January 2024
§ My mom, Lynne, is 90 years old today. Last night I forced myself to get out of the house on a damp, raw New York City evening and head to the theater to see Purlie Victorious before it closes, showing up at the Box Office at 5:45 PM or so to see if they had “anything for tonight,” and I indeed got a center orchestra seat. Magic. This morning I am thinking about transformation: how actors transform into characters; how young people transform into old people; how oppressed Black people transform into autonomous Black people; how racist white people too often never transform. But more to the point, how my depressed soul transforms in the presence of great art. How does this happen? Why is undergoing as well as witnessing transformation so necessary to our humanity? And why do we resist transformation?
§ Memories of transformation are often curious ones. When I was in 2nd grade, for example, Daphne O’Keefe brought in a Gallo wine jug melted over with rainbows of crayons. She was so proud of this show-and-tell object, explaining how she made it. She passed it round the class, and all I could think, confused, was, “What a waste of crayons.” Some transformations both small (see that wine jug) and large (see Tucker Carlson’s from “entitled Swanson Food trust-fund baby” turned “even richer Fox News personality” to “radicalized Russian-Putin ass kisser”) are lost on me. If transformations aren’t increasing your humanity or expanding your soul, what is the point? One woman’s wasted crayons may be another woman’s art (one man’s patriotism is another man’s treason?), and if the melting crayons make you happy, and you aren’t lying to yourself or hurting anyone in the process, melt way.
§ On my mind: Years ago, the now-famous comedian, podcaster, actor, and producer Tig Notaro was kind of doing okay as a mid-level comic, respected by her peers, booking enough gigs to make a living; one day she was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer, and that evening she went on stage, “Hi, I have cancer…,” and her whole career changed. Soon after the diagnosis, her mother fell, hit her head, and died. Between a middling career, a double mastectomy, and burying her beloved mother, you’d think, “How did she keep going?” But it was the beginning of a transformational phase in Notaro’s life, one in which she became widely known and successful, met her wife, had a family, and is happier than she has ever been. Go know.
§ Scaffolding: It’s everywhere in New York City. You can’t walk a block or a street without walking under some at least once; I used to jokingly ask my friend, Richard, back when I visited the city, “When will it be done?” I return and return to this image of crumbling, but also of trying to repair—it takes such an absurdly long time; I want to walk around the city with a bull horn, “TRANSFORM ALREADY! BE DONE!” New York City’s Times Square was once glamorous and exciting, and then it became derelict and dirty, and then Disney moved in and transformed it into a theme park for tourists that makes me want to stab myself in the arm every time I walk through it, just to feel something more elevated than pissed off. Then I look around at the endless scaffolding in these high traffic areas, and “pissed off” is about all I will manage for a long time to come.
February, 2024
§ Since mid-January, my left eye has been arcing light, flashing, and also numb; in fact that quadrant of my head and face is sorta numb, too. I went to a neuro ophthalmologist today (after my regular ophthalmologist and primary care docs were stumped, and thank goodness a colleague had one, and that I talk about my life to other people who then often have suggestions, because appointments with specialists like that can take a year to get). This special eye-brain doctor (and I can’t believe how easily I spell “ophthalmologist” now) can determine for sure that your eye is in fact numb by sticking a sort of blunt pin in it and you not knowing she did that. She said, “I don’t like that.” She is, as promised by my colleague, a total doll, and has a very busy but well-run clinic; we scheduled the MRI (it’s in a month, the earliest appointment (which can take many months to get sometimes) and bloodwork, and follow up. “I don’t like that your eye is numb and that you have headaches,” she said, and then she looked into my face, “but we will solve it.” My life is either about to transform completely (my maternal grandmother died of a brain tumor at 60; I’m 60 in May), or just be inconvenienced. But it’s scary. I still haven’t told my family (older half-brother and sister caring for their mom with Alzheimer’s; my brother Jeff looking after 90-year-old parents; my brother Pat just lost his father-in-law), except for my youngest brother who also has eye issues, just in case I collapse or something so at least one person knows what’s going on. (I think six people read my blog, and none of them family.) My upstairs neighbor also knows, a few friends, and one colleague, so I’m covered. Will tell all.
§ Sunday in New York, with photos: Grand Bazaar Flea Market (art purchase), American Museum of Natural History, Washington Square Park (with birds), Washington Square Mews (my favorite spot in New York, maybe), past Cooper Union, with lunch at Little Poland while you wait for the Rubber Stamp Store to open on East 11th St, near St. Mark’s Church, where you talk to Jimmy the owner, who has made all his own stamps since he became interested in coins in Ireland some 70 years ago, followed by a return to Queens and a binge of cocktails at Belo with the Cordero brothers Spencer, bartender, and Jonathan, owner. And all this, all this connection, is why we are alive, right? Republican motherfuckers be damned: we are here to transform each other and ourselves in creative, joyful ways. What else is the fucking point?
§ My Aunt Lorraine died on Valentine’s Day. She was 98, my dad’s oldest sister, the second oldest in a complicated family. Lorraine was my Grandma Fern’s daughter from her first marriage; Fern married Frank O’Hara, a widower with four sons, two daughters dead in infancy, and his wife dead in childbirth with the second daughter. (Fern and Frank only married because she was three months pregnant with what would be the first of five children, my Uncle Don.) When Lorraine died, various siblings and cousins speculated on the order of the kids, so I clarified: Chet, Lorraine, Bob (note: Chet and Bob were sent to an orphanage after their mom died; then returned when Fern (not that much older than Chet) became their stepmother), the twins Alfred and Alvin (who were adopted by Frank’s childless sister Emily and her husband Walter Smith), Don, Nadine, Bernie (my dad), Mary, and Francis, Jr. Of the ten children in all (not counting Grandpa’s baby girls), then, my dad is the last survivor. (For reference, they were all alive but Bob when Obama was elected president in 2008; I remember this because I called Uncle Chet on his birthday just after the election, and I told him I was happy about the outcome. “So that’s the way you went, huh?” he asked. I did. “Well, I did too,” he said. “Now I loved Hillary, loved her,” and he had even driven her around Omaha when she came to campaign. And I expressed my condolences about Uncle Bob. If anyone tries to tell you that American families should be “traditional,” you just point them to Frank and Fern in Council Bluffs, Iowa, ca. 1930. Oh, and Lorraine and Chet were best friends all his life (he died over ten years ago), and no relation to one another at all; my dad was a half-brother to each. Got that?) Families are living, breathing, ever-changing, and eventually dying, ecosystems, transforming all the time. Or they are if they are healthy, even if they sometimes put the “fun” in “dysfunction.”
Over the phone this past week, I asked my dad, who turned 90 last October, for his memories of Lorraine, and he told me what he remembered. “When I was little,” he said, “Lorraine used to take me to over to Broadway [in Council Bluffs], when we lived on Avenue E, at Christmastime, when Santa came down. He always threw candy, and she’d help me, we’d run around and gather up all the candy we could. I think about that memory a lot, I don’t know why.” Here he laughed. “And it’s funny, because Santa was in a pick-up truck or something, and he threw hard candy, really threw it, and you wonder how nobody got hurt.”
Another memory: “I told you that story, about the time Dad [my Grandpa O’Hara], he worked on the railroad, you know, and they had a wine car there that was leaking, and all the men were catching that wine and drinking it all day. Dad came home smashed, yelling that he was gonna do this, gonna do that. And Lorraine—she was working at the bomber plant at the time, and muscular—she laid him out on his back in nothin’ flat and said, ‘You aren’t doin’ nothin’,’ and we all just cracked up.” And Lorraine’s first child, Patty (one of ten, two deceased), and my dad’s first niece (or nephew for that matter—is their a general term for that?), just celebrated her 77th birthday; my dad was 13, and he remembers coming home from school one day and seeing Lorraine holding her in her arms.
My cousin Kerry (Don’s older daughter) and I (Bernie’s younger daughter), I think, are the only ones who know who everyone is and the order they come in, from aunts and uncles to cousins; maybe my cousin Liz (Mary’s oldest daughter) knows. Lorraine’s daughter, Rita (one of twins, children 6 & 7 in the lineup), who called last week to tell me that her mom was in hospice care, confessed that she had no idea who any of my siblings were. (“How do you know everyone?” she asked. Because every Christmas the relatives put school pictures, labeled on the back, in the cards; and I memorized them, because I thought I was supposed to.) Rita and I became friends the year I went out for our Aunt Mary’s funeral (2012, I think), and her twin sister Ruthie had coincidentally just moved to the street where my Uncle Denny, my mom’s cousin (with whom I was staying), lived (are you following?), so Rita started giving me rides after gatherings, dropping off first me and then Ruthie. (Ruthie, by the way, has moved back to Kansas City to be near her kids; I have a nephew living there, but since no one would know him because they don’t know my half-sister, Sherry, why mention it?) Sending love to all of Aunt Lorraine’s loved ones in our ever-transfiguring families.
§ Surprised by snow. Brown desolation to cheering plush white happens less and less frequently here in New York, and what does fall melts right away, so I went on walkabout and took photos. I was surprised how many folks were out doing just that on that chilly Saturday. I love when spring makes you beg for it.
§ Sunday morning, bright blue and sunny, but chilly as winter should be. Time to head to the city, I think, to City Papery and buy some blank card stock, maybe spend the rest of President’s Weekend making some original cards for people using those rubber stamps up there for inspiration. First, I’ll post this blog. Love, Miss O’
Color me grateful.
The Miss O' Show (Teacher's Edition) 