Category: Personal

Many of us have read Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts,

Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears

Say firmly:

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of

charity, mercy and patience.

“We women of one country

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!

Blood does not wipe out dishonor

Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have of ten forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.

Let women now leave all that may be left of home

For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace,

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality

May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions.

The great and general interests of peace.

Stirring stuff.  Still meaningful over a hundred years later.

I lived in Berkeley for a time. On a quiet street, bursting with flowers and trees and a good mix of people, not too far from the campus. It was big and cheap, the first floor flat of a somewhat rickety house. My friends lived in the flat upstairs. And for a year, my brother lived in the other upstairs flat. These Berkeley years were some particularly good years of life. I was poor. A graduate student. But I was devoted to life and to literature, thrilling to their proximity, exuberant about philosophy and poetry. Even my depressions felt luxurious at the time. I was poor, but rich.

Wherever I am, I love walking around, and Berkeley was no exception. Weekends meant yard-sales, and I’d often pick up a little this or that, maybe even a $5 splurge. One weekend I spotted a vintage typewriter. For five bucks it was mine. That night, at home I fed one end of a long roll of yellow paper into it and started clacking. It wasn’t a fast typewriter; it was old and dirty, but even clean and oiled, I imagine you had to earn every word. I thought it would be fun to just leave it out and encourage visitors and friends to peck out a this or that, whatever struck them. Maybe I’d even bang out a few lines. Or my husband.

Over two years, the scroll grew longer, the yellow paper bunching up behind the typewriter and eventually, when I moved the table away from the wall, cascading onto the floor in a lazy, curving pile.

When we moved back to New York, scroll and typewriter came with us. It was such frenzied packing, I didn’t reread the scroll, just pulled it out of the typerwriter, rolled it up, and packed it and the typewriter away.  

Back in New York, the unpacking was fairly leisurely. I hadn’t sifted and sorted and pitched before moving, and was doing that as I unpacked. I was happy to come across that yellow roll of paper and I sat down to read it through. Certain things brought back clear memories, other things I was delighted to find as if for the first time, some things bored me, other things made me laugh, and I even cried a few times. I was taken by the idea of slowly reading, unfurling this scroll, an eclectic version of my history for the past two years. Unrolling, unrolling, at the top of the scroll were the oldest entries, moving further and further into the future the more I unrolled.

The last entry was one that I had never read before. I had to read it twice to really understand it. It made my heart race with fear, then anger, and sadness. It made me cry, my body vibrating with discord. From memory here:

Ha! Ha! Ha! you in your cushy rich happy life here in berkeley.who would’ve thought that the hippies parked in the van across the street for the past two weeks would crash in and break your world. What makes you think you should live this life. You think the world is just fucking beautiful don’t you? well, we’re here to tell you it’s not yours so we’re taking what should be ours. you only got what you have by ripping people off. [then, iirc, there was a long kind of nonsensical “poem” or quote or stream of consciousness. it was syntaxless in some ways, but portended some private meaning or menace]

Smack. On the second reading. It clicked.

A few months earlier, still in Berkeley, coming home one day from German class, I found the outer front door was open and the inner one slightly ajar. I pushed it open tentatively, nervous, calling out my husband’s name. Silence. And then I realized what else was so strange. The cats were nowhere to be seen. They were hiding. Silence and absence. And then it came into focus what wasn’t there: the CDs, the T.V., stereo, computers, deeper into the apartment, drawers were open, things flung about. I noticed on the mantle that beautiful clock my parents had given as a wedding present was askew; perhaps they left it there, like that, at an angle, when they saw it was engraved on the back. Later, the police would dust it for prints. The dusting powder was black and a strange consistency. I couldn’t altogether get it out of the cracks in the white paint of the mantle. We never got any of the items back, of course. We never expected to. It was just part of a social ritual, I suppose, to have the police over, and fill out a report.

And so, I discovered 3,000 miles and several months at a distance, reading the last entry rolled up inside that scroll of yellow paper, not only had we been robbed and violated,  but the thief had taken the time to bang out a nasty message, deride me, judge me, hurt me even more–pure venom and insult, which also hurt because it was so wrong; it seemed so unjust.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, it’s not a hurt unbearable; it may even have a lesson in it somewhere. I’m not sure where.  

This is the latest carpetbagger insult to our people here in New Orleans. Mass Culture seeks to have it’s way with us and turn our cultures and our city into another version of Disneyland.

Like I’ve stated before, I don’t perform for tourists… I just live my life.

Here is the reference article: http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/f…

Cross-posted from GentillyGirl. http://gentillygirl.com

I love the subway. Even when it’s crowded. I love the solitude in the crowd. I like the act of faith of hundreds of bodies pressing into a machine so far underground. I like that it has mostly served us well for over a hundred years. I love it when it’s empty. I even probably love it when I’m cursing it, when it’s letting me down. It’s like family. Or it feels like home. Familiar.

I remember riding the subway as a child. My mother holding my hand on the platform. The train literally covered in fantastic, colorful graffiti. I remember one rush hour when I was a young girl, mom clutching me as we squeezed in (or out)–and my shoe, one shoe, was left behind–on the platform, or in the car. I don’t remember what happened after that. I loved falling asleep on mom’s shoulder when we were riding the subway on the way home. Yes, I loved the subway as a child, but I was also taught that it was dangerous, and sometimes, late at night, I have felt that fear.

I love watching people on the subway. I like the sociality. But I like the solitude you can also find in that intimate, public space. I like reading and writing and knitting on the subway. I like doing mindfulness meditation on the subway. My mind often blooms on the subway. Poems or ideas or things to be written bubble up. I take them down. Revisit them later. Leave some as is, subway artifacts, and take others up, tinker, expand.

What is it about the subway that stirs creativity? The noise-cancelling, rhythmic whoosh and rocking–is it like being in the womb? Being underground, in the subway, does it tap the unconscious in a distinctive way?

It’s not just that creativity breeds there. Violence too. I have seen the spontaneous eruption of hatred, racism, burst into physical violence. I have seen teenagers fighting. Children being spanked and hit. Women too. I have sometimes tried to intervene with one sentence, as if to bring someone to their senses. I have then wondered if this didn’t make things worse later.

I’ve seen and been involved in acts of kindness on the subway, too. And moments of shared humor. Or just shared moments. A smile. A conversation. A performance. It’s all there. In the subway. What racist pitcher John Rocker hated about the subway–the mixture and mass of humanity in all of its difference, and glory, and failing, and rage, and vulnerability–I love.

What kind of song of himself, of our world, would Whitman have penned on the subway?

Do you have a subway story? Or an unexpected place that tickles your creative bone? I’ll close out this ditty and turn it over to you with a poem that sprouted up on the subway.

COMMUTERS

By what right do I

conjure you,

stir you from sleep,

snag your attention,

turn you around?

Would an invitation

blunt the blow

reduce the weight

the freight

of solitude?

Oh, unintended companions,

by rude strokes,

I pray to you on this downtown C.

Tired man, pants rumpled,

I worry for your shoe untied.

I thank you, woman and child,

holding hands, blinking,

silent in the crushing rush

of our wondrous speed.

I see you, young man, opposite corner,

steady in the shelter of a book.

And you and you and you –

all signposts of everything else there is.

Like this, I come to my stop.

I am back in Flemington NJ. I left home when I was 31 to come here and live with my boyfriend. I think they thought I would never leave. And I never really wanted to leave. They were right about that. I liked being a child. I liked that I could always got to my mom’s house when I was sick. Or that I could always knock on my dad’s door for pasta at midnight after a wild night out…

No. I wasn’t looking for a mate. I was happy with a boyfriend.

“The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.”

Agnes Repplier

“We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.”

Anatole Broyard

“The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.”

Russell Baker

I had great designs on tackling the pictorial delights of Boston. I was hampered by a colleague hobbling on crutches, other colleagues who wanted to shop, and the fact that my employers expected us to actually attend the conference.

The hotel we stayed in was so modern, I did not know how to turn on the taps or find the light switch when we first arrived. Turns out I was not the only one who struggled with this, reference was made to it in the opening speech.

I had to go buy a Bosox cap ( so I did shop ) because the first morning I popped out of bed  needing coffee and there was a Starbucks in the lobby,pulled on my wrinkled clothes from the night before and realized my hair was sticking up and I was scaring the other hotel guests. They shrank away from me in the elevator. Even the Starbucks people seemed uneasy.

Oddly enough, although I have worked nights for years, early morning has never been a problem for me. I hate afternoons. Afternoons should just be eliminated as far as I am concerned.

I got up early to take these…

It’s a roller coaster ride. A tumbling act. We let words loose to persuade, describe, exclaim, defame, refute, convince, lie, confuse, or clarify.

We take stands, have platforms, craft mission statements and credos, construct constitutions, and write theses and treatises. We’re busy alright. Conquering worlds with words… and sometimes the horizons explode. Sometimes all light is lost…….

During the fall of 1996, my wife, Holly, came down with a fever approaching 102.

She was in bed for a few days and when she didn’t seem to be recovering, her mother took her into the emergency room (we hadn’t gotten together yet).

The doctors ran tests, pronounced it a bad flu, and sent her home.

Less than 24 hours later, her mother walked into her living room to find Holly lying on the couch, incoherent and utterly delirious.

Her fever was now over 105.

She had developed scabs on the palms of her hand and the bottoms of her feet.

She was unable to stand, talk or even make eye contact.

And by the time they arrived at the hospital this time, she was in a coma…

Since returning from Boston, I have received every morning a harried phone call from Mom documenting my Grandmother’s decline. She has another infection, she has fallen, she has blacked out and isn’t certain what transpired. Each time the conversation ends, this morning I gave Mom some half assed advice that she treated like a sliver of brilliance because she too is stressed out, I think that there are countless other middle aged Americans getting these same phone calls. After all we are a nation of traveling and middle class aspiring wanderers and consumers dancing the ultimate unicorn shuffle thinking that we matter as individuals that we should be out achieving and growing and living in districts with good schools in suburbs with no trees or working OT to send the kiddies to private school and telling ourselves the money is worth it so somebody will recognize our offspring in their specialness and all of this is often done hours away from our parents who live in a small towns with no jobs/declining post industrial city with no jobs/NAFTAized regions with no jobs and the only people we know who stayed behind have no jobs or low paying jobs with no benefits who are dully caring for their parents while trying to talk their own kids out joining the service because their own options are limited. And really. They can go to college and become teachers and scientists and get plowed under by debt and live in a studio apartment after graduation with six other roommates because they pay more in rent than Mom and Dad do for the mortgage.

This is America. We have choices. We can just amble on down the road of personal responsibility and free market solutions and buy lottery tickets or hope to hit the big one at the local casino where everybody says: that buffet is really great. Really, I know somebody who won 80,000 or my neighbor’s cousin’s aunt does.

And each time I get the phone call I try to remember how much vacation time I have. Not much. Because I took a vacation this year. Stayed in America because Europe was too pricey and I am not keen on those charming third world countries where they put you on a compound to create the illusion of an  local economy. Then I berate myself for even taking a vacation, who can even afford to take one now? Who even gets paid vacation? That search is starting to take on Holy Grail like proportions for the average working American. Yeah. We will give you a job and the best that you can hope for is that we won’t humiliate you too too often and we will let you train your replacement. Deal?

My girlfriend who has been at her job in Canada two years gets twice as much paid vacation as I, at my job almost ten. But those Canadians pay high taxes. I hear they all want to come here but they won’t work cheap like those other immigrants…. you know the nice ones who enjoy and value hard work for slavery wages.

( – promoted by pfiore8) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ frantically felt for my throat….breathing sigh of relief ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I put my head down and closed my eyes everything was real quite and clear I ran over to him it was warm and clear thousands of stars ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ shaking and broken pathetic and hurt met you at …

Continue reading