Tag: Family

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’

What Would You Like for Crunch?

A few reflections on my mom, Lynne

Lynne died almost two months ago, on June 5. The other day I had an email from my friend Anna, who told me she thinks of my mom when she’s looking for something crunchy to go with her meal. When Lynne packed a little lunch for me to take on the train, a gesture she stopped doing in the five or six years before she died (not through lack of love but lack of energy), she’d ask, “What would you like for crunch?” (It usually came down to carrots or Cheez-Its or chips.) My mom was a strikingly picky eater, something I didn’t think much about, but noticed more than I was consciously aware of. In her last couple of years, down to 80 pounds and not out of bed too often, I’d see my dad, Bernie, running up and down the stairs from the bedroom, reheating her plates of small meals in the microwave—if the temperature was too cold, she’d stop eating, and desperate for his wife to eat, Bernie would warm it up. My brother Jeff is the same way—the food has to be the right temperature or he doesn’t want it.

By contrast, Bernie eats his spinach right of the can he just opened; I eat leftover Chinese chicken and broccoli out of the container from the fridge. Hot, cold, lukewarm (sidebar: I just realized I have no idea where lukewarm came from, so you’re welcome), it’s food. That said, both my dad and I have to have our coffee steaming hot or we don’t want it.

But one thing we O’s all agree on is that each meal should have a contrast of textures—something with a good chew, something soft, something with crunch. A little salt, a little sweet. I imagine that any human would agree on that—it’s something that makes grilled chicken nachos (topped with melted cheese, black beans, guacamole, salsa, and sour cream) a perfect dish (and luckily I enjoy them even as they get a bit soggy and cool over a long visit with friends).

And really, in a world of so few universals, you’d think we could agree that one of life’s great pleasures and purposes is to have the food we love, the way we want it, when we need it. After clean air and fresh water, and right before safe shelter, fine nourishing food of appropriate temperature and texture and taste is right up there. I find it sickening that anyone could deliberately starve any creature. I can’t stop thinking about this, and Lynne would feel it, too.

For whatever pleasures or pickinesses Lynne experienced in eating or not eating, she saw as one of her prime duties the feeding of her young. “So you have a ham sandwich on whole wheat and a Clementine,” she’d say, putting the Glad bag and napkin into the paper sack. “What do you want for crunch?”

I love that this stuck with Anna. Lynne seems to stay with people, and mostly through my stories. I’m glad I tell stories.

My friend Colleen sent me a card a few weeks back, offering condolences for the death of my mom, and remarked in the card that when I talked of her and told stories, I spoke of her as “Lynne,” never as “Mom” or “my mother,” and Colleen wondered why that was. Talking to my dad recently, I relayed this observation and said, “I always saw Mom as a person first, and my mother only incidentally.” He thought that made sense. I see Bernie the same way, a person first. They both made it clear from the beginning of all their kids’ lives that their marriage came first. “You kids can go to hell,” my dad said more than once during various moments of his children’s sometimes troubled adolescences, “all I need is your mother.” And it was true.

Back in 2022, my dad had surgery for the first time at age 88 to remove a mass (non-cancerous as it turned out) in his colon. This would turn out to the be the last year that Lynne was really mobile, and even then it was limited. Here’s from my sketchbook of that time:

I told you this I’m sure, but before I took the train down to Virginia from New York the week of the surgery, Lynne asked, “Why are you coming?” My brother Jeff lives with them, but he works a labor job, and as an editor I can work from anywhere. She still didn’t see the point. I knew that after a major operation that there was no way Bernie could lift, open, or otherwise help with anything, and that my mom was too weak to turn doorknobs. (I’m not kidding: years ago my father (who is a neat freak, so this was hard for him, I know) started leaving all the closet doors ajar, and even made the toilet paper hang long so it would be easy for his wife to reach; it wasn’t until after Lynne died that I realized why all that was.) And if you are waiting for your parents to realize they need you, that is not happening. So you go. A few days after my arrival, Lynne looked at me hard and said, “How did you know?”

During his recovery, in Bernie’s unstoppable neat freak rush (he is famous in the family for breaking and chipping every plate, glass, cup, mug, ornament, you name it, that he touches), he broke a precious object. Poor Lynne had a vase she was really fond of, at least 50 years old, and one morning I came downstairs to hear Lynne yelling, “How on earth did you break that?” And Bernie is yelling, “Well I had to pull the shade down,” and she’s yelling, “Why? There are curtains there, and I really loved that little vase.” It had been nearly 60 years of suffering the sloppiness, and yet all the love, you know?

So I went online, and I searched. And it took some time, but I found it. The exact same vase. I gave it to them for their 59th wedding anniversary. Neither of them even noticed its return. Ha, ha.

The best reason for Google.

Bernie and Lynne. I knew people growing up—good buddies and neighbors—who would say that their mom or their dad was their “best friend.” I found that creepy. Once when I was in middle school, or maybe early high school, Lynne said to me out of the blue, “You don’t care that we aren’t friends, do you?” I didn’t hesitate in saying, “No,” because Lynne raised her kids to be independent creatures, even as she fed and bathed us and took us to the dentist twice a year. It worked for the O’s.

At a reunion of my dad’s side of the family out in Iowa and Nebraska nearly 30 years ago, my youngest brother Mike told a girl cousin (one of 37 living) that we weren’t really raised with hugs. She asked, “How do you raise kids without hugs and kisses?” When we got to our Uncle Al’s farm, five of her six children walking toward our cousin’s Aunt Lynne, who walked purposefully to greet us with a wave and a back pat, Mike said, “We don’t hug, do we Lynne,” and our mom declared in perfect time, “No we don’t.” Our cousin gaped.

Hugs and kisses are nice, but some of the most screwed up people I’ve known in my life had all of that and a mom or dad for a best friend. You know. Every family is different, the needs are different, no one does it perfectly. The hot and cold, the bitter and sweet, the soft and the crunchy—I’m grateful for the textures Lynne brought to our lives, for the nourishment she gave, for the smarts she had. We may not have been smothered in kisses, but because of her, the O’Hara kids know injustice when we see it, and we are not afraid to call it out.

Crunch.

Sending love,

Miss O’

Past to Present

Revisiting Life on The Miss O’ Show

Back when I was a high school English teacher, and a kid would say the craziest thing, I used to joke, “Someday, when I do my one-woman show, The Miss O’ Show, I will share this moment.” When blogs became a thing, I came late to the game on Blogger in 2011 with The Miss O’ Show, where I used the space mostly to write about teaching and creating curriculum, but it veered into political lectures and observations. I lost my way, and I stopped. Around that time, I found WordPress, and thought I’d start fresh with The Miss O’ Show (Teacher Edition). When I lost my way there, too (because what was I teaching?), I moved over to Substack (duplicating posts) with The Miss O’ Show: Reading Glasses. I’m still not sure what is what or what for. This morning when I searched “The Miss O’ Show,” the first thing that came up was a skin care guru named Olivia, no apostrophe, whose videos are called The Miss O Show. Well, darn.

It seems it’s time to give up my handle, but since I own the domain name missoshow for those blogs on Blogger, WordPress, and Substack, I may as well keep them, understanding that with AI, what we know as writing (like reading in the age of audio books) may be destined to become old school, not unlike the shift from cave paintings to papyrus, from scrolls to bound books. Only this time, humans have created artificially intelligent communication and search technology that requires the sacrifice of all our potable water to cool the engines, causing humanity (and indeed life itself) to die off possibly as early as 2027. (When asked about this in an interview, fascist and Palantir Technologies founder Peter Thiel merely mumbled something to the effect of, “So?” God we’re dumb.)

Nature will out, and it’s reassuring. Queens.

Looking at our increasing human lust for self-immolation, tied now inextricably to the way Thiel’s tech eats all our words online in order to cause the end of earth through endless iterations of regurgitation, not unlike the end of Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the act of writing feels increasingly weird. On my way to Joe’s Pub in the East Village the other evening, I went into the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, as one does, and was overwhelmed as usual by all the volumes I’ll never read, classic and contemporary, on every subject you can imagine, enveloped wall to wall by self-referential merch. What are humans even doing? We’ve never known so much, and absorbed less; or should I say, lived less? Or should I just shut up? Should all of us?

And then I reread Whitman:

This poem always comes to mind when I get nauseated by the too-muchness of it all, all the data and breaking news; all the self-care videos and nonstop commercials; all the words.

In Union Square, before heading to the Strand, I found one of my favorite artists, Akassa, two of whose works I own, just to say hello. It was Thursday, and I remembered it was his Union Square day. He remembered me, and smiled, and there he was with even more beautiful work, and the first thing I said when he asked how I was was, “My Mom died June 5,” and he was so sympathetic I got teary. I tell most everyone that, not because I want sympathy so much as connection, to bring us to the real, the now, the human, the living, the alive. And we shared that. And leaving the Strand, walking into the first cool air in a week in New York City and my first time walking New York for itself since coming back June 11, I became present to an overcast dusk that reminded me of London, a man walking toward me, feeling for something in his pocket, then turning abruptly around, crossing the street to go back, I think, to Wegman’s in Astor Place. I found myself hoping he found it, whatever it was. Something about the way he searched, realized, and turned was recognizable and immediate, if you know what I mean. I miss observing like this.

I was early to Joe’s Pub, so after picking up my ticket I headed around the corner on E. 4th Street to the pub Swift, where I haven’t been since at least before Covid. The last time I was there was an early summer afternoon, where I read Patti Smith’s M Train while sneaking Lower East Side deli knish out of a paper sack as I sipped a Smithwick’s (which they no longer serve, I see). (Sidebar: Outside my window just now I heard a little girl say, “Why?” and her daddy reply, “Because people don’t usually order pizza at eight in the morning, babe,” and I found myself thinking, “But we eat it cold out of the fridge then, so that little girl is not wrong, is she?” My upstairs neighbor, Debbie, just went out to roll the compost bin around to the other side of our building, her self-selected Saturday chore to help the co-op, while I remain in a bed I’ve been in since last evening at 6 PM, because lately bed is the only place I want to be. But life goes.)

So back to Swift, I watched the bartenders working hard at pouring the draft pints of Guinness; I looked at the barstools filled with white bruhs in blue button-down shirts or similar, not one conversation worth eavesdropping on, finished up and left. Outside, I see I missed a sudden downpour. At the Public, I used the restroom, passing a very tall young woman at the mirror, brushing and brushing some kind of foundation powder into her face, and she was still at it after I flushed and washed my hands and dried my hands and went out the door. What is that about? I wonder. It’s funny being in my sixties, a plump old broad no one looks at anymore if they ever did, and they never did, and no amount of foundation powder was going to give them a better view, it’s all so surface and silly. Inside Joe’s Pub, still quite early, I ordered my drinks from my server, Izzy, a slender young man with a friendly face and joyful afro. “Izzy, I’m a cheap date,” I said, showing my Supporter ticket (giving me 15% off). “My mom died a few weeks ago, and this is my first night out since.” Izzy expressed condolences to my weepy eyes and said, “You are in for a good night! Is this your first time seeing…” and I said, “I’d only come out for Justin Vivian Bond—I see all of Mx. Viv’s shows.” I ordered my two-drink minimum, tonight a bourbon cocktail and a club soda, and on return, Izzy brought me also a glass of prosecco, “on me.” And I got weepy again; Izzy checked on me during the evening, and I was so grateful for that kindness. (And of course my tip paid for the drink.)

Sipping and sitting at a Joe’s Pub couch table with four other people, strangers to me, all so nice, a lesbian couple, a gay man and his trans woman friend, I felt as contented as I had in ages. The band came out, Viv entered through the house, singing joy as if to say, fuck the fucking fuckers. There really is nothing like music; the longer I live the surer I am that aside from the glories of the natural world, the only other thing that really matters is making and listening and dancing to music. I believe that it’s the only human-made creation that will live on; the only true human meaning there is to make in this life comes in musical form.

Justin Vivian Bond and band with their final installment of The Well of Loneliness (Tribute to Lesbian Songwriters) Series, “Well, Well, Well.” Joe’s Pub, NYC, June 26, 2025

Music is our one human universal. My youngest nephew, James, is four, and as we O’ siblings spent the week attending to our dying mother, Mike related how James won’t let him play recorded songs when they are outside, explaining, “I want to listen to bird music.” I used to hold infant James up to the O’ kitchen window to watch the birds at the feeder, and still one of his favorite things to do at Grandma and Grandpa’s house is to help Grandpa feed the birds, scooping seed into the feeders and watching his grandpa hang the feeders back up so the birds will return. The week my mom, James’s beloved grandma, died, the backyard was filled with young cardinals, the cardinal being the spiritual bird, the sign of a loved one who has died. It was comforting. Sitting outside the Monday after Lynne died, her grandson Cullen visiting us, a female cardinal kept joining the circle. Hi, Mom.

The last video I showed my mom before she began the long fade out under hospice care was one of James saying, “Hi, Grandma! I love you! It’s James!” Lying in bed next to my mom, I held the phone up so she could watch, and she put out her hand to interact with it, touching James with her finger and saying, “You’re so cute, you little squirt,” and smiling. I told Mike about it. When I asked Mike what he was going to tell James about his grandma’s death, he told me this: The week after Lynne died, Mike said to James, “You little squirt,” and James said, “That’s what Grandma called me before she went to live with the angels,” so that’s how Mike had told him, “but,” James added, “we’ll always be connected.” Mike and his wife had read a book to James that explained we are always connected to those we love by an invisible string, and the little squirt took it to heart.

James’s response to the death of his grandma reminds me that words, stories, books, that writing itself really matters if one is to live fully as a human being. That listening and talking and reading and writing will always matter as long as there are sentient humans to take it in. Bird music and human music are music, and we need them both at different times. It’s the human made, the human felt, the human heard and seen that lifts us. The making, the doing, the experiencing. Death, after all, is not artificial.

Miss O’ is trying to figure out how to return to words, and which blog gets which arrangement of them and to what end in this crazy end of times. In the meantime, I sleep all I can and try to replenish, or something, grateful for all the long conversations I’ve had on the phone lately (especially with my friend Cindy, who needs to write her life story, or I will), and the joy of a well-tended playlist.

Sending love and the music you need,

Miss O’