Tag: Family

Department of the Interior: Reflecting on our built environments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask me about my kitchen pass-through view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are lying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending love and hopes for a better tomorrow,

Miss O’

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

Waking in First Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, somehow,

Miss O’

Sunrise. Queens

Talking of Moms

Coming back from quick trip down South to see my dad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awkward family photos. Bernie is 92.

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

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

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

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

Miss O’

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

For That Little Bit of Food

On the mess it takes to make

Years ago, my super (and friend) was at my apartment to make a repair, and he noticed my sink filled with dishes—I’d made a pasta salad, involving boiling and draining pasta, cutting vegetables (scallions, tomatoes, etc.), adding feta, and so on. Assorted pots, a colander, and cutting boards were piled in the sink, along with knives, forks, spoons.

On seeing the finished product, a medium sized pottery bowl with a nice few portions of pasta salad under plastic wrap heading into the fridge, he clucked his tongue. “All that mess for such a little bit of food.” Well, yes. Had this handy man never watched his wife or grown daughters cook or clean up?

But that moment stayed with me—sort of embarrassed me, the way he thought, “for that little bit of food.” Why had I felt embarrassed? I mean, I’d watched him pour out a half dozen tools, rags, and plumber’s sealing tape onto the floor to fix a leak, and it would never occur to me to say, “All that mess for such a tiny little leak.” Let’s face it: most things worth doing require making a mess. It’s the tragedy, and joy, of being human. Life is not gossamer; no amount of meditation and austerity changes the reality that, to start, 1) humans must eat and drink; and 2) humans must evacuate waste. Planting, growing, cooking, and plumbing of all kinds: life’s basics don’t do themselves.

I thought of this again this morning: I’d walked over to LabCorp to get bloodwork done after 12 hours of fasting, so on my way home, I stopped by The Sconery for a (savory) scone treat. At home, I got out my little coffee maker, scooped out coffee into the reusable filter, poured in water, and let it perk; I poured some half and half into a small cream pitcher (to better control the amount used); I made a quick one-egg omelet with the last half of a cheese slice, to eat on the cracked pepper scone.

Following this little repast, a simple breakfast feeding just me (and I didn’t even have to make the scone), I had the following dishes in the sink:

  • Little bowl for scrambling the egg
  • Fork for the beating the egg
  • Small cast iron skillet for cooking the egg
  • Table knife to cut butter for the skillet
  • Coffee scoop
  • Small cream pitcher
  • Spoon for stirring
  • Plate
  • Coffee pot
  • Reusable filter and insert
  • Coffee mug
  • Water glass for taking my morning meds

All those dishes for a little bit of food, a cup of coffee, and a pill. That’s how it is.

And this was lunch.

Anyone who does projects knows this—to sew anything, say, I have to set up the sewing machine, get out the fabric scissors, the thread and bobbin, the seam ripper (always), all the stuff; whether this is making curtains or sewing a tiny seam split in a pair of pants, it’s the same drill. If you make collages or draw or paint or whatever, you have to get out all the stuff. Even to make a small card for a friend, or a bookmark, it’s all that mess to clean up and put away for a little bit of creative output. Even a bookshelf, when hung up, looks like “of course,” no one thinking about the sawdust.

Last weekend, my best college buddy Richard came over with his two teenagers, who, after lunch, napped in various spots in the apartment while he and I went through a big envelope of theater memorabilia from our college days. I was cleaning out a closet last weekend when I happened on it, and thought, I need to make some kind of scrapbook or toss it. Being a BA theater major was, as I’ve said many times, the luckiest thing I could have been. (I distinguish this from a BFA—a bachelor of fine arts—which is narrow in focus, an actor never learning set design, for example; in our liberal arts program we did it all.) You learn all the theater trades, practice on many shows, from black box to main stage, and figure out what you like about it and what you are good at. It was awesome. Though you sure get tired doing all you do.

Theatre Arts-University Theatre is now The School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech. I recommend it.

This sorting made us tired, too, program after program, script after script, party notices, “Break a leg!” cards, SETC (Southeastern Theater Conference) badges. “I was on the makeup crew for She Stoops to Conquer?” Richard asked, thumbing over the names in one program. “I did wardrobe for this?” I said, handing Richard a program for a show in which he got “special thanks.” We’d never heard of it, to see our reactions, let alone recalled working on it. And yet there our names were. Other times the programs brought back loads of memories, “Oh my god, remember that turntable that didn’t turn, and we all had to push it from backstage, in costume,” “…and the tech director got fired for buying cheap casters?” but most of them were fond memories. From hauling boards in from the truck to building stud walls and constructing flats; to measuring actors, to fabric shopping and cutting cloth from patterns; to putting makeup on faces and taking it off with cold cream afterward. “How did we do all that?” “And classes, and parties…?” To say nothing of hydrating.

I suppose one way of looking at it is, “All that mess for such a little bit of show.” But that’s never the whole story.

Ca. 1982-86; I just realized I graduated 40 years ago. [Insert popping eyes.]

I watched YouTube videos about photographers this week—I got on a Richard Avedon kick, thence to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, always learning—and one commentator brought up how much paper and how many dark room supplies went into producing each large-scale photo that landed on museum walls. (So much mess for such a little bit of beauty? Yes.)

In further video travels, I watched Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution on PBS, and I admit that I thought, in passing, about the war, “All that mess for such a (little bit of?) new world order.” And really—when any act is all about money and power—it is a lot of mess, and for, too often, such a lot of nothing but destruction and misery. Worsley finds, for example (seeking the British view), that if King George III hadn’t had a huge 7 Years’ War debt to pay off, he wouldn’t have signed the Stamp Act, and if he’d listened to the colonists’ reasonable complaints about taxation without representation, they wouldn’t have revolted, and Britain’s Empire wouldn’t have fallen, and who knows? Still a mess, no doubt, and the mess continues amid the stabs at progress, and no use looking back.

The latest world order upset is Trump’s unstable, treacherous presidency, his support of Israel, and his attack on Iran—all that mess to distract from such a little bit, oh, wait, an ungodly amount of pedophilia and bribery and corruption.

Money and power, power and depravity. I’ve been reading a few articles during my doom scrolling hiatus, and the more investigating people do into Epstein (to take one example)—and loads of terrific independent journalists are doing just that, unrelentingly—the more horrible and seemingly unstoppable these diseased forces seemed to be; but they are stoppable. This is changeable.

But my god the mess in their wake. Their mess is vast and awful, but we gotta clean it up so we can start fresh. Again. Like doing the dishes. Like a set strike.

And how much better would we all be if our messy work were for creative, useful, and community purposes (with women to guide it)? So much better.

Sending love, all the detritus now in plastic sleeves in a tidy (ahem) binder,

Miss O’

Summer Arts Festival, 1985; Final Directing project 1986. How did l learn all those lines? And pass my classes? And have fun? And feed myself? It can be done. Also, I hope you are charmed by the handcrafted nature of that college program. I made it.

Stories We Just Don’t Recall (till a poet shows you)

Disappointment and despair, everything secret
I believed I could never tell anyone, were single threads

in the prairie’s great cloak of grass and sky.

from “Standing in the Middle of a Great Field,” Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1983, Adah, age 94 (from Stories We Didn’t Tell by Anna Citrino, p. 238)

It’s always a surprise what hearing poetry gets you thinking about.

My mom, Lynne, died on Thursday evening, June 5, 2025, and Friday was all about the mortuary and paperwork. Saturday morning, around 4:00 AM, my sister and I found ourselves up at that witching hour with our dad, sitting in a small darkened living room, rocking in our respective chairs or sitting quietly, with coffee, when Dad suddenly blurted out all the traumas of Lynne’s childhood, traumas we knew nothing about, including the entire year, when Lynne was maybe seven, that her mom lived and worked in Omaha without even communicating with her daughter, who’d had to live with relatives. Bernie is crying, sobbing, for the pain this caused his beloved wife. My sister and I looked at each other, same thought, and I say, “Dad, was Grandma pregnant?” A divorced woman with child, especially with a daughter in Catholic school, would have been carrying more sins than any confessional could bear.

Dad looked at me, at us, uncomprehending. It’s funny what a woman understands, or is quick to suspect, things that a man wouldn’t even consider. In the end, we will never know, and my poor mom was abandoned by her mother and ignored by her father, who was quite possibly overseas in WWII at the time. That pain could never be made right.

Does it matter enough
that, if you could have the dead back

for an hour, these would be the questions
you would ask?


~ from “Our Family Tree and Other Myths” (from the collection of the same name by Jean LeBlanc, p. 37)

This event from last year rose in my chest as I listened to my poet friends Jean LeBlanc and Anna Citrino read from their latest collections via a Zoom event this evening, both poets published by Shanti Arts: Our Family Tree and Other Myths and Stories We Didn’t Tell.

Our Family Tree and Other Myths by Jean LeBlanc. (These are the selfies I send my artist friends when their works arrive at my house.)
Glad I managed to get the title AND author’s name in this one.

Both poetry collections, which couldn’t be more different in terms of approach, style, and geography, are deeply connected in their subjects’ perseverance, struggles, and connection to the natural world.

Anna, Jeannie, and I met in 1990, the very first late June day on arriving at the Bread Loaf School of English to begin our MA program. From the first, it was clear these women were deeply soulful and talented—each in possession of great cameras, too, photographing the Vermont landscape from our first walk. I was a theater major and very lost English teacher, sans camera, still trying to find herself, no writer, but somehow I managed to get admitted on a “rural teacher scholarship” (the MA was geared to teachers). I took it on faith. One of the best joys of lifelong friendships, really, is evenings like tonight, where I listen to women I’ve known over 35 years grow into these astonishing artists. My degree has served to help me appreciate the great work they do, and therefore to open up my understanding of the world. Not bad.

This evening, as Anna and Jean read (via an app thingy none of us (as Jean said) could have imagined in 1990), something profound occurred to me: I have no home place. Whereas Anna is a product of California sky and eucalyptus (by way of Wyoming), and Jean is New England to the core (by way of Quebec), I’m, well, a sort of Virginian (though Northern Virginia (NOVA) really doesn’t count as Virginia), via the U.S. military (because my naval officer mom was stationed at Barracks K in Arlington) by way of Iowa (which my dad always called “home”). I didn’t really belong anywhere. The natural world encounters of my suburban childhood felt inadvertent. I’d meet kids whose families went back generations on farms in NOVA before it was NOVA, and they seemed vaguely alien to me, with their wild cedars for Christmas trees and lapses into Southern dialect at home, dialect they never used at school. I never knew how to feel about that.

Whatever I am, presently a New Yorker, and whatever my insoluble confusions over identity, it’s artists who shake us out of our stupors to look at our truths in the face. So let’s just say I have a lot of thinking to do, right after I reread (yet again) both collections.

You can find these wonderful poetry collections I mentioned at Shanti Arts, based in Brunswick, Maine. May I recommend them? I may. Consider adding Anna’s and Jeannie’s books to your library. Consider, in this our National Poetry Month, adding poetry to your life.

Happy April.

Bits and Pieces

Random fragments from a charged week

“I got a job for which I was ill-prepared and unqualified. That’s the American Dream right there: anything can happen to anyone. It’s random.”

~ Nellie (played by Catherine Tate), who stole the Sabre manager’s job from Andy on The Office, Season 8, the most prescient show ever, our true Zeitgeist

Random 1: Have you had those times when you know you need to go out, do something, but there’s no place you really feel you can be? You get an idea…no, not that. Turn around. Well, turn left. Wait. No. Just go home. No, you put on nice clothes. You have to try. For example, this evening after my work-from-home day, as a cold front moved into Queens, I thought I’d go to one of my favorite bars. Both of my two places are about ¾ of a mile away, and the winds of fool’s spring March began making me doubt my choices; so instead, I found myself randomly heading north to Queens Boulevard to the Irish Butcher Block. I reasoned, I can get fish and chips, maybe a bottle of Guinness or Smithwick’s, and be cozy at home. But when I arrived, the shop was packed; so I thought, okay, I need a walk, so I’ll walk over to my friend Violet’s shop. On arrival, I looked in the store door to see her shop was packed, and that’s fantastic for her, but I’m still not belonging anywhere. I turned around. Despite the increasing feeling that I should just go home, I walked on to my bars, as I say, despite myself. Not a stool was open, not a greeting to be had, not meant to be. Both places. Right? So I keep walking, circling back, as it turned out, to the Butcher Block, now without a line, for the fish and chips, and thence to the liquor store and Italian Rosso.

Sometimes you take a circuitous route to end up where you needed to be, but now you have had exercise and gained a fresh perspective.

Forsythia makes everything kinda hopeful.

Random 2: When I was in kindergarten, I came home one day to the smell of new carpet stretched over the first-floor asbestos black and tan tile in our little split-level house. Harvest gold industrial. One day early in its new life, the carpet by the laundry room door was damaged—not sure how, some kind of tear and a stain maybe. Around this time on TV, ca. 1969, was this advertisement for a magic fabric repair powder—it involved rubbing fibers into the powder and ironing the mixture onto damaged area, and POOF! like new. What my mom, Lynne, actually got, instead of a smooth “repair,” was a scorch mark on a new carpet they could barely afford: the mark shaped perfectly like the bottom of the iron, brown and indelible. Irreparable.

As a child, I was more afraid of the iron than anything. I have no memory of this, but my mom, Lynne, told me that whenever she set up the ironing board and brought out the iron to plug it in, I would begin screaming. Iron as Handbag, 2026. LO’H

To cover the scorch, my mom found a rug at a store somewhere, a 2’ x 3’ area rug, like a doormat, and so for all those years there was this little rug that scooted always over to the right at an angle, as we came and went through the laundry room to the back door (really a side door), and out of habit all of us just scooched the rug back to the center of the door, making sure the scorch stayed covered.

When some 20 years later my parents were able to afford to replace the carpet, this time blue plush, they also found a small complementary doormat-type rug to put in front of the laundry room. For the next decades, then, we all endured the same irritation of watching the rug scooch over as people went in and out of the doorway, each of us moving it slightly back to center. Day in, day out. Not until my mom had the first big fall in 2023 did I just roll it up and hide it (I’d been proposing its removal for years; I performed this “disappearing” act with every single area rug in every room, too, afterwards, and no one questioned). But when my mom asked, “Where’s the rug?” pointing to the area by the laundry room, I asked in return, “Mom, why was there a rug there at all?” And that’s when she realized, “Do you know what? I put it there to hide the scorch”—the scorch that disappeared with the removal of the old carpet some 30 years before.

Random 3: Do you know that story—I think it was in Reader’s Digest, or from a local paper, maybe, back when they all had a feature called “Bits ‘n’ Pieces,” and I really miss local papers, but my old Appomattox landlady recounted it to me: One Thanksgiving, a man sees his wife preparing a ham, and just before she puts it in the pan, she cuts the end of the ham off. “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know,” his wife replies, “my mother always did it.” So that man asks his mother-in-law, and she says, “I don’t know, my mother always did it.” So the man finds his wife’s grandma, sitting in a chair, explains his observation, and asks her, “Why did you cut off the end of the ham?” And she looks at him, “To fit it in the pan.”

We humans do a lot of things because we’ve always done it that way. How did it start? Why do we still do it? Unless you can answer that, you really have to question, and keep at it until you realize, “There’s no scorch mark anymore.”

Random 4: “It’s policy. The government runs on policy. Without policy it all comes apart.” Words to that effect greet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s newest deputy, Julissa Reynoso, a naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic, by a seasoned State Department veteran, in the play Public Charge, which I saw last night at The Public Theater in New York. Things are only done a certain way, Reynosa (who co-wrote the play, with the endorsement of Clinton) is told, and no other way. In order to get a wrongly imprisoned USAID worker out of a Cuban prison, a duty charged to her by Sec. Clinton (unseen and largely unnamed), while also working to free the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Reynoso spends five years, 2009-2014, under her boss and President Obama achieving the impossible, upending business as usual, with their full support. It’s exhausting and crazy-making. The play closes with footage of President Obama’s address that the U.S. would be returning to normalized relations with Cuba, and Reynosa leaving her post to begin work on the campaign of a lifetime, the promise of our first woman president.

We all know what happened. What is happening now.

And you sit with this. And sit with this.

Random 5: I was watching a rerun of The Office tonight and not really thinking about anything, and it was the episode where Nellie simply decides she’s the new manager of Sabre (see that quote up there), and Robert California, the CEO who is all talk and no ability, just lets her do it. Jim says to the camera, “What is happening?!” And all I could think was, “I don’t know, but here we are.”

TV ratings for reality shows notwithstanding, it’s no good to shake things up just to shake ’em up—putting morons in the highest offices is never going to yield good results. People DIE. Life and death. Morality matters, ethics matters, and so does humanity: sometimes a smart woman—and smart is key, woman is key; who is a moral person—and moral is key; and who is not molded by what has always been and is also highly educated and imaginative (no small things) with a complex immigrant background (so underrated) that affords her a global perspective—and supported by reasonable and daring leaders, can to shake up a years’ long, idiotic stalemate to reconcile many factions, save some lives, and make change for the better. It’s work, and it’s hard and frustrating, totally unsung (no statues or commemorative coins), and the key to success is not to quit—because right when you think you have to give up (as my old therapist told me about psychic breakthroughs), you get the big idea.

The United States cannot survive another year on Celebrity Apprentice faking greatness, or exist in perpetuity as a weird Season 8 arc on The Office. Shit is real.

But goddamn, this country, man.

Racism. Misogyny. White male fragility. Greed. Power. All the ills. It’s all so much bullshit.

We American humans are so far out of touch with our natural world, with anything like roots, that our collective nervous breakdown must be due in large part to that loss. (I stood in Astor Place last evening en route to The Public, looking at all the dead-eyed faces of skinny NYU students with earbuds and fast fashion and too much money, and the speeding e-bikes of food delivery guys talking on cellphones, and no one is happy and no one looks present, and I’m thinking how I don’t want to perpetuate this AI bullshit world, and now what?) Hillary Clinton understood that it is through person to person connection that we change hearts and minds, and that until you change those you change nothing. I get really pissed off when liberals and progressives make fun of the notion of changing hearts and minds, and it’s deeply ironic when conservatives make fun of Hillary—what do all these lefties think Turning Points U.S.A. is all about? Reprogramming hearts and minds, people, and not for the good. Conservatives just don’t want the Libs to figure out that Hillary has been right all along.

There are some mistakes you can’t throw a rug over. Not to bludgeon this metaphor but how long have we been scooching little (law) rugs over our racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, pedophilia, greed; our history; our abuses of all kinds? It’s time to replace that carpet, and one hopes without burning down the house.

And take a fucking walk. Cults aren’t culture. See you at No Kings.

Reasons to love my neighborhood. Queens.

Remembrance of Things Past: Are we only what we remember?

The title of Marcel Proust’s famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, was beautifully translated as Remembrance of Things Past, until some literal-minded academic pointed out that the literal translation, the actual title, taking it word by French word, was In Search of Lost Time. And I say, Is it? Which novel would you take down off the shelf? Exactly. Sometimes literal is not the way to go; sometimes essence gets more at meaning. Today I’m all about memory.

Yesterday I went to see Marjorie Prime at the Helen Hayes Theater on W. 44th St. here in New York. The play has been around since before Covid—my friend Colleen auditioned for it when it was starting a run at Playwrights Horizons, where our playwright friend Tom saw it. That’s how they remember it—an event before Covid. The play itself, by Jordan Harrison, concerns an 85-year-old woman (born in 1977, so we’re about forty years into the future) in the late beginnings of dementia, cared for by an unseen woman named Julia, and visited periodically by her daughter and son-in-law. At the opening, an oddly stiff, handsome young man (Christopher Lowell) is talking with Marjorie (96-year-old June Squibb, who is just remarkable; I first became aware of Squibb in the movie About Schmidt, where she played a Midwestern wife to Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt and was so good I thought they’d plucked an Iowa housewife off the street for the brief but pivotal part. Sidebar: I know he was nominated for an Oscar, but I thought Nicholson was all wrong for the part—it’s one that really belonged to a less complicated actor like Paul Dooley. I digress—and yet remembering our takes on things is also part of what I’m focused on this morning.)

To keep her mother company, Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law (Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein) have purchased her a Prime, an android, this one in the form of Majorie’s husband, Walter, when he was young (as she requested)—so the oddly stiff companion is stiff for a reason. A Prime can be generated into any form, to be filled with whatever memories people give it; as a result it can converse by speaking only in programmed memories and saying comforting things. The play is asking us to consider what a person is. Is our worth, our existence, dependent on what we can remember, even in facsimile, and must what we remember be in terms of other people in our lives? Should trauma remain part of our memory? When we can’t stop remembering trauma, is therapy or forgetting harder the better way? What does it mean to truly live? Ultimately, Are we only what we can remember and who remembers us? For a relatively spare play, it does bring stuff up.

I found myself this morning asking, “Why do we remember?” And more than that, is memory the essence of humanity? It’s the first day of Black History Month, and I think of Alex Haley’s historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), where Alex learns about his enslaved ancestor Kunta Kinte (his name and story passed through Haley’s family over generations), when in his research Alex travels to West Africa by the Gambian River and finds a griot, a storyteller who tells the history of all the people of a village, committed to memory, once a year, and it can take up to three days without stopping to do this. But when he hears “Kunta Kinte,” and learns of his capture by slave traders, Alex knows he’s found the complete history of his people, almost unheard of for African Americans (even finding the affirmative mark of a slave on a slave schedule, let alone the name of the ship, let alone the name of the African, as I’ve learned from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his PBS series Finding Your Roots, is beyond rare).

In 1977, when I was 12, ABC showed Roots, a miniseries based on the novel, that galvanized the whole nation (there being only three major networks and no cable), teaching white America about real enslavement for the first time. To quickly erase (again) that powerful, historically true narrative, NBC countered by showing Gone with the Wind on television for the first time (the “television event of a generation!”), so we could (mis)remember the real story, the glory we lost, I guess. Horrifying when you think about it. And here we are. (I remember my social studies and English teacher Miss Covington glossing past Roots and gushing about Gone with the Wind, her favorite movie, telling us the whole plot—and keep in mind she (no more than 30) could only have seen this 1939 movie once, or twice at most, in a revival at a movie theater, say, this being before VHS, let alone streaming; when she taught us about the Civil War, she minced no words: the North didn’t want slavery, but they didn’t want Black people there, either. I cannot imagine what the Black kids in her classes felt.)

Thinking more about ethnic generational memory, I remember seeing a David Mamet play maybe 25 years ago, The Old Neighborhood, where a Jewish man named Bobby Gould (played by Peter Riegert, who should have won a special Tony for his master class in active listening) who in three scenes visits 1) a childhood friend; 2) his sister; and 3) an old girlfriend. In each scene he says a few words at most, and listens to each of the others talk about the past, the “old neighborhood,” partly a shared history, partly revelations about things he didn’t know. While the play massively bored the three friends I was with, I found it galvanizing—the terrific performances (Patti LuPone played the sister), yes, but mainly the premise, that so much of our time spent with family and friends is absorbed in reviewing the past, our memories. Why is that? Why do we do that? What do we gain, or lose, from that act? In the first scene, Riegert’s character is visiting a childhood friend back in the city, staying at a hotel on a business trip. His buddy reflects at one point, “I could have made it in the camps,” and Riegert says, “You can’t know that,” and the friend insists he could. And that was the first time I became aware of the weight that Jews today carry when they had family die in the Holocaust.

Roots was the first time I had been shown anything about slavery, having grown up with text books that minimized the abuses of enslavement, and in a state with a state song, “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” which says, “There’s where this old darkey’s heart am long’d to go.” (It’s credited to an African American minstrel, James Bland (1878), but its roots appear to go back to the 1840s, lyrics by Edward Christy and sung by Confederate soldiers; and in either case, yikes. It was not retired as Virginia’s state song until 1997.) In other words, the truth and memory of enslavement was not part of my white Virginia memory, so here I am in my sixties only now really reckoning with it, what with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed during my first year on earth, a seeming ]course correction. Wow have I been blind.

What am I on about? History—the importance of a shared and factually accurate history, one we learn all our lives, together as a people, revised and reflected upon rationally as new information comes to light. National, personal—all the history defines us. I saw a post by a Black woman—and I didn’t save it and I hate myself—who pointed out that in her view the core issue for white people is that whites have no home. Blacks have Africa and enslavement to root them; Native Americans are the indigenous people. But whites? A culture of constant colonization and conquest, from ancient Rome to the Nordic invasions all over what is now Europe, most whites, especially white Americans, have no real homeland (this term tied to Nazis and white supremacists features on MAGA propaganda posters to bolster their deeply false and hideous American narrative). Everything for whites has been about invasion, genocide, rich man-enforced patriarchal “Christianity,” and repression of The Other to the point that we, as whites, have no roots and no shared memory beyond war and domination and fear. We whites have been trained by the rich elites to stew in hatred or resentment, say, crying on about our disrespected primacy; or, by contrast (it seems to me), we whites may live in bland acceptance of our privilege exercising little agency beyond voting and saving for retirement. How can you root in that?

So after watching Marjorie Prime, where the only value the characters seemed to place on one another was in memory—forcing one shared memory while maintaining the repression of another one, both confining—I got to thinking about memory as a kind of cage, its relation to creativity and forward motion coming into question. The white people in that play were defined by, and at home in, the past, but a murky, unsettling past, often manipulated and limited through the use of the Prime by the stories it repeated, with no clear plans for, or authentic excitement over, a present or a future. Is traveling to Madagascar the answer? (No.) At one point, the son-in-law replaces a dying Ficus tree in the house with another Ficus tree that no one pays attention to, and how is that a useful creative act? He’s the only character trying to reintroduce life into a dead space, and futile though it is, he at least is trying.

Some of the last things I did with my mom, Lynne, involved me asking questions of her life and filming her in very short videos; collecting recipes; she and I sorting a box of linen for me to take, tatting done by her aunt and grandmother. Memories through things, new stories emerging using the objects as a prime. And if we aren’t maintaining and deepening connections to our loved ones and our history, who even are we in the world?

When I look at Minnesotans and their powerful resistance to authoritarian rule, I am struck by this happening collectively and also in winter. Garrison Keillor used to begin his weekly Lake Wobegon monologues on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, “It’s been a quiet week up in Lake Wobegon, my home town out on the edge of the prairie. It’s been cold this last week.” That natural bond between Minnesotans in their landscape was ever and remains the relentless cold, the snow and ice (followed by the muddy springs, hot summers, and the short growing season). Anyone who is brave enough to move from Europe, let alone Somalia, to that unforgiving winterscape would need good neighbors immediately; and it’s that culture that appears to have bound all these people to one another—winter warriors—in an essential goodness and clarity.

My sibling text thread all week has been filled with photos of snow, including a video of my Virginia brother Jeff walking on top of snow, so thick is the ice still.

Dispatch from North Carolina, where three of our six siblings live, with humor.

Virginia just set a record for the most days in a row below freezing—a totally unnatural thing, so yes, Herr President, this is a result of global warming—and I’m thinking that it’s winter above all seasons that makes us reassess, remember, and also be present. Winter is never boring, even if it’s exhausting. Winter does not forgive. You can never let up, chopping wood or shoveling snow or suiting up to keep warm. Sometimes you have to wait for the melt. But waiting is for the old, the Marjorie Primes of the world, and only then if they are looked after. The rest of us still have to get to work.

New York City, in my first decade, always looked like this from December to the end of March. I’m out of practice navigating the street, crossing obstacle courses of walking paths, walking with heartiness, but we all share it and roll with it. And it’s a comfort.

It’s history, people. It’s all about history. Let’s never forget this time, whatever happens, wherever we go from here.

And celebrate Black History Month. Learn all you can. As the snow deepens, as ICE expands, deepen and expand yourself.

Now, Voyager

Dreams of the dead

The Untold Want

by Walt Whitman (1819 –1892)

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find

Last night I dreamed I came out of the room where I sleep when I’m at my parents’ house, but it was my bed here in Queens, and my very aged, dead mother sat before a bright computer screen at the living room desk in the dark, her alert face blue-lit and her thin hands wildly flying over the keyboard, flying up and over the keys, eyes focused but expressionless. She was wearing a version of her blue pajamas. “Mom?” I needed to tell her she was dead, she didn’t need to do this, and I pulled myself awake. It was disturbing, seeing that tiny body, so pale and shriveled, working on a computer, which she never did, and so frantically.

I have dreams like that quite a bit since my mom died, unnerving dreams at times. And it’s easy to feel confused then, and afraid.

This evening on YouTube I caught NPR legend Terri Gross on Colbert talking about her husband’s death and a dream she had about him, in which she turned to him to remind him he was dead, and he vanished. Stephen then told Terri about a dream he had after his mom died, where he told her a similar thing, “Mom, why are you here?” and that she was dead; she also vanished. Stephen’s mother’s dream words before she vanished were, “Oh good. It’s the only way you’ll stay awake.” Terri asked what he thought that meant, and she suggested that his mother’s words meant what her husband’s presence meant in her own dream: you need to live life. By that I gather, when you admit the death, when you face that loss, you can awaken to your own life again. It was a wonderfully tender, adult conversation between two artists, two humans, one I hope everyone, somehow, can see during this horrible week. I needed it.

During their exchange, I found myself teary, and the dream I had last night came back to me. What was my mom telling me? I think my mother was telling me to write my life. Lynne had no interest in my acting, my teaching, or my writing. “That’s your thing,” she’d say. But here she was in death telling me, maybe, or showing me, that I need to keep writing, and even writing about her. Maybe it’s a better dream than first appeared, maybe. Nothing to be afraid of, and in fact quite the opposite.

As I do when it’s on demand on TCM, I watched Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid for the many, manyeth time, and the feelings I have about it change over viewings and years, but whatever qualms or critiques, I can’t help loving Charlotte’s journey as Camille. Unconventionally, Charlotte Vale finds a purpose for her life, waking out of years of emotional abuse to become her own woman. Her most important moment of self-discovery comes during a renewed fight with her mother, when Charlotte is able to say honestly, “You see, Mother, I’m not afraid.” In addition to Max Steiner’s score, her guide out of the sanitarium and into the world was that Whitman quotation, presented to her by Dr. Jaquith. She can sail forth to seek and find; she can do anything she wants now. She can become. “I’m not afraid.”

When I saw the new footage today of Renee Good in her car via the “body cam” or phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE “agent” who shot Ms. Good in cold blood in the face at least three times through her windshield as she left the scene, something became plain to me: that Renee Good, who by all accounts, including her wife’s, was nothing if not kind, “pure sunshine”—that the only thing Good did wrong was be true to her name and her Christian faith.

She was not afraid.

She said kindly to the officer, “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” And Ross opened fire. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed.

I saw an interview with a pastor who was arrested by ICE and was asked over and over again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you afraid now?” And that (true) follower of Jesus said simply, “I’m not afraid,” and you could tell it was driving the ICE thugs to murderous rage. To what end? What do they think this rage at good people gives them?

I look at all the people posting, all the people protesting, all the people still out in their neighborhoods. We aren’t afraid. We are grieving, we are traumatized, we are experiencing all this horror together, we’ve all known loss, been visited by death in dreams, and we aren’t afraid. You know why? Because, whatever our faith or origin, we know who we are. And we are learning more all the time. We seek, we find, and it’s interesting to note that the Bible quotation as we know it doesn’t stop there. Let me close out with a little Gnostic Gospel of Thomas who said, “Seek and you shall find. When you find, you will become troubled. When you are troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.” I’m not a Christian; I study all the faiths, and that feels universal to me.

I hope you have the dreams you need tonight.

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few words from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was published in January of 1776. This later reminder from Paine, when the rebellion seemed its most hopeless, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” via Heather Cox Richardson:

Of It (and Over It)

When I take my evening walk about in my Queens neighborhood, and maybe I’ve written about this before—this is the age, but I sort of marvel that I’m of it.

I can’t help marveling that for a truly odd woman, odd since birth, who never really belonged anywhere or with any group for as long as I can remember (and lucky enough to find loads of friends just like me), I have still managed to make a life in a range of locations, learning through walking, greeting everyone I make eye contact with, with “Hi.” I’m not stupid, but my experience has been that as Anne Frank said in her diary, most people really are basically good.

It’s hard to feel like that today.

Trigger happy white men are freely enjoying acting our all their Nazi fantasies, their blood lust, on ordinary sweet Americans, and they know they can do it with impunity. It won’t matter if anyone is charged for the murder of the Minnesota poet/wife/mom whose van was in an ICE agent’s way, because Trump will pardon him. This is America now. Until these men rape, kill, pillage, torture, torment, destroy everything human and decent to the point of over-satiation, they won’t rest. And they won’t stop, not really, ever, because their rage is superfueled by their increasing cruelty.

I remember seeing footage of the earliest days of the war Russia has waged on Ukraine, where confused and under-equipped Russian baby soldiers pointed weapons at and were utterly baffled by old people walking out of their houses to shoo them away, like flies, and they went. That didn’t last long. Three years later, the war is no closer to ending.

America will soon be under siege, too, I guess, by its own kill-happy MAGA citizens. It’s so hard to fathom how quickly it all went to hell. And how long we will have to endure this is anyone’s guess. General Stephen Miller all but came all over himself on CNN the other night as he talked about raw power, how he had it now, and would never give up that “raw iron” he was, in his dreams, holding in his pants.

Even harder to reckon with is the fact that we have absolutely no Democratic leadership to meet this nation’s defining moment. Not even a retired military official will break protocol. Trump has zero real opposition outside ordinary citizens doing their best to keep democracy going. It’s lonely and it’s terrifying. And now, deadly.

So here I was this evening, after a half hour of wracking sobs, making myself dress well and go out into the world in search of dinner to bring home, marveling at the sky.

And I began remembering other skies, the seasonal skies of many walks, from early adolescence on, when you start going outside yourself—the wild Virginia sky of my childhood neighborhood after a hail storm; a playground sky of Biblical proportions, the light coming down from behind the clouds, as I played basketball with middle school friends; windswept blue drama during Hurricane Andrew in the eye of that storm in rural Central Virginia; half blue, half black clouds with rain to dodge walking across the Virginia Tech campus; an otherworldly dark orange sunset in Vermont during summer in graduate school; the still-light sky of London at 11 PM in summer; the perfect dusk of summer parks in Oxford; so many skies.

In all my walking in places as disparate as Woodbridge, Blacksburg, Appomattox, Vermont, Oxford, Spriggs Road, California, Iowa, London, and New York City, alone as I always am, I’m of it. Always of it. The sky never lets me feel abandoned. And so it is that I seem always to be from places, eventually, regardless of my oddness.

I’m too deeply, darkly sad to write anything else tonight.

As if on cue, my friend Tom sent me this:

Yes, they are.

I’m sending you these:

Once at the beach around midnight in Nags Head, North Carolina, a few decades back, I heard a mother, probably the same age as the Minnesota ICE murder victim, say to her eager child on just arriving, “Let’s not gather shells at nighttime. Look at the moon.” And what a moon it was.

Look at the sky. Don’t let the fucking fuckers take away your sky.

Sending love even in grief,

Miss O’

“Grouchy Resilience”

A week off with art and the city, with photos

It takes a while to come down from the ledge, to decompress, when taking a vacation. All I had to decompress from, in my immediate life, was dealing with some personal grief, healing a hand from surgery, and unfeeling a job with lots of confusions in the odds and ends of finishing a project. It’s an embarrassment of riches, my little life. Somehow I feel I should do a roll call of global suffering to rationalize my own breaks in this life, but I’ll spare you that guilt.

Monday, Labor Day, I hung out in the neighborhood. Walked about. Hey, the mural’s back.

Tuesday, I headed to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum via the N Train to 5th Avenue/59th Street. Here, I am going to complain. One cannot walk two yards, from the Plaza Hotel, to the lake; from the Sheep’s Meadow to the Literary Walk and Bethesda Fountain, without 1) choppers overhead; 2) food carts of overpriced water; 3) vendors of every imaginable item of tourist shit blocking the view of the American elms; and 4) bad saxophones/pan pipes. Assaults to the senses all, so all you can do is look up.

While at the Met, I visited a couple of favorite pieces. First, the El Anatsui:

Then Paxton’s tea girls:

Grateful but still feeling edgy, on Wednesday I thought maybe I what I needed was water; the Rockaways were a couple hours away, but hey, the East River is down the road:

Close. But not feeling shiny yet.

Thursday, I rested.

Friday, I joined my friend Cathy to meet a former colleague in the city for lunch, and it was reviving. As I was only a block from MoMA, after lunch I parted from my friends and headed in.

Bingo.

The cap on the beat:

Perfect. Breezy, calm, cool.

When you can’t have it all, settle for grouchy resilience. And quiet marble.

Sending love, renewed, from New York City,

Miss O’