Mackie, Naked Illusion:

In this still of the famed designer for Cher, Carol Burnett, and Elton John, among so many others, I’m especially proud of my screen capture of Mackie either about to sing opera or take a dump.
Art isn’t easy.

The other night I asked a young waiter in my neighborhood haunt, Belo—a kid I know to love theater, literature, and film—“Do you like classic movies?” to which he eagerly replied, “Yes!” so I told him about Film Forum’s retrospective. He pulled out his phone, Googled Ernst Lubitsch, and winced. “These aren’t classic, they’re old.” And that was it, phone back in pocket, conversation over. In an American age where the president wants to either tear down a congressional cultural monument like The Kennedy Center or rebrand it as vulgar Trump real estate; in a nation in which everyone of note seemingly wants to erase the arts and entertainment they don’t care for—from Timothée Chalamet dismissing opera and ballet, to Meryl Streep doing the same to wrestling on the Golden Globes (I guess that UFC cage match on the White House lawn will show her)—I feel that Americans are being Meta-trained to consume, to criticize, to forget, to throw away, to wipe out everything at greater and greater rates, in larger and larger amounts, across all spectrums of our collective experience—all so we can’t and won’t learn our true and full history. I think it’s that dangerous—for with every bit of historical memory we give up or entertainment pastime we bury with derision, we come that much closer to erasing who we are, where we came from, and the more the oligarchs and freedom fuckers win. (I read that Peter Thiel, a principal architect of America’s apocalypse, has moved to Argentina; that should tell us something, and maybe it’s good.)

I heard a little kid ask his parent the other day, “Why is the Mona Lisa so famous still?” And it struck me that the real beauty of that painting is that the whole world knows of it and that the knowing started in the Renaissance. That said, so too will everyone remember Mar-a-Lago and for just as long, because the grotesque and the evil matter to our story as much as the beautiful and the great; after all, the Borges financed the Renaissance. Obama’s legacy, I hope, will outlast Trump’s for all the right reasons; Trump can build all the monuments to himself and generate all the AI superhero images of himself he wants, but you know the only thing that will really last? This POEM:

I recommend regular rereadings of this poem, aloud, for sanity.

Here in my neighborhood on Friday evening, I stopped by the vintage clothing and gift shop Bliss and learned of owner Violet’s annual plant exchange (where we all can exchange cuttings to share with others) next weekend—and also the 8th anniversary of her store. She advertised for a band via Instagram and an Armenian guitarist said he could bring a tuba player and a violinist for a trio. Violet said, “Only in New York could I get world class musicians to come out to Queens for a plant exchange and face painting.” Now that is what I mean by collective culture.

I’ll leave you this Sunday with a couple of video essays by PissedMagistus on Instagram and Qasim Rashid on Substack, both on the sheer stupidity of racism, fascism, xenophobia, homophobia, and bigotry of all kinds—think of these clips as different kinds of bias cuts. No one should mind either high art, so-called, or low culture, so-called, just as they shouldn’t care what color someone’s skin is or what country they come from. With June starting tomorrow, I think of the Pride call, “We’re here, we’re queer,” and life goes on, right? What should never be stomached, though, are the dangerous people in power right now and the atrocities they are committing. Don’t drain your outrage, I keep telling myself, and while I’m upset over the Kennedy Center and glad a judge ordered Trump to remove his name, I’m saving my tight chest for Delaney Hall and my outrage for two Democratic women governors who are squandering their leadership—already. Spanberger vetoed a bill that would demand warrants for all ICE searches; Sherrill sent in troops to terrorize peaceful protestors yesterday. Shame, shame, shame, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So much work to do.

And don’t forget to make space for art.

Sidebar: Seen at the Montclair Art Museum in Monclair, NJ, last weekend—I love this label, upending “Unknown” as the default to illuminate gaps in our historical memory and think about why that is.

Waking in First Light

While the Frozen Left lets democracy slip away, a little talk in the heat of late spring

This morning, as I do at least two mornings a week, I awoke around 3 AM. I was sleeping in my own bed, in a room with a working lamp and fan, surrounded by two dressers, a stack of books, and art objects either gifted to me or purchased with money earned from work. I was able to get up on my own two legs and walk to a working indoor toilet, use it, and pad into my very own kitchen, take out my coffee maker, scoop local artisanal coffee into the filter, extract potable water from my own faucet and pour it into the drip coffeemaker on my own kitchen counter. Flip a switch, listen to the drip, pull down a mug.

These are no small things. Taken together, you realize, “In America, we live like kings.”

I saw a video the other day, though I didn’t save it and don’t know who said it, that in the 21st century, Americans, and indeed many, many people, live like kings for the just the situation and services I noted. And no one is happy.

And though the Big “Haves” as well as too many “haves in denial” are never satisfied, more of us could be living like kings if it weren’t for about 2,000 rich people (nearly all white men) who can’t bear the thought of you having anything, let alone Blacks having so much as a vote, or Hispanics and Muslims sending their children to school. These same oligarchs hate Jews even as they fund Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. To prevent you and me and anyone brown from having a goddamned thing, they will bomb every nation and even blow up the planet. This isn’t even hyperbole. When I read yesterday that Trump’s DOJ, now his personal police force, awarded $1.7 billion to the January 6 insurrectionists—shown in the Mueller Report to be crisis actors (the Republican term) transported to D.C. and housed in hotels paid for by a Trump SuperPAC—I realized how idiotic Democrats have been to “trust the system.” We also know those feces-smearing cop-killers will never see a dime; all the money will go into a Trump trust or some such. But it’s our money. Our money.

I don’t even know how to feel mad anymore. I read that we the sentient have what is called Compassion Fatigue, and Outrage Exhaustion, pick a syndrome borne out of this Theatre of the Absurd that celebrates and normalizes those who engage in pedophilia and rape and grift, gets incensed by the idea of universal healthcare, and chooses unchecked guns over school safety, book bans over public education.

[At 5:29 AM, my peace in typing this on my little porch was interrupted by a big truck’s deafening engine in idle somewhere nearby, for maybe ten minutes, and I thought, “Of course.” It’s the perfect metaphor for America.]

This past weekend, one of my former students, ca. 1997-98, was in town for a wedding in Brooklyn and was determined to visit me, even after multiple delays, changing hotels, and helping return tuxedos. My strongest memory of this student is the first week of school in my tenth grade Humanities class, when I had the kids introduce themselves to the class using a question they hated being asked. His question was, “Are you mixed?” and his answer was, “I am a beautiful mulatto.” I recounted this to him when I saw him, finally, late Sunday evening. He lives out West now with his wife and son, and his best friend came along to Queens with him—in fact, this kid said his main reason for accompanying his bff to this wedding was a chance to see me—and apologize.

In fact, his first words coming down the stairs from the el train and seeing me were, “I love you!” And over the course of tequila shots and beer at my favorite bar, he explained what a troubled teen he had been, and he said something I’d never heard: “You held me with different hands than anyone else,” and those hands were full of “culture.” He felt cared for in a way that was new.

This exchange—the great conversation in general—reminds me how vital education is for mind and spirit, for sustenance in a dry-as-bones corporate world. Of my former profession, I told him that I would love to teach again—all I ever wanted to be was a teacher and learner—but not the way education is now. “I’d like to sit on some steps, like Socrates,” I said, and his friend said, “And philosophize!” Yes. Talk, think, observe. Make learning fun and human again.

I want to say that I gave this kid every out, texting, “It’s okay if you can’t come out here,” and “I’m too tired to get out to you,” and in truth I was really tired, being old now and feeling it at 7 PM on a Sunday; but he was determined, so I did it. My point here: always make an effort.

We can be surprised by visits, and we need to let visitors in. While I was home in Virginia the other week, my dad, Bernie, brother Jeff , and I were sitting outside on the little pea gravel patio, staring at sky and trees and the bird sanctuary that has formed around Bernie’s feeders, after a few hours of long-needed yard work. Suddenly a bird we’d never seen alighted on the feeder, wild black and white striped wings, a red breast, a golden beak. He was a vision. (I say “he” because any bird of colorful plumage is a male—to attract mates and distract predators from the nest, they say.) We all went crazy trying to identify it, commenting on the markings, watching the movements. Wow.

Google Lens identified the bird as an adult male Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and indeed the female is a simpler golden brown color. It turns out the bird should be in the mountains on his migration, some 50 miles west, but he stopped over for a meal.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rose-breasted_Grosbeak/id

This sighting got me thinking about female beauty. I remember by mom, Lynne, saying to me when I balked at wearing lipstick and mascara the year I’d lost my natural bloom and students wanted to give me a makeover, feeling as if it would call unnecessary attention to myself: “Honey, you don’t wear makeup so they notice you; you wear it so they don’t.” She was right.

“Beauty is invisibility,” I read on a post the other day, where men write in the radical female content creator’s comments, “You are so beautiful” in response to a video on social justice for women. I’ve had men do that to me—compliment my hair in mid-sentence. I’m not heard, not seen. So many ways for men to miss out through misogyny.

Years ago, my best friend at the time, a man, asked me what I wanted in a relationship. “Great conversations,” I said, and he snorted, “Yeah, you’re gonna be alone.” And I am. He was absolutely right. I cannot have great conversations with most men, or I can but only to a point, and right when I’m reaching a new understanding, or sharing one, or moving them so they might figure something out, they crack a joke. Every. Time. I’m sorry about that.

And so it was a delight to have a great and serious and also fun conversation with a former male student. Curiously, it’s not the drama students who seek me out to visit after many years so much as it is the language arts kids, like this student. While the intensity of a weeks-long rehearsal process in the drama club creates fast friends, perhaps it’s the 9-month incubation of a high school English class that births the real relationships.

We cannot have it all—in friends, in citizens, in a nation—but if we look around for a minute and make space for visitors, we already have more than we realize. Now, how to get people in power to see this, to want this for all of us? As theater legend Joseph Chaikin said, “I want to change my life and everyone else’s. I don’t know how to do it. And if not the life, then the day, the evening, the hour, the minute.” Chaikin also came to realize that change doesn’t happen “en masse,” but rather “one by one by one.” One conversation at a time, one tough year at a time.

Most every morning, I wake too early and in a panic about the planet, our country, and the next pandemic borne of idiots. Today, I enjoyed a little light. Hope you found some light, too.

Love, somehow,

Miss O’

Sunrise. Queens

Talking of Moms

Coming back from quick trip down South to see my dad

Yesterday morning, en route to a stop at D.C.’s Union Station from Woodbridge (where I’d traveled to from New York last Friday), I sat next to a young Black man snoozing with sunglasses on. He was about the only person on that early morning train from Richmond not spread out while asleep, leaving space for a seat mate. He began waking when we got to Alexandria, and I asked where he was getting off—anticipating when we need to move out of the way for a seat mate’s disembarking is important train etiquette. “D.C.,” he said, and I asked where he was coming from. “Richmond, but I live in D.C.,” and I said, “Not a bad trip, but early,” and he said, “That’s why you caught me snoozing,” and he smiled, then asked where I was headed, and then if I’d been down for Mother’s Day. “My mom died last year,” I said; “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, gently, and I said, “Thanks,” and explained that I wanted to be home for my dad. I didn’t get a chance to find out about his own mother, as we pulled into Union Station and he needed to get his bag. Such a nice guy.

I myself snoozed quite a bit on my journey from D.C. to my destination, when I wasn’t reading a 1967 Amanda Cross detective novel, The James Joyce Murder—highly academic and modeled on Peter Wimsey mysteries but with a female and radically feminist amateur sleuth. I haven’t felt much like murder mysteries, what with the world being full of murder, hate, mayhem, injustice, all that. Hence the naps, I guess.

Talking to new people on the train is a favorite pastime—but there was very little in the way of chatting with strangers going down or coming back. A youngish woman (tall, white, long strawberry blonde hair, maybe 40) got on in D.C. en route to New Brunswick (as it turned out), but we didn’t begin talking until Trenton, when we fell into a very deep conversation about her mom’s Alzheimer’s and my mom’s death (all this beginning with, “I’m going home for Mother’s Day” or some such), the difference between mental and physical decline—we agreed that the physical is less awful. Her 76-year-old mother is in great physical health right now, but calls this woman and her younger sister by the names of of her own younger sisters—the regression to youth is fascinating and also deeply sad (my half-sister’s mother called my sister “Becky” for a decade before she died, and my sister always answered, “Well, hey, Ann,” like it was normal—very hard). At New Brunswick, my seat mate departed and another youngish woman got on (50 to my 62, as it turns out) and sat beside me, beaming from this great road trip to four high school friends, she said. We too entered into this unexpectedly deep conversation on Mother’s Day, her own mom in Nepal, aged 82 and with the need for a heart procedure, and whom she can’t visit because of the Iran war now, given all the travel problems. We agreed, with an understanding beyond words, that the U.S. government is totally batshit now, I saying simply, “It’s all so awful and stupid,” and she nodding sadly. I talked of my mom’s death—it turns out my Nepalese companion is a doctor (she’d vaguely mentioned “the healthcare field” and I’m sure she’d been deliberately vague because people say, “Hey, let me ask you…,” and I clearly wasn’t going to do that). “I deal with that every day,” she said of death and dying, including families in denial, and spoke of the importance of hospice. In Nepal there is a form of hospice in the Temple, where the dying are taken to be attended by healers and shaman, and that sounded pretty good to me, but now there is a cost to be incurred even for that. (I see more clearly than ever that nothing is free in any village anymore; the triumph of Western corporate capitalism is that a few white men get rich off everyone’s paying them for what they, the villagers, used to get for free, thanks to the threat of weapons and the mercenaries who wield them.) In addition, her beloved family dog is seriously ill, and her children (ages 12 and 14) and worried. All that learning—about Nepal and dying and parents and lives— in the short run from New Brunswick to Newark to New York. I moved to get up when we entered the NJ-NY tunnel to get my backpack, as my new friend moved for me, and bade her a good trip back to Boston, wished her mother and her dog well. As we do.

I lined up in the aisle as others stood to get their bags and noticed a young white man reading an old Mickey Spillane paperback. “Mickey Spillane,” I said, and he looked up, telling me he was reading all those old-school writers now, like Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I recommended The Maltese Falcon for a good movie version of Hammett. He was loving the language, including the new phrase “slopping beer,” and I found his enthusiasm heartening. Across the aisle from him was a short, round old lady with pageboy white hair and a visor, who was saying to the tall young black man next to her, moving into the aisle, “Tie your shoe,” and then, pointing, “Your shoe’s untied,” and the fellow obeyed her and he tied it, and she added, “Sorry, my retired vice-principal-of-an-elementary-school is showing,” and he smiled, and she said, “I can’t let you trip!” He asked, “Do you have a bag to get?” and she pointed to the front of the car, a pink rolling suitcase, and he said, “Easy to spot at the airport,” and she said, “That was the idea,” and he pulled it out and also got his own, and they worked out a system so he could help her get her suitcase off the train. How sweet was that?

There is something about the confinement of travel in short spaces that breaks us open, and I think the sentiment of Mother’s Day hovered over us, too, filled us all with an awareness of where we all come from. Everyone was birthed into this world through a mom, and so many of us seem like moms. (I myself was wished an enthusiastic “Happy Mother’s Day!” by no fewer than three (Black) women at various points this past week, and I just said, “Thank you! You too!”)

There aren’t many universals anymore, or so it seems—mothers, certainly, whatever the degree of influence over or care they gave us. Another, surely, is food. I would say a third universal is responding positively to cuteness, whether it’s dogs or cats or babies, and anyone who is ambivalent about or hostile toward moms, nourishment, or cuteness needs to work a hard, hideous job and live quietly in a hole without access to weapons of any kind.

Cuteness: my 5-year-old nephew insisted on carrying my backpack.

During my stay in the South, my youngest brother, who lives in North Carolina with his family, introduced me and our brother Jeff to the series Tucci in Italy, and when we got back to Virginia, Jeff and I watched the other five episodes. We then received the “Recommended for You” idea to watch No Taste Like Home with Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski, in which Antoni takes celebrities on a tour to discover their roots through family dishes they have always loved. In that way, Jeff and I traveled to Yorkshire, England, and again to Italy, thence to Germany, Senegal, and Malaysia. Everywhere Antoni goes are women and men preparing local food, and you get a chance to see how geography and colonization inform every aspect of their lives and, in turn, the lives of those who emigrated.

Something about a road trip. I was disgusted by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy encouraging Americans to take summer road trips with gas at $5.00/gallon— for his own oil profit, no doubt. Jeff and i wanted to spare our brother the expense.

Back in Virginia, hanging out with my dad, we watched sports and walked the neighborhood, talked about how much we both miss Lynne, shared memories. Food was always important to my dad, a retired meat cutter and short order cook in the Air Force, but he said, “I just don’t feel like cooking anymore.” When we did set about making a meal, we both found ourselves looking up the stairs, wondering what Mom would like to eat. It’s been a year but it’s flown by, and last May’s ordeal feels like yesterday, and today.

Awkward family photos. Bernie is 92.

Universals. We all thrive when we have shelter and access to nourishing food and clean water, but more than that, loving homes and creative community culture. And I couldn’t help thinking about how far America has pulled away from all this in favor of corporate structures, bottom lines, 401Ks, screen-screed loneliness, AI, and endless consumerism (says the woman who consumed 11 episodes of two shows on a paid subscription streaming network that still forces commercials on us because we accept it as normal).

I told you once about that professor I had at Virginia Tech, an old (my age now, no doubt) white-haired, deeply Southern white man named Byers (I think), who in his American Literature class asked us what was meant by the term universal. After some attempts from his students in answer, Prof. Byers intoned, “A good example of a universal is a warm [woah-um] shower [show-ah]. Everyone enjoys a whoa-um show-ah.” At the time of his pronouncement, ca. 1983, the only people “enjoying” a warm shower were almost exclusively Westerners, and only since around 1950. In any case, I remember finding his example weirdly specific, if not a little creepy. How about food? I thought. How about being birthed by moms?

I also think connection is vital to our universal survival, as I’ve previously noted, and I was touched to find how important that remains, even to strangers on a train.

Sending you love, this day after Mother’s Day,

Miss O’

Aunt Lisa in conversation with a new generation. Photo by my nephew’s mom.