The Searchers: Pilgrimage in a time of insidious groundings

Even though it’s mid-November, traveling has been sounding good; and though Chaucer reminds us that it’s in April “Thanne longen folk to go on pilgrimages,” the desire can happen anytime. Humans get those restless feet, roaming hearts.

Then there’s Friday, November the 13th, which must top the list of All-Time Craziest Thirteenths in American history: Microsoft goes down; a New Orleans Riverboat gets struck by another boat while in dock; and due to [checks notes] an “AI malfunction,” the government’s FAA grounds all flights until a ransom of $50 billion dollars is paid to the FAA—just to name three. So let’s ask the victims of this incompetence and malfeasance, including the millions of people stranded in American airports, those in need of serious deliveries and communications that are going nowhere, the dozens of sports teams that cannot play their games (just to name a few of the inconvenienced and thwarted), what they are thinking of “travel” right now. (Somewhere Susan Collins is concerned.)

So instead of going anywhere beyond the easy reach of subway, train, and bus, I guess I’ll keep reading. Patti Smith, my latest reread, has got me thinking of the writers who have influenced me, stayed with me, been my constant life traveling companions. (I have artists, musicians, and actors, too, but today I’m thinking about writers.) What writers have been your constant companions? Go ahead—jot down a list.

The writers I’ve most connected to and drawn from in my life are, first, Oscar Wilde in my teens; Virginia Woolf from my twenties to forties; and Patti Smith in my fifties and sixties. They couldn’t be more different, on the surface—but it was their daring to be themselves and in public, whatever the cost, that dazzles me. I’m not brave like that; possibly I read them to screw up the courage to become whatever it is I’m supposed to be. Or, more possibly, I read them for themselves.

But what I have, and have always had, that connects me to all three: awareness, observation, listening to conversations, watching the room, and using my imagination to make memory manifest now, to tell the story. All three were keenly aware of their worlds, the political moment, and never ignored it, but their art came first. (I aspire to that last bit.)

I’ve been unable, up to this point in my life at any rate, to go very deep—my limitation in any art I attempt is apparent to me. Even when I feel something deeply, the feeling only lasts seconds. Penetrating to the deepest places, therefore, is something I look for in authors, and usually it takes years and multiple readings to follow where they lead and feel it completely. Living longer will do that.

My friend Jean, a poet, introduced me to the poetry of Wallace Stevens when we were in graduate school. (As with most writers, it’s male essayists, poets, and novelists—Thoreau, Emerson, Frost, Steinbeck—that were key to her development and remain most important. Woolf looked to Shakespeare and the classics; Wilde to Dante and the classics, Smith to the French authors Genet and Rimbaud.) This poem struck me, particularly part one:

Of the Surface of Things

By Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955)

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four

hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,

Reading where I have written,

“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

III

The gold tree is blue,

The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.

The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

(This poem is in the public domain.)

I don’t pretend to get this whole poem—a lot of modernist poets took refuge and pleasure in the obscure—but I laughed at Part I. When you get outside yourself, out of your own head, you can get simple pretty fast.

How I’ve skimmed over my life—is that what I’ve done?

There’s a quote by poet Rabindranath Tagore: “Let your life lightly dance on the verge of Time like a dew on the tip of a leaf.” My mom, Lynne, however, quoted it thusly, a different translation and a better rhythm in English, and it’s been a mantra: “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like the dew on the tip of a leaf.” I wrote out that version of the quotation and had it taped inside a floral cloth-covered three-ringed binder I carried all through high school. I added other quotes from Lynne (as I now recall them, accurately or not) that included Thackery, “The world is a looking-glass and gives back to each man the reflection of his own face,” and how true is that; and Milton, ‘The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.” And somewhere I wrote down two Thoreau quotes, “I would rather sit alone on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” which my mom quoted by way of explaining a store in our nearby Springfield Mall called The Velvet Pumpkin; the second was one Lynne intoned, to show Henry’s self-contraction, “A man need not be so poor that he must sit on a pumpkin, for that is shiftlessness.” It made her grin. Well, not grin, exactly, and not smile, and not smirk—Lynne had a way with her lips and face that showed she got a kick out of something that I have yet to find the verb for. The search continues.

From the first day of teaching, each day on the chalkboard in all my classrooms, I wrote a Thought for the Day—I’ve told you this—and I was charmed by to see kids copy them out in their own notebooks. The words to say it—the thing, whatever it is; it’s why words matter so much, why writers matter so much.

The first writer I connected to was one I discovered not through his writing but through a BBC production on Masterpiece Theater called Lillie, about Lillie Langtry, a woman who completely beguiled a poet and personality called Oscar Wilde. It’s was the quips that did it, so quotable and so unexpected. “I can resist everything except temptation.” My mom thought I just fell in love with the actor who played him, Peter Egan, but that wasn’t it. It was Wilde’s words, his life and the way he lived it. Then age 15, I went to the Potomac Library and found everything I could by and on Wilde—Wilde’s plays were my first search. Lynne, who had started working at Crown Books, bought me his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and his children’s stories, The Happy Prince and the Selfish Giant. I wrote my senior English research paper on that novel and Wilde (the paper focusing on the absurd Victorian conceit that anyone with a beautiful face could not possibly be a bad person). I was deeply disappointed in the one biography I found, by Sheridan Morley, which seemed to discount Wilde’s genius and dismiss him for his homosexuality. (Richard Ellman would correct that reduction several years later.)

This promotional poster came to Lynne’s bookstore. She gave it to me, and my artist friend Patty framed it back when I lived in Appomattox. Framed Oscar has traveled with me for some 38 years.

So my first writer love, the one who was my spirit guide through my teens into my early 20s, was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), a bisexual (but, really, gay) man and father of two sons. And the two writers who have guided me through my life since are two highly unusual, if also white, women: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a childless though married bisexual woman (though consummation, as you might think of it, wasn’t really part of her life), in my 30s and 40s; and Patti Smith (b. 1946), whose first love Robert Mapplethorpe was bisexual (but, really, gay) and who married (and was widowed) and had two children, in my 50s and 60s. Wilde, Woolf, and Smith couldn’t be more different humans or writers, their European origins and connections to dissolving gender norms notwithstanding. (See Wilde’s life, Woolf’s novel Orlando, and Patti Smith’s photo on the cover of her debut album Horses for reference.)

Another thing these writers have in common was the desire for pilgrimage of a kind. Wilde famously camped outside Lillie Langtry’s London home and lectured all over America, even in mining camps, to let those American pilgrims bask in his genius; Woolf traveled with her siblings to Greece and other ancient places to see the origins of Classical literature; and for Smith, pilgrimage to the graves of writers such as Plath, Rimbaud, and Genet was a spiritual need.

Following the publishing of The Year of the Monkey, Smith participated in a really good interview at the University of Chicago, which I recommend.

In one of her questions, the interviewer asks about Smith’s need to “reinscribe” her subjects, and this word gets Patti’s attention, “I don’t know that word, I like that,” and she moves to write it down, patting her pockets for her notebook and pen, which are not there, and that gesture moved me. Still today, Patti Smith can be found in global cafes scribbling lines into notebooks and onto paper napkins; my last night at Maxwell’s bar in Blacksburg, Virginia, ca. 1987 was with my theater mentor Maureen, who said so many things worth recording (in what I think of as her final tutorial for me), that I left the bar with a small stack of cocktail napkins to stuff into my backpack. Mo said, “That’s what’s special about you, Lisa.” I didn’t know what she meant. Doesn’t everyone grab napkins to write down important words, ideas, snatches of conversation? I started paying more attention to the habits of others. As I saw with my students, the handful who copied out my Thoughts for the Day, it’s a special club—not unique to one of us, mind, but to a certain sort of person who scribbles and sketches hastily and in public, whether artists or composers or writers, to grab the overheard, or “overseen,” and record the impression.

What makes you special? Who makes up your tribe? What gestures have shown you that connection?

Patti Smith often writes of her visits to the homes and graves of her heroes; I was lucky enough to study Woolf at Oxford in 1992, and my tutor drove our little class of four to Monk’s House. Years later I spent several days in Bloomsbury in London, haunting the streets to see where Woolf lived, where her artist friends studied, sitting in squares to breathe it in. Do you do this?

I heard Patti (I call her Patti now) say once in an interview at Cooper Union that she never had any great gift or talent, but she worked hard at what she loved. (In a similar way, I heard Cher say on The Graham Norton Show that her mom said to her early in her life, “You won’t be the prettiest one, you won’t be the best singer, but there is something special about you,” and to never to forget that; and it was the best thing a mom could say—telling the daughter to step away from the inevitable comparisons.) You find the magic inside yourself. Oscar, whose talents might seem limited to the nonreader of his work, and whose life might baffle or repulse some, had to live as himself and took the ultimate risk to do it. Virginia, whose works and style mostly do not speak to the general public (my friend Jean thinks she’s terrible), pushed past her own sufferings and the doubts of those around her (always encouraged by her husband, Leonard), and wrote, profoundly and prolifically, as herself. Patti, despite every seemingly impossible obstacle, pushed into the artistic world of New York City in the 1970s to sing and write and live as herself. I think there is something in all three that is pure love. A love of life, a need to express that love, is what keeps me coming back, worshiping at their altars, and growing into them.

Though Jean herself does not care at all for Woolf’s fiction, she has always supported me in my obsession (the handwritten old library card tucked behind the incense box, say), as have other dear friends. Smith writes that her friends and sister do that for her, taking her picture at the pilgrimage sites. That is love.

All three writers (have) suffered in ways I cannot imagine. Oscar Wilde’s hubris and surety in being beloved as an artist betrayed him at his trial for sodomy and sent him to prison for two years’ hard labor; he lost his career and fortune, his wife, his children, his friends, and his home, and died at age 46. Virginia Woolf lost her beloved mother when she was 13, her older half-sister Stella when she was 15; then her difficult but also beloved father when she was 21, her brother Thoby when she was 24, so much loss; she battled mental illness all her life, a battle that ended in suicide at age 59 during yet another World War that bombed her beloved London to bits; Patti Smith gave up a baby for adoption at a teenager, lost her best friend and fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe to AIDS, lost her husband Fred Sonic Smith to heart failure at age 49, her beloved brother Todd of a massive stroke at age 42 just months later, and battled back into public life in New York City when she had to support her two young children. And bless her, Smith turns 80 December 30. She’s still performing and writing.

Through all their personal losses and traumas—to say nothing of all the political trials, natural disasters, wars, and horrors that humans can make of this world to which they were/have been witness—these artists lived as seekers, entertainers, creators, in love with the world in all its contradictions and catastrophes. It give us something to aspire to, I think, and to take heart from.

From prison at Reading Gaol, Wilde wrote:

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.

– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

The surface of things. Looking at my own life this Sunday morning in a country of insanity daily manifest, I think of dreams—pilgrimage—lightly touching life—partial careers, mini-impacts, flashlight searches. And still seek the depths.

Scrapbook art. Pictures from a Royal Shakespeare Company brochure, I think. 1992

Let’s live, and live deeply, shall we? Somehow?

Sending love and any words that might help,

Miss O’

My Privilege

A short play cycle

A short play cycle

Hey, friend. I’m a little worn out from politics, though not from the gratitude; after waking for three straight mornings without my usual chest tightness and my first thought being Donald Trump, I found I woke this morning fighting mad at Democratic leadership, but that’s for next week.

I spent all day yesterday cooking cabbage, potatoes, and carrots from the farmer’s market, tossing in hunks of ham and an onion, simmering it all in chicken broth and water. I made thick split pea soup. All my food for the week, and I’m grateful.

The reduction in panic has freed my mind, and I started thinking about objects. Patti Smith writes in M Train about her favorite coat, a spring-weight black wool coat given to her by a poet she knew maybe twenty years before, moth holes along the seam in places; and one day, inexplicably, it was gone. She says, “So foolish, lamenting a coat, such a small thing in the grand scheme.” Primo Levi, a survivor of the Holocaust, says in the play, Primo, which I saw many years ago on Broadway with Anthony Sher, something to the effect that it’s impossible to imagine losing “everything,” so instead he asks us to recall how it affects you when you cannot find something small, a handkerchief, say. You know how we obsess—where is it? How will we get along now?

How is it an object becomes important like this? You know, in the grand scheme.

Smith recalls other objects lost throughout the book—the book is in many ways a meditation on loss (and the lethargy that accompanies it), so many things, from something as small a well-loved copy of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle left in an airport restroom, to something as catastrophic as her just-purchased fixer upper bungalow in the Rockaways courtesy of Superstorm Sandy.

Do you have that wish sometimes, to go back or just have in front of you some lost, long-ago object? It’s a strange desire, I think, but sometimes it just comes on you. I don’t know why. Maybe just to touch the thing, to draw energy from it. With Christmas coming, for example, I had a memory this week of a foot-tall white ceramic Christmas tree from when I was a little kid. I haven’t thought of it in decades, probably. It never lit up that I remember—but my mom, Lynne, used to put it out every year on a tabletop somewhere; I think it was her traveling Christmas tree when she was a Navy WAVE. Of course we kids smashed it at some point—at least I guess we did. I haven’t seen it in years and years.

My memory.

Two years ago, I lost a sterling silver hair stick that I’d worn in my bun since about 1995, some thirty years, and I know it happened in a rainstorm somewhere caught in my hood between my apartment and the 7 Train. I sketched it obsessively until I kind of captured it; I sent the sketch to the maker, still in business, but I never heard back. Just one of those things—we had a good run.

Other memories of objects are far sillier—my red smiley face rug in my tiny childhood bedroom. How did I even come to recall it?

And what is it I’m looking for? Hell if I know.

I love that I grew up in the 1970s.

Yesterday and today, the weather being lovely, I made a special point of choosing clothes in fall colors, good hats, jackets, scarves, bags. The right pins. I enjoy this, assembling wearable objects, and it’s not so much that I chase compliments as I like to show an effort, put something hopeful out in the world. And the spooky thing was, I was invisible. At the market, around town, I was unable to make eye contact let alone engage with a single stranger, to feel I was of the world, we were here together. It’s like I was wrapped so well in the colors of fall, the blend into the season was too complete.

No one talked about Midterms, I heard no joy anywhere; life just went on. I realize how lucky that is, to be able to say that. But there’s this hollowness.

My littlest nephew turned 6 this week, and his mom made him a dinosaur cake. I went out Friday night with my friends Frances and Jim, Italian food and the revival of a Moliere play, The Imaginary Invalid, adapted by and starring Bill Irwin. It was just wonderful.

Bill Irwin’s delightful version of this classic closes November 22. I love play bills.

Life lost, life found. Something about art. Collecting memories.

My former student (and now friend) Darin sent this song to me as a closeout to a hard week, and it’s what I needed. Books, music, theater, friends, objects with memory—shouldn’t everyone have those things without starving and living in fear all the fucking time?

Louis Price sings, “A Change Is Gonna Come”:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfGJQXZp0Q-/?dlrf=bXFhMDQ1dWJpbm1l

Here’s to better times, with love.

Hum and Thrum

On inaudible loneliness

As a kid, I remember my mom’s ca. 1960 “portable” hi-fi playing music a lot. My parents sought out music, even my mom, Lynne, who was admittedly tone-deaf and limited to smooth voices, like Harry Belafonte’s. (She was horrified by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Janis Joplin. “Have you heard of Adele?” she once asked me and my brother Mike, disgust in her voice. Mike said, gently, “Hush, Mom. She’s a genius.” Lynne looked at me. “She is,” I explained.) She really hated “country” music, but my dad, Bernie, loved Eddie Arnold; they both like Johnny Cash and Tennessee Ernie Ford. We all loved Nat King Cole and Burl Ives. It’s hard to imagine now, I guess, a family sitting together in a play room on a rainy day, the parents with beers, and four kids aged 5 to 13, sitting and playing with blocks, listening to Irish and American folks songs sung by Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but we did, and we all remember it fondly. My brother Pat and I to this day, 50 years later, will every once in a while break out in “Mrs. McGrath, the sergeant said, do you want to make a soldier out of your son Ted?”

This internet photo is not quite it–my mom’s was more compact and was placed on a table–but it’s the general idea. All us kids learned how to work it.

Touchstones—the noises of growing up in the O’House, playing games, building forts, making cookies, and fighting, and there was always a soundtrack. I don’t turn on music enough. I’m listening to a shuffle of music as I type, and it’s nice.

Sitting out in my (now) dad’s yard the other week, in the swing he and my mom lived in for a few hours most days in her last years, watching clouds—and I have felt this for years—it’s been far too quiet. The chatter of birds notwithstanding, I’ve felt weird outside, something off. This past late September, during sunny and warm days, I realized what it was.

Back ca. 2012, I drove my mom’s truck to rural Central Virginia to see friends, as I did every summer, and realized for the first time since the 1980s I hadn’t had to stop at least twice at a filling station to scrape bugs off my windshield. I hadn’t had to scrape the windshield once after four hours driving through wilderness. Jesus. What have we done?

I am lonely for insects. Gnats, chiggers, crickets, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, flies, mosquitoes—all the creatures of earth that vibrate, snack, annoy, announce their presence, and make being outside an athletic even in micro movements of swatting. I never thought I’d think of insects as a kind of hug. But they are. I miss them. The earth misses them.

This isn’t about aesthetics.

Music is another kind of hug, I think—and in this world of noise, where music might be a warm, nurturing thing, it seems to come off as another distraction. TVs, phones, screens of all kinds—sitting undistracted by visual stimulation, listening to music quietly or even present to it in the background while cooking or cleaning seems impossible to imagine for people, let alone sitting as a group of friends or a family, truly listening.

Music is not a luxury; it’s life.

My brother Jeff and I were talking about the reaction videos popular on YouTube now, where influencers pretend they are hearing a song for the first time, and stop it every five or six notes to comment, without listening; their individual facial expressions now are almost parodies of one another—the wide eyes, the closed eyes of supposed contemplation, the hands up-mouth open “wow.” These used to be fun, back before they became shows for sport and clicks. Jeff is like me, screaming at them when they hit stop without listening at all, and moving on to find another one. We’ve also noticed that they all seem to “react” to the exact same playlists out of millions of possible songs and thousands of artists: Karen Carpenter, “Superstar”; Jim Croce, “I’ve Got a Name”; Dolly Parton, “Jolene.” It’s silly now.

Do I sound grumpy? Yeah, well. It seems the loss of insects and the loss of shared songs (and high school dances, for that matter) are connected for me—something about a hug, a warmth of hum and thrum, vibrations of life—replaced with a silence that feels like solitary confinement.

So much to repair.

What sounds are you missing?

Sending love and good vibrations,

Miss O’

’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore

Because he is so deeply, irredeemably amoral and stupid

Hi, friend. Your Miss O’ awoke this morning, the first day since Saturday, October 3, on her own without an alarm and feeling not unwell. After ten days nursing a nasty respiratory infection, I found myself on waking thinking of a title, “Why the Sea Is Salt,” and another, “Snow White and Rose Red,” and visualizing a filmstrip called “Pandora,” accompanied by a cassette tape or record on which played a high “BEEP” when it was time to manually change the picture cell. (I was fortunate enough to be not only a student using such machines, but a teacher who used them even four or five years into my job.)

The titles, I realized, all came out of a foggy memory of fourth grade, the year I had a depressive young teacher named Miss Shelburn, whose unusual blond streak of hair and blotched skin meant, I realize now, that she had Vitiligo, a condition where the immune system causes lighter skin pigmentation to show up in patches. She spent most of her teaching time sitting at her desk, slightly slumped over. She liked that I read aloud with so much expression that I didn’t notice I said “lives” with a long i when it should have been “lives” with the short one, a mistake that made her snort, the only trace of a laugh in her I’d seen, more than worth a little personal embarrassment.

Miss Shelburn’s one day of true enthusiasm came the day she wheeled in a television set and turned on Princess Anne’s royal wedding live from England, and we watched it all day. (We watched a lot of television that year, Public Television, especially The Electric Company (starring Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman) to help us learn the metric system, for all the good that did, but hey, Rita and Morgan!) Miss Shelburn was enchanted by this fairytale wedding.

That year of the stories, first, those myths and legends of salty seas and fairy tale castles and locked boxes, that came into my waking world this morning, and I’m not sure why.

Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m still thinking about this quote. Have you ever felt too big for your life? I have. Temporarily. So I moved to New York City.

Fourth grade was also the year we learned American history, going so far as to spend a day out in the cold mist in “Pilgrim” clothes, and I think some “Indians,” in paper hats and no coats, roasting potatoes in a pit poor Mr. Westerberg, the custodian, had to dig. I mostly remember flying around on the blacktop looking out at bare gray trees and suburban houses, trying to imagine a log village and pretending this was fun.

One Thanksgiving my mom gave these costumes to me and my brother Pat. We went “hunting” in the backyard. Watching Westerns, Lynne taught us to root for the Indians.

I still have the white Pilgrim apron my reluctant mom, Lynne, sewed for me by hand, which I wore over her 1950s tiny black and white check skirt, long then; a skirt I wore again, now knee-length, for the Junior Variety show in high school, and which we donated to the drama club along with several of her other skirts and dresses.

[We interrupt this letter to note that a search for the apron for a photo portrait was unsuccessful, because like a dope I moved it out of its drawer of 20 years when I reorganized some drawers this summer, but prayers to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects, have been dispatched. -ed.]

The apron is a lot more gathered and nicer than this. As much as my mom hated sewing, she did a lot of it and all by hand, because the making mattered.

Fourth grade—for all the weirdness of Miss Shelburn, and my burgeoning hormones returning my hair to natural curl, and Billy Beard accidentally smearing India ink on my only white blouse (this being the time when art teachers let children use supplies like India ink), and learning about the happy slaves in the fields of our Southern plantations through the Ginn Reader (I wish I were kidding)—was the time when I think I discovered the real magic of fiction. The Scholastic Book Fair meant something better than candy. I could read whatever I wanted.

It was the 1970s, and all the girls and women, even teachers, wore miniskirts. My mom wore slacks. Both meant liberation.

We could all be having so much fun.

Women are human beings, living, sentient creatures who love to feel sensation and experience their bodies and think with their minds. We generate and incubate and give life. Without women, and their lifelong transformative sufferings, there is no being.

Unfortunately for the species, far too many men do not experience women as beings.

We are [checks notes] “whores.”

How is this still the American female narrative for American men?

I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of stupid.

I’m sick of men.

We are bored.

There is not a moment of my life I have regretted living and sleeping alone. Not a minute.

All this comes to me full force from SNL standups and rape allegations and once more, with feeling (no, really, this time we mean it), “no more frat parties until further notice” and promises to “investigate.” Until the coup, of course.

Was it those gym shorts? But wasn’t she a whore? Megyn said she was “beefy.”

How in the name of everything sacred in the universe is THIS where ostensibly sentient humans are? How is this the best we have to offer our creator? (How pathetic is it that a powerful man can only feel smart when represented by that sort of female?)

All that off my chest, it’s time for my nighttime antibiotics, inhaler, and Flonase, as I gratefully turn toward my very own bed in my very own home surrounded by collected things imbued with love and memory, a sacred place, free of collective human-made stupidity and frail-egoed men, and lift from my bedstand my reading glasses and a novel into which to sink, to sleep perchance to dream.

Americans, as if it’s not enough to have loved ones facing terrible illnesses and personal tragedies, we are daily perpetuating a hellscape for the nation, all of our own making. Bigotry and hatred and mass murder and rape cannot be The Story. We’ve done that to death. And it sucks. We have to write another story. Write your chapter. Have a reading. And Abolish ICE.

Sending love and reading among the evils (unleashed on us by men),

Miss O’

“Pandora. Pandora (the ‘all-gifted’) was the first mortal woman according to the Greek poet Hesiod. She was sent by Zeus as a gift to Epithemus. She brought a box (a jar in Hesiod’s original version) which, when opened, released all the world’s evils. Only Hope remained. After a Victorian painting (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)”

Markets, Museums, and New York City

A day in the life at the end of the world

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself going over to Jar Bar, a local place nearly 100 years old (in location if not name) I’ve seen from the outside all my years here in Queens, but had never gone in. Learning a neighbor of mine is tending bar there some evenings, I started going, and have been over maybe four times, including a couple of weekend afternoons in the garden, where I met an Irishman whose sister—Marie of Dillon’s, that closed ca. 2006—was a bartender I’d known and loved. Jar Bar is filled with fascinating if sketchy characters—pool players, depressives, tightly wound young men, fighting old couples, laid back tokers. I listen; I watch. I have a pint. Here, I contrast the darkness of this dimly lit local bar with the world of The Alcove, a wonderful Colombian-infused bar and restaurant full of light and warmth I’ve frequented on the other side of Queens Boulevard for all of its eleven years, where everyone gets hugs from the owners. And while both places learn your name right away, the vibes could not be more starkly different.

Have you seen the movie Blue Velvet? At the movie’s end you have to accept, fully, that Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern live in the same town, and that Kyle MacLachlan is equally drawn to the Dean Stockwell underbelly and to the domestic idyll that is the promise of marriage in the suburbs. Just so, I’ve found myself drawn into a sort of underbelly for heavy drink in my neighborhood as well and warm and light-hearted vibe of fellowship and food, and it’s hard to believe it’s the same town. Oddly, I find I enjoy both worlds and seem to navigate them easily. That’s Miss O’s Queens.

Jar Bar garden moment. Queens.

For my gorgeous Sunday on my long weekend off though, I eschewed an afternoon pub crawl for a morning at the Grand Bazaar Flea Market on Columbus Avenue. I stroll from booth to booth, tempted by interesting hooks, vintage jackets, costume jewelry brooches, and pottery if you can find it; I noticed a young white couple looking at Jacquard woven silk square pillow shams—from their conversation, I saw she wanted pink—or at least she wanted color (“I can see from your face you hate it,” she said to her husband, who did not disagree and nor did he help); even the dark blue, which they both seemed to like, was too much for him, and they agreed the brighter blue was a maybe. I spoke up (having said hello to the importer, whose wares I’d bought before): “I love that dark blue,” I said, and you saw this breath enter them both, a confidence. “I don’t mean to intrude,” I added, but the woman said eagerly, “No, I want another opinion. We just want to find a second one,” and I suggested they find a complimentary one instead, picking up the red accent, or the gray. “They don’t have to match.” Revelation! I’d heard them worry to the vendor about the right-sized pillow form, and so I said, “I put my covers over existing pillows; change it up.” The young man said, “We could do that,” and I felt his doubt lifting. “Enjoy your day,” I said, leaving, and they were no doubt relieved that old lady wasn’t going to follow them home.

At another booth, an older Indian couple showed beautiful textile wares, and I’d been circling around their area and found myself loving a couple of scarves, especially one felted item. “These are scarves sold in museum gift shops,” designed by a woman in India, the woman said, and now they are here in a NYC flea market on clearance. I said to the woman, who helping two Black women buying a scarf for a birthday present, I didn’t interrupt, but sifted through two scarves; I realized there was a really a combination—the colors of the silk and the style of the felted, and I found it! When she came over to me, I said, “Here’s what I did,” and I showed her how I found the one I wanted, and her eyes saw and she said, “You created a middle,” and I said, “I have to tell you I feel sort of ridiculous buying a scarf with the world as it is,” and she instantly said, “Terrible things, terrible,” and I said, “But I guess we have to keep putting beauty out into the world,” and we agreed we do.

Following the market, I walked toward the American Museum of Natural History, where as a resident New Yorker I get in free. En route I saw the lavender lady at the sidewalk market and bought a pound of dried lavender flowers (I put them in sachets of my own and try to save my wool from moths). At the museum desk, I explained I only gain entrance to use their facilities on flea market Sundays; he refused to accept my dollar and handed me my ticket.

Once relieved, now where? I decided on the park, and en route I saw the New York Historical Society, where I hadn’t been in a few years. I first tooled around the gift shop, which merch makes it the best place to see what’s on exhibit, but there was an exhibition not featured there, as it turns out, for obvious reasons when out of context.

Black Dolls:

Assemblage artist Betye Saar, who died July 26 four days shy of her 100th birthday, is featured in an exhibition at the New York Historical Society’s second floor.

It was a small, beautiful, unnerving, unsettling exhibition for me; I also have a black doll:

I know I told you this story: my mother’s friend Laura (a Navy WAVE like my mom) was raised in New Orleans by a “mammy.” Lynne said, “Laura was a great gal but my god, the racism.” Laura’s gift to toddler Lisa was a NOLA souvenir mammy doll, “and before I could stop her, Laura had given it to you and you wouldn’t let it go.” I still won’t let her go.

I was in tears throughout the exhibit, and I’m not sure how to put into words why—all this evil racism, the denial of Black little girls having pretty black dolls to call their own, without stereotyped big white eyes looking sideways, forced-laborer head scarves and aprons. More than that, it was Saar’s art, her paintings and collages that reimagine these dolls with love and joy, that moved the shit out me.

I also have a topsy-turvy doll. You see both the white doll and the black doll, part of one being, but never both together. And there it is.

Heading down to the first floor, fairly gutted by now after three other floors of exhibits of all kinds of NYC and American history, I happened on an exhibition of women’s shoes and paused there before leaving. I’d no sooner begun looking than three early-college-age young women approached (whom I’ll call Elle (who was Black), Jaye (Chinese), and Cece (Indian or Pakistani, I think)), studying advertising and given the assignment to visit a museum and ask people what brought them to the museum, what emotional reactions they had, and anything else the interviewee wanted to share.

Elle said, “I saw your bag, and your necklace, and I knew we could ask you.” Schoolteacher vibe.

I said a lot of stuff, as you can imagine—they recorded me: I requested that in their careers they market curiosity instead of consumption; I said you can’t have emotional responses if you come into a cultural place with an agenda; I celebrated wandering; told them I loved the doll exhibit and about my own Mammy doll, how maybe my tears were coming from the artistry of Betye Saar, surely, but were also tied up in history—the unfairness, rank cruelty of slave systems, and that NYHS balances all our past pretty fabulously, I think.

I then pointed out the shoe exhibit, where we were standing, gesturing as I responded, “All this is foot binding, you know, just as surely as the literal binding of the feet of women in China,” heels so high you can’t run from an attacker, shapes that destroy the health of our feet. “But they’re beautiful,” I said, “I love looking at shoes.” You live inside these contradictions all the time.

NYHS Merch #1
NYHS Merch #2 (ironic contrast to Merch #1)

I kept having to shift us out of the way so others could get at the views of the shoes; I took the students’ picture and we did a selfie for Elle. She put her information into my phone, and I sent the photos I took. I haven’t heard back, so I don’t know if she got them. (Telling my friend Colleen all this at dinner at The Alcove last evening, she said, referencing her grandchild, “Oh, she won’t get back to you, and if she does, it will be in a month. That’s how all the kids are now.”)

Finally, I mentioned to the gals that my next career plan was to put a sign around my neck, “ASK ME A GRAMMAR QUESTION,” and sit on benches around the city. Do you want to ask me a grammar question? Cece jumped for it. She wanted to better understand the semicolon. I WAS IN HEAVEN! Consider three versions of these same clause combinations, I said off the cuff.

Gloria Steinem was a great activist. [period] My mother never spoke of her. [period]

Gloria Steinem was a great activist; [semicolon] my mother never spoke of her. [period]

Gloria Steinem was a great activist , but [comma but] my mother never spoke of her. [period]

Cece, Jaye, and Elle said, “Ohhhh…,” as I demonstrated the contrasts: I asked them to consider the first independent clauses separated by a period—there’s an underlying weight to the (dis)connection which may or may not get explored. In the second example, with the semicolon, there’s an opening indicating the writer will say more, and this is created by suggesting a connection with that punctuation. The third, with the comma and coordinating conjunction but, has a kind of softer quality, almost dismissive or suggesting something that is part of a pattern that is explainable. All of this was to say: the meaning you want will dictate the way you punctuate and connect the clauses. It depends on what you’re going for.

From their reactions, I saw that it’s possible I taught them more about writing in that little “off the record” lesson than they’d had in all their years of school. Possibly not. But I had the time of my life. (I later heard a man in my neighborhood later talking on his phone sitting on a stoop, saying, “I’m doing the Socratic method here, just asking questions,” and I realized I’m no Socrates. I just love to lecture. Direct instruction is underrated. Look at all those lightbulbs.)

So the event of that interview had me looking at life in America: White people use periods; Black people use semicolons; moderate/liberal white people use the , but. Do with that observation what you will. When it comes to meting out justice, to changing this world, to making whatever it is to create our new world, what are you going for?

On the first floor, before leaving NYHS, I looked at an America 250 exhibition (and that this nation had no celebrations at all, none to speak of, is beyond depressing, and also an opportunity), featuring the contrast of slave and free in many Revolution art pieces. Among these installations was a booth that displayed a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, and along the bottom were three clear tubes partially filled with little orange rubber balls, balls which could be procured from a box on the side. The balls were for taking a poll: LIFE – LIBERTY – PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS—of the three, where do you place your ball?

I chose LIFE.

Most balls were placed in LIBERTY, which I rejected because I don’t know how anyone defines that. All I know is the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Mississippi, under a Trump-appointed judge, this week ruled that no citizen has the right to clean drinking water, and that the government has no obligation to inform anyone about the status of water quality. Full. Stop. And if we aren’t entitled to water, we get no life. Full. Stop. So what are we even doing in this country? No Life, no nothing.

I continued my day with a walk through Central Park, including an extended bench sit to watch the scenes. My friend Colleen called as I sat there, and I ended my day meeting Colleen at The Alcove (I walked through the park to 57th Street to the N Train; she walked from Astoria. We arrived five minutes apart). Open windows, margaritas, chips and guac, sliders and fries. Hugs from the staff. Delicious.

We walked Skillman Avenue to the park, where the media swap tables are, and sat outside to watch the coming dusk. Magical light, my favorite time of year for light, hinting at the fall to come. Hmm.

We don’t have much time left on earth, our planet of hideous contradictions, of indescribable beauties; it will never be more temperate or lovelier than it is right now, this second. I’m trying to take it all in. I wish I knew what else to do.

Love, love,

Miss O’

Central Park, Sunday in summer. LO’H

Always: On losing our best American girl

“Please don’t.” Her final t was hard, bitten, staccato. Rude. Entitled. I’ve heard that in my ear all day.

Violet’s Bliss shop, Queens.

This morning around 7:45, walking down 7th Avenue in Chelsea to go to my ophthalmologist (yeah, dilation is a bitch in the morning, but if you wait till afternoon, when everyone else wants to go, you can’t get out of there before six, even if your appointment is at three). Beautiful morning—blue and cool, like fall almost.

Seventh Avenue, called “Fashion Avenue” and shown to be glamorous in shows like Project Runway, is a grim, grim stretch from 40th Street to Greenwich Village, where it becomes Varick. It’s possibly my least favorite street or avenue in New York. Just past the subway exit, I passed an unhoused Black man (note: I don’t care what term you use, the situation itself creates a human indignity for which the whole nation should be ashamed to allow) lying asleep on cardboard along a building façade; I soon passed another woman, maybe my age, Black, sitting on the sidewalk, short legged, short arms grasping “gimme,” mouth agape, chewing rhythmically, eating nothing. I walked past, reached into my bag to see if I had any singles, and gave her one. “Good luck to you,” I said, though whether she was even aware I don’t know. I always try to smile, but it hard.

“If you see someone without a smile, give ’em yours.”

~ Dolly Parton

I turned back to walk on when I saw a tall, lithe, long-iron-gray haired muscular white woman of maybe 45 heading into a fancy coffee shop, who said coldly into my face, “Please don’t,” the t especially harsh. My face wasn’t properly chastened apparently, because she added, and right in front of this woman, “You aren’t doing us any favors.” Her eyes said she wanted to fight me; I shook my head and walked on, trusting her morning latte was more important. It was.

Us and Them: The Great White (Supremacist) Hope.

I’m sorry Lorraine Hansberry didn’t live long enough to write a parody of her great play: To Be Middle-Aged, Privileged, and White. This afternoon, learning the news, I thought, What would Dolly do?

I guess that privileged latte white lady would have some words for Dolly, and not very nice ones, “You aren’t doing us any favors.” No, privileged middle-aged white lady, she’s not: she’s investing in the future. Just like I was. Dolly is lost on you.

Coming out of the subway up the stairs at 23rd Street, I was behind a man who had that odor, distinctly unwashed, almost fecal, long-soiled, that I think came from his shoes; he wore a black doorman or security sort of uniform, possibly in need of dry cleaning; his coat and backpack looked light but weighed down his shoulders as only working poverty can. I always want to help such a person get washed. But I don’t. Dolly would have.

All I thought about when learning Dolly Parton died was her heart. I remember her stories, the ones she told on herself, how she saw a woman all painted and tarted up in town and she thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Her mama said, “That woman is nothing but trash,” and Dolly said, dreamily, “I want to be trash!”

Killing time before my 8:30 AM eye appointment, I wandered into a Duane Reade drugstore, where I found a few “school supplies” on clearance. Alone in the store, I heard the familiar AI intercom voice, “Customer assistance needed in the laundry detergent aisle,” which I’ve learned in store code for “Possible shoplifter lurking about.” They’ve used that same code for years. It’s comical.

I used to wonder why all the detergents and shampoos and conditioners and deodorants and toothpastes were ending up behind locked plastic windows, until I saw two men walk into my local Walgreens in Queens, casual as you please, no masks, with giant blue canvas bags, striding into separate aisles and bagging shelves of merchandise with a sweep on their languorous arms; the floor manager, a short young woman, was on the phone with the police, standing right beside one of them, but he paid her no mind. The two men exited the store once their bags were full and entered a waiting van.

It’s not like they were robbing the rich to give to the poor; they were pulling a heist to put things on the black market. And what kind a world is it that we don’t share with one another what is needed? When I was a cashier during summers at Dart Drug, for several years, I saw these two little boys, brothers, maybe five and four, and then six and five, seven and six, shirtless and shoeless, who’d try to walk out with vitamins and other items. I would stop them, and the older one would say, “We’re waiting for our parents,” and I’d say, “Why don’t you leave these items with me until they come?” and they’d look at each other, and I was so worried they’d get caught by our manager or beaten by their parents, and it broke my heart. Vitamins, toothpaste. It shouldn’t be.

Without a word, Dolly Parton set up foundations, created jobs (that was behind Dollywood), distributed over one million books to children, and all the while wrote some of the most genius songs in our musical history, performed live worldwide, possibly the most recognizable singer on the whole globe. And she lived in Tennessee, married all her life to the same man, keeping her private life to herself.

When I first saw Dolly Parton, I was maybe five, and it was on the syndicated Porter Wagoner Show, Wagoner a bit star at the Grand Ole Opry at the time, when she was only 19 or so; and I remember even my mom, Lynne—no country music lover—saying, “Well she’s obviously a lot more talented than he is,” and she wondered why Dolly stayed so long only on his show. Ah, contracts and the men who write them. But she was able to move on, writing “I Will Always Love You” as her farewell to Porter.

Thanks, Steve, for sending this picture along.

We’re all thinking the same thing—that God is taking all the wrong white people; and there’s another 80-year-old whom not one person on this entire earth will miss, but it’s not our call. You can’t blame anyone for calling Dolly. “Please don’t,” we say, but this is life.

Deep love and respect to the best of American artists and humans, the likes of which will never be again.

Finally, and I think I speak for Ms. Parton here, don’t be a privileged cunt.

Love to Dolly,

Miss O’

Do give Dolly’s live “Stairway to Heaven” a listen, and get out the tissues.

Postcards from MoMA

Today’s post brought to you by the color turquoise:

Images from my modern art day, or, Why We Are All Going Mad. Queens

I took the subway into Manhattan twice this week, once to a checkup (doing okay, generally) and another for a day off, wherein I went to MoMA(s). For the first trip in, on Wednesday, I walked from my apartment up the street to Queens Blvd. On arriving at the corner light, I looked up to see this man from the neighborhood, maybe 6’5”, always in workout gear (this time a white tee shirt and dark nylon sweats), earbuds in, carrying a blue sack, the kind of plastic bag a lot of stores used to use. He’s tan, with barely graying black hair, probably a few years younger than I am. Without speaking, I have never liked him. Once, twenty years ago at least, Lydia, who used own the corner Chinese restaurant (with her husband before they were able to retire at age 45 or so, having worked for 25 years, 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, no vacations, two boys put through college; they moved to the Chinese enclave, Flushing; I miss them) tried to introduce us, “You both single,” she said as we were waiting for our takeout. We regarded one another, he sitting, I standing, and did not like one another on sight. I saw in his face echoes of that man I dated a few times, the one whose first comment about me was, disappointed, “Oh, you’re smart.”

So for twenty years, we’ve pretended not to see one another—but of course we do. Lots of people in my Queens neighborhood pretend not to see you—they like their privacy, walk in apparent trances, but no one in New York survives walking in a trance; it’s like people put up a protective shield to avoid getting caught up in someone else’s weirdness. I’d tried to greet many of these people and gave up, but now that we’re old, a few of the older ones will kinda meet your eye, a surrender that comes with old age and loneliness.

All of this is just to share one of the comical occurrences of coincidence that really do happen in this city: so Guy I Don’t Like (and whom I rarely see) is at the corner on Queens Blvd, crossing, as I am, over to the elevated 7 Train. Okay. One coincidence. Then, we both turn left up the stairs (he’s on his bluetooth on the phone the whole time), so another one. (Note: I turned left so I can get out at Queensboro Plaza for the N-W to 34th St near the front—since I want to exit the 32nd St side of 34th St stop—you learn these things—so I went in the front of both trains, as the front of the train heading downtown is closer, see?). We each, however, went into different cars. I got out at Queensboro Plaza.

So did GIDL. Seriously? Fortunately, he made a point of heading even farther down to another car.

The N train comes; I reached the Manhattan station, one of dozens of potential stops. I got out to exit up the stairs at 32nd St (my doctor is on 31st St), and, you guessed it, there was the tall white tee shirt and blue sack. HOW? And I know he saw me because I was in a bright turquoise blouse. More than that, at street level GIDL headed toward 7th Avenue and Penn Station, which is where I was headed (to go to the ATM), but all this was creeping me out, so I ditched that plan and headed straight to my doctor’s office at 31st St near 9th Avenue.

And you think, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” Why must my morning be made somehow uncomfortable—he really does give me the creeps—and the truth is, I don’t know.

After the appointment, I decided to take the 7 train from 34th St. Hudson Yards, by way of an ATM for my bank near there…and no, I don’t see GIDL, because that would be Twilight Zone creepy. I only just made a train in the station heading toward Queens. At Times Square, the next station, an Asian woman (I hate to be general that way—I’d like to say “Chinese,” but I’m just not sure, and after all, I’m “white,” so) a bit younger than I am, got on, simple blue shaded top and slacks, a big purse, and when she saw my face, she smiled a twinkly smile. It’s something I’ve noticed we older women do, a kind of acknowledgement of our survival to this point.

During our ride, we bonded over Surprise by Buskers—the first a (not that) young Black man with boom box (oh dear, showtime), whose tricks—swinging on the poles, flipping, kicking the hat up to his head—were so, so old (like doing vaudeville schtick during a standup comedy set) that I found myself giggling, trying to imagine other objects he could surprise us with to kick onto the top of his head—but it’s an attempt at performance art to a deeply indifferent midday subway car; he asked for applause (even he looked bored), and I offered it, and a dollar; the Asian woman across from me then also pulled out a dollar. “Anything for art,” I said, and it heartened the performer, “Thanks to the front row seats,” he said as he got off at the next stop. At the stop after that the mariachi band got on (four pieces!), and the woman and I looked at each other and started laughing. I threw up my hands, “It’s our lucky day!” The band was so out of tune and flat—instruments, singing, all of it—you had to laugh at their loud boldness. Again we pulled out dollars. At my stop, she’d nodded off, and I touched her wrist upon leaving, “Have a good day,” and she roused and smiled and said, “You too,” and off I went home to my “office,” late for a meeting but better for it.

The next day I was off, and as I say, it found me back out searching for signs of art in the universe, and maybe some answers.

Here’s a question: Why are all the literary and artistic icons old? How is it that Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Lena Horne (1917-2010) and Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) and Yoko Ono (1933-present), or Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) and Salvadore Dalí (1904-1989), are the faces on the postcards in the gift shops? How is it our kids and grandkids still know the Beatles as well as they know Taylor Swift (and how long will Taylor Swift last)?

Paul McCartney said on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, of the Beatles, “We thought it would last ten years, but it keeps going on and on and on.” I watched a Rick Beato YouTube segment dramatically titled, “Old Music Is Killing New Music.” Beato, who listens to all the latest as well as classics on Spotify and YouTube, wondered why it was that ca. 1970 bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival or the Doobie Brothers could still get one billion streams, while many newer artists had a fraction of that. It was a fascinating analysis, starting with the fact that the music business—a 20th Century phenomenon (before recording, the only music anyone heard was live)—was about what teenagers were listening to. The fan girls of Frank Sinatra (the original bobbysoxers) were younger than the singer; the screaming fan girls of the Fab Four, who were around age 20 when they broke through, were younger teens. So music is generally for young people, and young people age. And also our cultural tastes change, and while not displaced totally by trends, in popular terms orchestral music gave way to jazz, which eventually gave over to ballad and swing crooners, and then the years of crooning gave way to rock ’n’ roll, which was popular concurrently with heavy metal, soul, techno music, R & B, rap, and hip hop, back to the power ballads.

And I think today’s pop music is often way less interesting than the old stuff. I found myself thinking again of Aristotle (if you follow my posts), “The ideas are hard, and so the reading is hard.” To produce a record in the age of Autotune and synthesizers and songwriting by committee, there’s less craft than at a time when four guys who played their own instruments, and well, sat with mixers in a studio for hours and days and weeks, going sound by sound by sound to get the tracks (written by one or two people) and record right.

Listening to new popular music, I’ve found the subjects of contemporary songs are as follows: love, sex, getting high, surviving a breakup. That’s about it. The subjects of songs in the 1970s include but are not limited to: love, sex, getting high, breaking up, sure, but in wildly poetic, varied, and nuanced ways (Blue, The Stranger, Born to Run, Rumours, Rocky Mountain High, Bad Girls, Blood on the Tracks, Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin III come quickly to mind, with more song subjects than those noted, and really I could just list and list and list) and in there was also political protest, environment and natural world concerns, seeing America, living out dreams, ending the Vietnam War—so many one-hit wonders as well as continuations of long careers.

Because it’s all about careers. Music—all art, really—changes with the years, the developments, the technology, the culture. Or it should. Most bands, let’s face it, have short careers, and they make room for new artists.

Does the continued presence of the long-lived artist kill new artists? Why the longevity?

Talented as they are, I can’t really imagine the faces of Billie Eilish or Drake or Ed Sheeran selling on post cards at a MoMA gift shop. You know what I mean? No one now feels like they’ll be iconic in their artistry like that. (Maybe Adele?) I tried to name a visual artist and picture their face. First, can you name a museum-quality famous contemporary visual artist? (Kara Walker came to mind, and Kehinde Wiley). Second, can you picture their faces? (No.) And maybe that’s unfair—everyone knew Hemingway and Picasso and Stein and Van Gogh, but I have no idea what Cezanne looked like. Not everyone is an icon that way. And we do love icons.

I’m not sure why I think any of this is important, but with air buds and phones, everyone on the subway or at home is having an individual art experience, streaming from Spotify or going down a Google Choose-Your-Own-Adventure rabbit hole (without know that the “rabbit hole” is not a “worm hole” because it’s an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, another old work of art in our curiously limited common culture that we still reference because there’s been nothing to replace it, and why is that?) And who’s to know what’s not AI?

It’s why I cherish theater and live music and trips to museums. You see and hear the work of human hands in the presence of other humans, even if we are having our individual experiences. At MoMA I saw the Marcel Duchamp retrospective, and what a great time. I smiled all the way through it—what a range of creativity, an artist who helped break open the art world, followed his own voice, changed it up. I couldn’t believe all those works were by the same person.

(I think that’s why I love Billy Joel so much as a musician—the same guy who wrote Glass Houses and “Uptown Girl” did The Nylon Curtain. I love to see creative forces adapt to the changes in the artists and the times.)

In a time of so much distress, existential crises of our making, and indifference to suffering at levels I cannot imagine at least partly as a result of state run media suppression of truths, I’d like to encourage you to get out there at get your art on, find good stuff, share it, promote it, enjoy it with others.

I ended my week at Jar Bar here in Queens with a young artist from my building, whose husband tends bar there, and her mom and friend—we three were aged 62-64, and we chose music for the digital algorithm-infused juke box, and we all agreed on Yes, “I’ve Seen All Good People.” We closed the bar down. So there is something for your Sunday.

Sending love, art, hope, DAMMIT,

Miss O’

Work for It:

I think I mentioned I’ve been watching videos by music teacher Rick Beato (so many good ones). The most recent one I happened on was made in response to a commenter who suggested Mr. Beato knew nothing of real work. Gauntlet thrown.

As Beato offers his biography and resume, the stops along the way all featuring employment, it got me thinking about all my paying jobs. Here I go. At first I thought, How many could there be?

  • When I was about 12, I started babysitting in the neighborhood, an occasional cash gig ($1 to $3 an hour was a going rate, depending on how late at night I had to stay); I babysat all through high school and college, and for extra cash when I was a public high school teacher, supplementing my $17,500/ year income as I paid off a student loan and my truck;
  • When I was 14, I spent various hours of summer afternoons walking across the street to help my neighbor Mr. Flaherty, who owned and operated Woodbridge Driving School out of his basement (his wife taught special education in our county, and I babysat their three kids), and helped him file and organize his invoices (he taught me how the drive the summer I was 17—great teacher);
  • At 17 (now with a driver’s license) I got my first regular job as a cashier/stocker at Woolco, which job I had my senior year, all the summer before college, and my college Christmas break; this job paid for all my books, clothes, and toiletries for my freshman year, and luckily I didn’t have to work through the terms;
  • The summer after freshman year, Woolco had gone defunct, but I was able to get a job at Dart Drug, in the same plaza where my mom, Lynne, managed Crown Books. I remember filling out the application by hand, running across the street to the realtor’s to pay $1.00 to have it notarized, and returning to Dart where I was given a smock and told to start the next day. I worked as a cashier (which also meant washing windows, collecting carts from the parking lot, and other tasks) every summer, winter break, and spring break for the next two years of college;
  • Between my junior and senior years, I acted professionally ($75!) at the Virginia Tech Summer Arts Festival in Seamarks by Gardner McKay, a two-hander where I had half the lines, and that same summer I house sat for my costume design professor, Felice Proctor, while she spent the summer doing the costumes for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I lived in a townhouse shared by theater students and rode my bike the few miles every day over to her place to collect and her mail and newspapers, empty the ever-running dehumidifier, and water her flower garden, all while attending summer school for education classes, and bike back to my place so I could catch the bus to rehearsals and performances; at summer’s end and the following Christmas, I spent a few weeks back at Dart;
  • During my senior year, I auditioned for and got a job as a telemarketer for the Virginia Tech athletic boosters, giving a survey to alumni and asking for money; I also babysat for assorted professors’s kids; during breaks I was back at Dart;
  • After graduation, I lived at the same townhouse for the summer and worked as a Christmas tree shearer in the Blue Ridge Mountains; getting picked up by a fellow college student at 5:00 AM every day for the 45-minute drive to Floyd County, where I learned to don chaps and shear pines with a long knife, pee outside, and eat ham sandwiches from my little bag that held my half-frozen gallon water jug; in the evenings I’d drive my friend Liz’s family station wagon over to her apartment, pick her up, lift her into the passenger seat and fold up her wheelchair and toss it in the back, drive over to the Performing Arts Building, park, get her out of the car, wheel her to the steps where some guys would come out and we’d get her chair up to room 204—I swear I have no memory of this, but I know we did it, and out again; I was her assistant as she stage managed the play Tennessee for the VT Summer Arts Festival; I’d drive her home at 10 PM, get myself home, no sooner hit the pillow then suddenly my 4:45 alarm would go off; I also acted in a show called Rich Lives: The Voices of American Homemakers as “The Woman from New Hampshire” for the 50th Anniversary of the Women’s Extension Service for 3,000 farm women from all over the United States, all while recovering from near-fatal blood poisoning due to poison ivy; I also realized too late that I was way over-extended taking care of Felice’s house again, so all her flowers died; at Christmas it was back to Dart;
With the late, stupendous Elizabeth Wills, ca. 1984, Virginia Tech, after the annual Theatre Spring Thing softball game. Ah, the energy of youth.
  • Between my student-loan backed 5th year—where I was a student aide, student taught, co-directed a local high school musical, and took a bunch of education classes in preparation for my Boards—and my first job as a paid schoolteacher, I once again acted in the VT Summer Arts Festival, this time as several characters in Andre Gregory’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; I did not house sit for Felice; at some point I got paid for doing a mime show at a nursing home. Possibly this event closed out the hardest total year of my life;
  • Next, I was, finally, a full-time public high school teacher, a job I got in a rural county where outsiders never came (I told you that story), and taught English 9, English 10, and Speech and Drama, and directed four plays my first year; I also had to host the VHSL (Virginia High School League) AA One-Act Play Competition, both District and Regional (meaning I did all the communications with the other competing schools, by phone, and had to procure all the judges, set the schedules, arrange dressing rooms for all the kids, figure out the lighting, sweet holy mother), in a town with nowhere for lunch so I got our Food Services class to cater (bless Tawana Lee); and I had to repeat all of this the next year while also co-sponsoring It’s Academic and Forensics; and then repeat all that in my third and final year sans the Christmas play and my drama class, instead being given a section of English 12—guess why I quit?;
  • My next jobs were in my year off (after my first summer of five in grad school at Bread Loaf), where I lived in the country and worked a little catering, did some babysitting, and was a reporter/photographer for the Virginia Farmer, a rural paper, writing feature articles and learning how to use a Pentax K-1000 SE (thanks to my professional photographer friend Jay’s over-the-phone tutorials);
  • My next job was to be found when I moved back home to Northern Virginia; while trying to get an interview with a school system (my letters of recommendation apparently sabotaged by a vindictive superintendent, is the best I can gather), I worked the weekly afternoon-to-evening shift at Minnieland Daycare for three months until I could land a job…
  • …which I did, partway into the year as a replacement teacher, at my second and final high school, where I went to high school (I told you that story) where I worked for twelve years, all told in my career maybe 2,500 students, before I…
  • Moved to NYC and was hired by an educational publisher, an entirely new career, where I still work 22 years later, having helped create (I think) eight full reading programs, Grades 5-12.

Here’s a challenge: if you are feeling a little lost, a little, “What have I even done with my life?”, take an idea from Rick Beato and Miss O’ and perform this service for yourself. Nobody comes from nowhere; nobody does nothing.

So. I’ll wait.

Would you look at that? Yes, you did that.

There is no doubt in my mind, none, that all our youth would be far happier, less depressed, more fulfilled, if they could point to an assortment of work they’ve done with their hands, out in public, something for others—you know what I mean? My god the miles I logged on foot, on my bike, on the boards of theaters, around stores and parking lots, in classrooms and down endless hallways. How did we do all that? And we did—and also went out with friends, did art, built stuff, listened to music, danced, made meals, had holidays with family, traveled, and moved, and moved again, and again.

And here we fucking ARE.

VT Theatre Arts Reunion, 2014

Come on now!

Sending love,

Miss O’

Gladly Learn, Gladly Teach

In memoriam, an appreciation, tinged with warning

Before beginning to write this at the witching hour of 3:00 AM (ah, the insomnia of post-menopause), I reread previous posts of appreciations I’d written for two Bread Loaf professors of mine who had died; I suspect the one person who liked those essays is the one person who actually finished reading them, so this latest is for that reader—thanks, Michele. Because here’s another one—and more backstory of Bread Loaf. (Note: part of my reason for writing blogs is to chronicle my life story, my history, so that when I’m senile, the collection might jar memories. And any time I reread a post, I’m so glad I wrote it—I wouldn’t remember any of that now, whatever it is. You might try this for yourself—it’s not about anyone else caring, though they might, and thanks if you do. Write for yourself. And save it somewhere besides online. -ed.)

Like my feelings around the man himself, even in trying to write this I find myself self-conscious. Isn’t that funny? Here I am, age 62, around the age John V. Fleming of Princeton was the year I had him as a professor for Chaucer at the Bread Loaf School of English. I’ve mentioned him recently in a few posts, including my appreciations for the late Michael Armstrong and David Huddle. Back in June, in searching out Fleming’s blog “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche,” again, which I’ve followed on and off for years, I instead came upon his obituary, learning he’d died on May 30.

Princeton University: John Fleming, renowned medieval scholar and legendary Princeton lecturer, dies at age 90

A little history first: The Bread Loaf School of English, as I may have told you, was created when a very rich man named Joseph Battell willed his summer resort in Ripton, Vermont, to Middlebury College ca. 1920—the idea to use it as a summer English master’s degree program was inspired, a place for teachers to gather in their off months, and, as they say, fill the well. (The famous Writer’s Conference came later.) Back then it was a kind of “gentleman’s degree,” I gather, a summer camp for (white male) elite private school teachers, the location of which assembled the finest (white male) English professors from around the country, with a promise of light courses, lots of reading, witty conversation, plenty of mountain air and fine walking, and a chance to get paid to hang out with like-minded, moldable fellows on expansive porches, smoke pipes, sip scotch, and sound like geniuses.

Like President Bill Clinton a decade after him, John Fleming was a Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas, though unlike Clinton he lost all traces of his regional accent. A legendary figure at Bread Loaf, Fleming famously didn’t come up every summer, so you had to grab one of his classes while you could. Curiously, Mr. Fleming made no secret that he found Bread Loaf “self-congratulatory” and too full of its own reputation; he said as much to my class. Yet I couldn’t help seeing that tension in himself—the conservative country boy who saw all this book learning for the intellectually masturbatory exercise it could be; and also the enthusiastic, wondering schoolboy scholar whose own small life was expanded and awakened through the world of books. Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

When he came back to Bread Loaf during my second summer of five, Fleming set to work to restore the little Printer’s Cabin across the road, used in the days before Xerox, boys and girls, to hand typeset the daily newsletter, “The Crumb” (all the puns of Bread Loaf—named after a mountain so called because its owner Battell though the mountain looked like a loaf of bread; the daycare was called Croutons), and literally print off copies to place at every lunch table in the dining hall. (Two “Crumb” authors I knew at Bread Loaf were children’s book author Sam Swope and then-editor of the New England Review, Hugh Coyle; I even wrote a couple of “guest pieces” in my time there.)

Ah, kids, there was a time one typed directly onto typing paper to make newsletters. This was the first year of the Apple Cellar, Bread Loaf’s new computer lab, and so was composed there and printed, I think, digitally. Big transition—I used a portable electric typewriter for four of five summers.

In this Brigadoon of a place where all electronics except typewriters were forbidden and no locks adorned the doors (heaven!), my roommate that second summer, Karen, was one of a few students who answered Fleming’s “Crumb” call to assist him and learn printing, and she’s the only one who stayed with his project. It never would have occurred to me to learn about printing; the next summer, when I would immerse myself in Virginia Woolf at Oxford, including learning that she and her husband, Leonard, started their own hand-printed Hogarth Press (the first press to publish T.S. Eliot, for example), I saw I’d missed a fine opportunity.

A printer’s box from the family-owned, now gone Poyer Press, Belvidere, NJ. My name letters are from that press, and try as they might, Bread Loaf friends George and Jeannie just could find me an apostrophe. Also, see that dashing knight in the upper left hand block? Bread Loaf fellow senior Anna picked that up for me at the Ben Franklin hardware store in Middlebury; she was heading to town and asked, “Can I bring you anything?” And I said, “Surprise me.” A Chaucerian knight.

While she talked about the printing restoration, Karen didn’t say much about the man himself; I myself remember being quite struck by Fleming’s great height, his expressive face, and by his bringing a large “brown Betty” teapot to the dining hall every morning at breakfast and asking a waiter (it was a clique thing and also a way for some students to earn free room and board each summer) to fill it with hot water (I think with his own tea); I recall him being charming and grateful about it. I could relate, as I was a tea drinker, exclusively, back in those days—no coffee or soft drinks or hooch—black tea, hot and straight, and I wondered if only faculty could bring a tea pot like that.

You can also see the Brown Betty in Wallace and Gromit. LO’H collection.

Wonderful though my summer experiences were, Bread Loaf was a place divided very much by money and class: the students either came from personal money and Ivy League educations and became private school teachers in order to “give back” (private schools paid their graduate degree tuitions in full); or else they fell into the “other” category, the latest edition of students, as when I arrived in 1990 on a rural teacher scholarship, of working and middle class students who attended state colleges and taught public school. It was my first time being aware of class like that, though I had hints of it when I became friends in high school with people who lived in a (new, then) gated community called Montclair. Fancy, but we all attended the same public school.

Even without knowing anything about him beyond his legendary intellectual acumen (“brilliant,” “Princeton”), Fleming’s loping gate and careless (almost sloppy) way of wearing corduroys, unpressed button-down shirts, and shoes that suggested they had to be re-tied a lot, bespoke a man caught between worlds. Coming from three years teaching in rural Virginia after graduating Virginia Tech before finding myself in these rarified circumstances, I found Mr. Fleming’s presence both comforting and unsettling. He was a kind of mirror—as a man not quite of Bread Loaf, while also looked up to, I recognized myself in him (see: The Oracle). It made me think about myself, and no one likes to be self-conscious, though self-aware is always important.

The textbook Fleming assigned was The Riverside Chaucer, in Middle English; my mom, Lynne, manager of Crown Books in our town, stripped me a remainder Signet edition of The Canterbury Tales in both Middle and modern English, side by side, though I quickly found that because of Fleming’s teaching, I didn’t need it; I could (using the footnotes) soon read Middle English ca. 1390. He did afternoon tutorials to guide us in reading the work out loud, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…”; since there were no tape recorders, he noted, it’s not possible to say how it sounded—another important reason for classes like this is historical perspective*—and Fleming guided us to see how only 200 years later, this version of English would become recognizable into the present era with Shakespeare ca. 1590—pretty amazing.

Still has pride of place on an upper shelf.

*[Sidebar: I recently watched a YouTube video by Rick Beato, a music scholar and teacher, where he demonstrated and explained how really wonderful Jim Croce’s 1972 song “Operator” is; very matter-of-factly, as he paused during moments of the song, Beato defined for his younger audience terms like “operator” and “matchbook,” explained what a pay phone was, how much it cost to place a call, and also explicated the events of the song—all things a modern young person who only texts could never recognize, not merely the mechanisms but the desire to hear a voice, all alien. In. My. Lifetime. As with listening to old songs, classes in Chaucer, say, remind you how far we’ve come, and also how recognizable we are in our humanity. -ed.]

After Day 1 of the class, though, I asked to meet with him. “Mr. Fleming,” I explained, “I’m a theater major from Virginia Tech with a 1970s suburban public school education, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. What do I need to read to succeed in your class?” He thanked me for letting him know, and gave me a reading list: stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, St. Augustine’s Confessions, various books of the Bible, all of which are alluded to in The Canterbury Tales. We would also be reading The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius as part of the course. Time to get seriously to work.

The first time I practiced reading Chaucer aloud, by the way, I kept inflecting up at the end of every line, in my nervousness, I guess. Fleming stopped me after a few lines, “Miss O’Hara, every sentence is not a question,” to which I responded, in surprise, “Oh, my god? It’s like all my teenage girls? Who do that all the time?” And I giggled. He looked startled. I spent the summer deciding I could be myself—keep this Chaucer stuff real. I could tell he got a kick out of it, defying his scholarly approach with my realities of a public school classroom and today’s teens. I wrote Mr. Fleming a third essay, a personal one, at summer’s end to explain how I’d translate all this to my kids, giving him a copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland. “That longen folk to go on pilgrimages,” Elvis as our new Thomas à Becket.

When I look at the supposed miracle that is AI—no one has to read or think at all anymore!—I get sick. Physically sick. Back in my undergraduate days, because Aristotle’s Poetics is such a feature of the theater that was my major, I took Aristotelian philosophy as an elective. I struggled mightily with it, and I asked my professor, Dr. Nick Smith, why this was so hard to read. “Because the ideas are hard,” he said. There it is.

And taking that challenging class, along with being taught Chaucer in Mr. Corbin’s AP English 12 class, and learning through acting to read Shakespeare with relative ease, I was able to challenge myself and find not only increased knowledge but genuine pleasure in my success in a hard graduate course. And Chaucer is funny—really funny. And filthy as well as pious. Once a summer when he was there, Fleming read “The Miller’s Tale” aloud at the weekly Thursday bonfire, in Middle English, and he was a riot. (Give yourself a treat and read “The Miller’s Tale.”)

Given all his exacting Princeton expectations, you might wonder why I’d sign up for his class— for one thing, I needed that period of literature to graduate; for another it scared me, so I had to do it. One thing that took the big pressure off me when taking Fleming’s class, by the way, was finding out from students past that he never gave A’s. He didn’t believe that anyone in a summer course could possibly earn the top kind of grade he assigned at Princeton.

I got an A.

I have never valued a grade like I valued that A.

When I was graduating at the close of that summer, I learned that the tradition for our celebration dinner was to ask a professor to escort us to our tables. David Huddle was quickly snapped up, and my earlier beloved professors were quickly taken, too. I remember stopping Mr. Fleming in the Inn lobby to ask if he would consider doing it, and he was startled. “I’ll have to get back to you,” he said, because I believe his intention was to leave campus with his family before graduation. But he did indeed escort me, to the shock, I think, of many faculty and students, and to my infinite pride.

I don’t have any photos of my graduation, save one, taken with my friend Becca Cummins (the friend who inspired my eBook), who was also in David’s Fiction Writing. Somehow that feels about right—so much of our experiences are in the doing anyway.

To Mr. John Fleming of Princeton, I give thanks.

And I feel beyond lucky to have aged in a world that centered books, that three of my great mentors—David Huddle, Michael Armstrong, and John Fleming (all white men, to be sure, noting those first two were only ever first names with their students; but we can’t forget Maureen Shea and I hope it’s years and years before I have to memorialize Jacqueline Jones Royster and Felice Proctor) made reading and writing come alive for me, that I could pass that on to my students, maybe even to you.

We are now, sadly, post-reading, post-books. I could never have believed such a thing in my lifetime. It’s been deeply distressing to me to have to imagine a world without the wonder of reading, the deep intelligence that hands-on, eyes-on reading gives us as individuals and a society, not only culturally and intellectually, but emotionally. Reading is an education of the heart, more than anything else. Consider this tribute to Mr. John Fleming another shot in the dark to keep literacy alive. Tell the stories before our AI internet searches lead only to “PAGE NOT FOUND.”

Miss O’ with Rebecca Cummins, Bread Loaf, August 1994

Read all the things, and from a place of love, always choosing your words for their meaning, even as we forgive typos.

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!”