An old friend, two mothers, and a march

I haven’t seen Judy for fifty years, but here she is on Facebook, standing next to a sign that reads: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.” Her face not really familiar to me but it triggers the memory of another face---her mother.  Of course, I might not recognize Judy herself after so many decades and never seeing her as a grown up.  But when we were kids our mothers were in their prime.  I remember their adult faces very well, those female models in our child lives, sometimes adversaries or rivals, subjects of our intense interest about their mysterious world of grown women and their secrets which we were beginning to intuit. And so it was Judy’s mother who jumped out at me from the computer screen, there at the Women’s March in San Francisco on January 21, as if from another world.

I last saw Judy when we were in the fifth grade, she with tousled black hair and the heft of a tomboy who could be rascally, her antics hovering at the fringe of legal elementary school decorum.  We grew up in northern California and lived on the outskirts of our town where our school was nestled at the dead end of a valley. Classes were small, the postwar baby boom having just barely begun to swell the numbers of children. 

When I commented about recalling her mother’s face, Judy (now Judith) responded that when she was six years old her mother took her to a march against nuclear war. The year must have been 1951 or 52, six years after Hiroshima. My mother was not as daring. Judy’s mom was probably the most radical woman my mother knew during my grade school years and I suspect that my mother was awed by her.

So here we are on Facebook, Judith and I, sharing pictures of our respective marches, she in northern California and me near Los Angeles; bolstered by seeing others, we’ve powered through a fortnight of demonstrations. 

For the first one, the Day of Action to Save Health Care, I went downtown to LA General, officially the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center.  Founded in 1878 and one of the largest public hospitals in the US, the old hospital (Mary Pickford laid its cornerstone in 1930) stands on a hilltop in an area called Boyle Heights, once a wild mix of Jewish, east European, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Japanese.  Today it’s Latino east LA. The site reminds me of Hurley hospital in Flint, with its current “old” building up high and new additions grafted onto it below. Around the bus stop at the foot of the hospital hillside several bundles stowed under benches await the homeless who gather at night around the exhaust grates that belch gusts of warm air from the hospital.

Some 800 or 1000 people stand on the steps of the new entrance to the medical center that slopes down to the street. There’s a podium, yellow tape, and a small tent to our right where security men are visible between the flaps. The first speakers are women who tell their stories of severe, chronic conditions, of how they survived without medicine until the ACA came along.  Then white coated staff from the hospital are introduced and the first one stuns me.  He is an African American psychologist in the Emergency Department---LA County is a Level I Trauma Center like Hurley. He announces that he was raised in Grand Blanc, Michigan.   He rises today, he says, to speak about Flint and the suffering there due to lead contamination. People listen in hushed amazement to this horror story from far away. 

Finally, Kamala Harris, California’s new senator, recounts her first 48 hours in the Hart Senate building, as old timers scurried through the halls for the late night “vote-a-rama” marathon that culminated with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (http://www.rollcall.com/news/hoh/vote-rama-watch-young-brings-reporters-snacks).  She tells about her parents who met in Berkeley in the 1960s, in another era of movements and marches, and then closes quoting Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” Do not give up hope, she exhorts us.  

The following Saturday I joined a small "sister" march in the LA area.  Redondo Beach organizers offered an option for families with children, a less than two-mile walk, accessible as the organizers emphasized, for little legs.  For old legs too, I thought. The crowd gathered slowly, women greeting one another with happy surprise, as if slightly amazed that the event was going to come off.  Morning on the SoCal coast and only in the high 50s, the hand-held megaphone no match for the gusty ocean air and women glad for the warmth of a pussy hat.

Discipline from marches past came back to me as we walk: close up the spaces and don’t leave gaps in the march, link arms only if there’s danger, signal politely to drivers who try to exit through the line of marchers. But this is a very relaxed, suburban group---middle aged and younger. What would they know of civil rights or antiwar demonstration drill?  People seem happy to be doing something, conversations are lively.  Word passed through the crowd that the organizers here got a permit for 30 people---half way through the march someone ran by us shouting the count: 1800.  

No chants in laid back beach land or what I miss most, singing---civil rights marches swelled to the lyrics of black church hymns, spirits rose on the resonant African American voice.  Folk song buoyed antiwar marches; Woody Guthrie optimism pierced with the scratchy laments of Bob Dylan, the quaver of Joan Baez, the solo voice as tenuous as the concept of peace.  Anthems will come; it’s early days yet.

Meantime, other work continues. Coming up on the LA January calendar is the annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count takes place from January 24 through 26, a mission to count those on the streets and in shelters---in 2016 it was year the largest homeless census in the nation.  For three evenings volunteers in yellow vests will head out with clipboards---a metonymy bequeathed to us in Obama’s Chicago valedictory speech (http://www.theycountwillyou.org/homelesscount). The tallies provide data to support a tax for services to homeless. 

Judy’s mother would be 104 this year, my mother (who finally got political during Adlai Stevenson’s second presidential campaign) would have turned 100. We carry our mothers’ experience and our own, over six decades worth.  Yes, we are still protesting. Believe it.

Read more essays like this one at East Village Magazine online at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org

Cliché---until it happens to you

It’s the stuff of chick lit and rom-com. An event so cliché-encrusted it sinks right down, sucked into the seabed of ready-made metaphors. 

But that’s the thing about clichés.  Like many life events (divorce being another notorious one) it’s a commonplace---until it happens to you. 

This one is a marker you can’t avoid.  Not a wedding or a funeral---no relatives involved either.  Still, you casually check out plane fares online.  Then in a moment of merlot-induced nonchalance, you snap down the credit card (metaphorically, that is), locking in a five-bill ticket to fly across the country for it. 

Even if you cancel, you’ll be upset for a week just because you got the news.

Welcome to your high school reunion!  The fiftieth.  The merlot does not help with the number.

So, dear reader, I went.

My experience with reunions is limited. The first one was ten years ago---the fortieth from this high school. I confided my apprehensions to my Michigan dental hygienist, Annette.   Italian and well-traveled, Annette immediately grasped the import of the situation.  She geared me up with a regimen of professional grade Crest white strips so I’d be in good toothy shape for pictures.  I wore black and swathed my neck with a silk scarf.  Bella figura, said Annette.

This reunion was hosted by a classmate, Wally, at his historic home in the town of Ross, the most secluded of a string of once sleepy summer towns that stretch across Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The town was named for Gold Rush era adventurer, James Ross, a Scot who’d first tried his luck in Tasmania, and then struck his own gold in California as a wholesaler of wine and spirits.  He took his fortune and retired to the Rancho Punta de Quentin---part of the huge land grant parcel that later became Marin County.  He died in 1862 at the age of fifty.

Over later decades, other settlers followed. The newly prosperous from San Francisco built summer estates in styles that reflected their aspirations and fond recollections of the East they’d left behind. The 1906 quake and fire brought another wave.  Prescient city fathers enacted ordinances to protect trees and prevent noise at the first Board of Trustees meeting in 1908. 

Today large wooded parcels of land still shield residents from highway sounds. The leaves of tall, dense hedges obscure street numbers.  This enclave of old affluence looks untouched since the nineteen sixties when I was in high school.

And so it begins. 

An unseasonable heat wave has settled on Marin County this September Saturday, just when people celebrating fifty years of anything in their lives struggle to look their best.  Small consolation that even residents of Eden suffer summer weather from time to time.

My partner, Dennis, is driving me to the shindig.  His nature is frank and forthright and he’s a reunion veteran, having attended two high schools.  Classmates from both keep in touch and get together every year.  His complete lack of anxiety bolsters my spirits.  “Guys can always shoot the shit,” he says. 

Hand this man a beer.

Meantime, we’ve found what Google maps says is our destination.  A gate opens.  In we roll. 

Velvety black asphalt guides us along a graceful curve and past a gate house to the right.  Beside it, in the dappled shade of the trees, I can just make out a small cannon resting on a two-wheeled gun carriage.  We dead end at a turnaround.  A carport sheltering antique cars on one side, a fountain on the other.

I open the window and ask for guidance from a woman stepping smartly across the pavement, a small florist’s arrangement clutched against her robin’s egg blue shirt, fine dun-color hair pushed back behind her ears. 

“Parking is supposed to be down at the school,” she says, probably exasperated at having to repeat this yet again. I mumble my thanks and close the passenger window, relieved to seal in coolness and composure.  

Dennis backs and fills.  I recall that we’d passed the Episcopal Church down the road on a corner.        

We are not here yet. 

It’s trickier now to retrace the driveway and exit; people spill out of the gate house, clusters  gather on the pavement.  Clearly, they all must have parked somewhere else.   

I turn my head and look back across the grass toward a rambling three-story Victorian house.  Freshly painted and startlingly bright, its wrap around verandah and white wicker furniture inviting on this hot day.  I’ve lived so long in the East that I recognize where these multi-storied frame houses with their Queen Anne turrets and elaborate friezes came from. 

Tables are set for dinner out on the grass. It is the deep, even green of professional landscaping, a miniature of the perfect English lawn that gardeners mow and roll with heavy metal drums for generations.  Across the grass and opposite the house is a pool, its corners bracketed with ornamental cypress like a Roman villa. Beyond the pool two pergolas extend from each side of a pool house. 

I live in Flint, Michigan, a notorious rust-belt GM town. Over the last thirty years it’s become my home, its grit and catastrophe my “normal.”  It is a place pervaded by economic decline that seeps into daily life.  Without realizing it you choose your route to the grocery store by how much urban blight you are willing to pass along the way. 

Five decades away from my native land, its vernacular and costume, and today I feel like a tourist on formerly home turf.  

We find the church parking lot, ditch the car with relief, and walk down Shady Lane (yes, a two-lane road arched with trees), and re-enter through a gate hidden in the hedge. 

From the gatehouse across the grass, a woman calls out my name, her arms raised in joyful recognition; unease evaporates and I am captivated. No one has called out to me this way for many years.  I am here at last.  More exclamations follow, like pops from small fire crackers.  We hug and clutch one another’s hands, reluctant to let go. 

I am moved to see so many people and to remember them by name, to see their faces contoured by time but their eyes and smiles immediately familiar. 

We query one another with a kindly curiosity, gesture our empathy with sighs and laughter,  and then cut short our conversations each exclaiming to the other, “I want to talk to everyone.” 

Our age feels comfortable, while our high school years seem (as indeed they were) closer to childhood than to being adults---so much younger than we thought we were, with our striving to be older.  Some in our class had met in first and second grade.  Others felt like outsiders when they confronted uniformed dyads and triads of primary school friends.  No matter now.   As Dylan wrote in the mid-sixties, “Ah, I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

A male classmate reminds me about a time when he’d brought me home after a dance.  All I remember is that I had a crush on him; of the dance or the impressive, gentlemanly transport home?  No recollection.  Again no matter.  As he says “this time our achievement is just getting here, upright and coherent.”  We are grateful.

The classmates who still live nearby get together between the big landmark dates.  Widow and widower, divorced and remarried. Some now tend one another after surgeries. Parkinson’s and MS have appeared. I watch as a former football player gingerly supports the arm of a former songleader. 

As dinner begins, one of the organizers calls for our attention.  In a little speech he asks us to remember those of our number who have died, and also our parents and to think of them with thanks for having sent us to this school.  Succinct and effortless, without pretension.  Better than academic receptions I attended before retirement. 

It is dark when we leave.  The clusters of people standing on the lawn or seated in the white wicker chairs on the porch have vanished; the driveway is quiet.  Lights from inside the carriage house suggest lingering conversations.  The small illumined structure glows in the darkness like paintings of nighttime scenes in Japanese landscapes. In the shadows by the tall hedge I can see five or six people huddled together beneath pool house pergola.

I am tired, my conversation spent.  I want to absorb all the sensations and impressions and then spread them out before me all over again.  To stand back while the others talk and laugh, to have the afternoon linger as the sunlight fades.  To savor it bit by bit, like the concluding moments in a movie where the story has found resolution, and in slow motion the last frames seal the image in our minds. 

Months later the many close-up pictures that Dennis took now roll across my computer screen saver.  Each morning when I open my laptop I greet my classmates as we greeted one another that hot day. Again and again, I look at the faces and the smiles.  And wish them well.

The California that I left no longer pulls me back.  

And Dennis?  He met everyone---not with me, of course, but on his own. Now he’s looking forward to the next one.  Besides, he’d like to talk more to Wally about that cannon. It’s a Civil War replica and Wally fires it---minus the cannon ball---on special occasions.   

Read more essays like this one at in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

. 

Turning 60

For Jan at 60

Round and full

complete in itself

Eternal.

At the top of a column

you climb and climb---a decade’s worth of years

then pause

at rest in the equilibrium of a perfect number:

a year of evenness and self-sufficiency.

Moving down the column (although up in numbers)

even at midway---it’s nothing, really,

not very far from the top.

But then close, close come those latter years that crush together

and I forget which one; I am just older until

another symmetry is attained, again a cause for celebration.

Now on the right hand of the ranks,

Columns approaching the edge of the ledger

March toward a double perfection, entirely theoretical.  

November 14, 2009
at Steady Eddy’s
Flint, Michigan