Road Trip: One Amazing Thing

I started writing a post titled “Human beings do amazing things,” and I was telling you all about the amazing things encountered on this trip: art, museum exhibits, architecture, theater, food. But there was just too much. It got boring: This great thing, that great thing, oh and another great thing.

So I’m just going to tell you about one thing. Who knew that the Gettysburg Museum & Visitor Center would float to the top of my list?

I had my qualms about the whole stop in Gettysburg, thinking it might be a chronicle of this general and that battle and those maneuvers. I’m tired of the militarization of American history; our chapters go from war to war: Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, World War I, etc etc. What if instead our chapters went from invention to invention or economy to economy, peace to peace? What would things look like if most of our monuments were all about peacekeepers, good Samaritans, educators, farmers?

There were 51,000 casualties in three days at Gettysburg. This is no victory celebration site; this is a cemetery. By the end, the Civil War killed more Americans than any other war: 620,000 people.

Gettysburg is a museum of War – of the toll it takes

of the people who die

of the people who have to bury them

of the equipment they have to carry

of the equipment they don’t have

of the heat

of their heavy uniforms

of the photographers and journalists who witness their deaths

of the weight of decisions to make and mistakes that are made

of canteens collected and water not found

of regret and despair

of the whims of chance and who had the higher ground and who they couldn’t see in the dark

of medics and disease and amputations

 

of the women left behind and the families splintered.

of freedom fought for and yet freedom undelivered.

It’s all arranged chronologically, by the three days of the battle. We walk those three days. It’s a brilliantly designed museum. We feel those three days.

Sometimes you learn things by slowly absorbing them, bit by bit. And then, every now and then, you get a direct infusion to the brain. The Gettysburg Museum is a 2 x 4 to the head and heart: War is hell; freedom is worth fighting for; equality is not done.

At the end of the museum, there’s a continuously-running film that ends with the 50-year reunion at Gettysburg. President Wilson invited white veterans of both sides, and a famous handshake between white Union and Confederate soldiers took place. Black soldiers were relegated to setting up tents and cleaning latrines.

All those dead people, and this is where we are.

I read further and the story of the racism of the 1913 centennial is even worse. In 1963, at the 100th anniversary, President Johnson gave his Gettysburg address:

“The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’”

That was in 1963, but still equality is not done.

The next day, we did the outdoor tour of Gettysburg. You can hire a guide or you can follow along in your car and listen to Ranger Gwinn describe the sites on your smart phone.

Little light interlude because this is all so heavy:

I was very happy because Ranger Gwinn does a wonderful job at each site, but mostly: I got make-your-own waffles for breakfast! All through this trip, the hotel breakfasts have been reduced to grab-and-go breakfasts because of Covid. I love make-your-own waffles, but I have only been able to stare longingly at the dormant waffle makers. Not in Gettysburg! Waffles for breakfast!

We went on to Washington, D.C, where white flags at the Washington Monument memorialize American Covid deaths – 700,327 when we were there. As far as the eye could see. We’d passed the Civil War milestone.

No, Gettysburg was not a depressing element of our trip, but it was thoughtful, sobering, and unforgettable.

Eager for the Revolution

I’m apologizing in advance. This post is about Me, in a time when Me needs to shut up and let others do the talking. But if my voice can add volume to the uproar and support to the weary, here I go.

I’m in my Third Third, and I have been waiting for the revolution since 1968. Or maybe it was 1964 when the three Freedom Riders were killed in Mississippi. I was sure it would happen in 1968 as assassination after assassination shook us to our core. I thought once you get horrified, once you SEE; you fix things.

But with every single new outrage – and we have had lots of outrages since 1964 – I thought, “This is SO HORRIFIC, so INHUMANE, this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back. This will spark the change.”

But it just kept on happening. Last week, I would have just chronicled all my furies, thrown my rage and MAD CAPITALIZATION around, and succumbed to the despair that nothing changes, injustice wins, hope is lost, racism is forever. I wasn’t going to see it end in my lifetime. That’s what I was going to say.

But maybe, maybe, this is a bit different. (Can it be? Can it be?) Maybe, maybe, eyes are opening. (Can it be? Can it be?) Maybe, maybe people are willing to see – can’t avoid seeing? – that racism is poisoning our society. That people of color have had to walk a much harder and more dangerous life. A MUCH harder and way more dangerous life.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, America was “appalled” at the poverty exposed. Mostly white police blocked an escape route out for the mostly black refugees; they didn’t want them in their suburb. It took a recent book to expose the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cells were used to develop a polio vaccine, advances in medicine, potential anti-cancer drugs … making lots of money for pharmaceutical companies but her family can’t even afford health insurance. And people are only now noticing that people of color receive unequal health services because they’re over-represented in Covid-19 cases? Only now??? 

Uh, oh. My optimism is precarious; it’s starting to give way. I wake up and tell Tim I’ve had another angry dream. He looks at me, “And that’s a surprise?” I want Martin Luther King’s dream, dammit!

Unarmed Eric Garner can’t breathe in New York in 2014, but unarmed George Floyd still can’t breathe and is murdered in Minneapolis in 2020. In between, there were unarmed Michael Brown and unarmed Freddie Gray and too many others. Can this be any clearer?

But to me, the thing that really shows the ugliness and racism that lurks and poisons is Amy Cooper. A regular white woman who doesn’t want to put her dog on a leash in a park KNOWS that she can call the police and shout “African American man” and get results. She can scare the shit out of him and potentially get him arrested or killed.

Isn’t that just the ugly truth of our society?

In 1964, people died trying to help black Americans vote. In 2020, Republicans decide people should die voting in Wisconsin. In 1965, police broke up a peaceful march in Selma with nightsticks and tear gas. In 2020, police tear-gassed a peaceful protest in Washington, D.C. so the President could get a photo op with a Bible in front of a church. In our third thirds, we’ve witnessed the sheer tenacity of injustice. It’s the story of our lives.

Can I even face getting my hopes up again?

White men with automatic rifles stand in front of the Michigan state Capitol; no police break up their protest. Yet African American protesters carrying signs and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” get tear-gassed. Journalists with visible microphones and cameras are deliberately attacked.

No wonder people are angry! I’ve been waiting decades to see justice done, to see racism faced, to see privilege acknowledged, to see wrongs righted … and I haven’t even been paying that price. A whole host of our population has been waiting – and paying the price – for hundreds of years. I’m angry that this is the world we’re giving our children.

This America that we value is just a popular and enduring myth. It’s only aspirational until – finally – we face ourselves and our institutions and make it a reality. Is this the time? Is it finally NOW? Finally? In our lifetimes?

We have work to do.

Monopoly of the Third Third

Did your Monopoly game have wooden houses and hotels or plastic ones? And are they green and red?

Did your Monopoly have a cannon as a token piece to move around the board? Or an iron? A wheelbarrow? A thimble? And pewter ones, not golden?

Did your Monopoly have yellow Community Chest cards? Were Mediterranean and Baltic purple?

Alas, the Monopoly of our First Third is no more, and not just because of all those variations (Boston-opoly, Big Bang Theory Monopoly, National Parks Monopoly, etc etc etc). Not only is Monopoly now cashless – with plastic debit cards! – but the newest involves voice banking. You press your token’s button and say, “Buy Park Place,” and your bank account is adjusted.

So, I asked, “How do kids learn how to make change without paper money?”

No one uses cash anymore? Oh.

One sister may have the Monopoly game we grew up with, but the box fell apart after all the masking tape holding it together dried up and fell off. Now it’s somewhere in a giant Macy’s gift box.

My Monopoly is a “deluxe” edition: my tokens are golden-colored and I have a steam locomotive, but my houses and hotels are still wooden. I think I requested it as a birthday present one year, but it suffered from two-on-one-itis and fell out of favor. (two-on-one-itis: when the other two greedy, cackling players gang up, make a deal, and leave you with nothing but going round and round until eventual bankruptcy).

During my month in London, I discovered a whole museum exhibition on board games. Monopoly was created in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as The Landlord’s Game and was designed to illustrate the evils of exploitative landowners (yes, the ones who cackle when you land on their property). It was produced in the U.S. beginning in 1935.

More recently, my friend Steve blogged about playing Monopoly with his granddaughter, and he discovered the cashless version. So that’s what sparked my latest Monopoly investigations.

For example, during World War II, MI6 made a special Monopoly for POWs held by the Nazis. It had maps and compasses and real money hidden inside to help with escape attempts. Wow! And Neiman Marcus once sold a completely chocolate Monopoly – even chocolate money and deeds – for $600.

You can really go down an Internet rabbit hole about Monopoly: “speed dies” and documentaries, world championships and strategic analyses of which properties to buy. Even Monopoly metaphors: Don’t we all know what a “Get Out of Jail Free card” means? Or “Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” It’s part of our language.

I once thought the most drastic change to Monopoly was when I first played with friends and they did that Free Parking jackpot thing: all the tax revenues get put there for the lucky lander. Well, the Free Parking jackpot has nothing on these variations:

• Collecting $2 million at GO, not $200
• Airports instead of railroads
• Houses, hotels – and skyscrapers
• Buying brands (not properties) 

I guess if you’ve been around since 1935 – not us! – you need a few makeovers now and then. Think of it this way: Monopoly is actually a great Third Third role model, creatively reinventing itself over and over again.

Yes, but the Monopoly my Third Third remembers will always be that Monopoly of my First Third. And yours?

It's MY Body

My grandmother was left to die on an illegal abortionist’s table. She pulled herself up, dragged herself home, and raised her five kids.

It was the Depression, and she couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. Eventually, my grandfather left her, and she raised the five kids. She’d also marched down Fifth Avenue as a Bloomer Girl for the vote for women. She is the matriarch of our family, and my daughter is named for her.

When I told this story to a long-ago boyfriend, he was shocked. Then his grandmother spoke up, “I had an abortion, too. How do you think I kept from having too many children?”

So how do we think women made do before effective birth control? How do we think they made sure their already-born children had enough to eat? Did you ask your grandmothers? Those women did what they had to do to raise that Greatest Generation, and they had abortions.

I know women who, after being fitted professionally for cervical caps, became pregnant. I know women who consented to abortion should in vitro fertilization yield multiple embryos. I know women who were told they were carrying fetuses with genetic abnormalities. I know women who became pregnant in college and would lose scholarships if they had to leave school. I even know a girl pregnant by her father.

These women – all these women, all of us – had control of our own bodies and had a legal option: abortion.

We women in our Third Third know these stories; we know that legal abortion saves lives – the lives women want to have that an unplanned pregnancy would disrupt.

I’ll say that again:

I’m going to stop here before I march down my fury road. I’m going to stop here before I go on about poorly-funded budgets to work with hungry children, abused children, and homeless children. Before I go on about slaps on the wrists for rapists, for unfunded birth control, for de-funded childcare.

I’m stopping here just to stick with that one thought: many of us have the lives we have because brave and desperate grandmothers or mothers faced illegal abortionists so there’d be enough food in the mouths of their children.

The lives I want to save are the potential lives of the young women with dreams. Dreams to go to school, dreams to get out of an abusive relationship, dreams for their futures. Who is anyone to say they deserve less, that their lives get deferred?

So some law wants to force a vulnerable 14-year-old to a nine-month sentence of prolonged occupation of her body while rapists are still getting slaps on the wrist? These are the same people who covered Viagra with health insurance, but not birth control. These are the same people who want to eliminate maternity care from lower-cost health insurance.

I know people who stretch poorly-funded budgets to work with hungry children, abused children, and homeless children. Low-income women have to find jobs, but childcare is de-funded. I know people who work with rape survivors, women suffering domestic violence, women sold into sexual slavery. Indigenous women just “disappear,” rape kits get lost, and yet the big issue is what’s in a woman’s uterus? My own uterus – which is no business of yours.

As I march down my fury road, I start inventing scenarios. I imagine some rich and powerful guy – maybe a legislator or a judge – a guy who “can do anything” – having an extramarital affair. Many of them do. What would he do if that other woman got pregnant? I am pretty sure he’d locate a quiet and confidential abortionist. What do you think?

I am in my Third Third and pregnancy fears are long behind me, but they’re always present for a new generation of women. I am in my Third Third, and I cannot believe women still have to argue for control of our own bodies. I am in my Third Third and this is my body.

These are dangerous times, and I’m marching down my fury road because abortions save lives.

Discard Remorse

Yes, my de-cluttering went too far. I went back into the recycling bin and pulled stuff out.

It was the letters. No, not just the letters – it was the memories reflected in the letters.

I’ve talked about the easy stages of de-cluttering: the broken, the junk, the never-used.  When I first started this blog, I was big into tossing. I was just off clearing out my mother’s house and fifty years of accumulation. Dealing with too much stuff has led to more tossing.

But in this latest binge, I uncovered two shoeboxes of letters from 1985 (when I moved to Alaska) till 1993 or so. (I think that’s when email took over and letter exchange diminished drastically.) I spent hours going through those letters, loving every minute of my trip down memory lane. And then I put them in the recycling bin.

I thought, “If I haven’t looked at them in 25+ years, by the next time I look at them, I’ll have dementia and won’t know who any of these people are.” I was thinking of my mother. When she was 84, she took great pleasure in letters from her cousin written when he was overseas during World War II. But by the time she was 91, things like that were distressing because she didn’t remember a lot of it.

But that night, I emailed my friend Janet and quoted a bit from a letter she’d written me. It brought back a flood of memories, and Janet replied right away to my email, saying that she’d loved it, too. We both sat, a thousand miles away, grateful for our history together. How could that happen if I’d thrown them all away?

When I was eight years old, we moved from New Jersey to Long Island. My friend Karen and I were devoted pen pals, as she moved on to Illinois. We met up again once in Colorado when we were in our 20s. I’ve tried finding her since then without luck. But spurred on by these letters, I tried again that night and found her online! We’re emailing again!

My friend Rodney died in 2008, and I loved reading every letter he’d written. But this time, I saw that I’d always appeared in his holiday letters:

“As I have for all Thanksgivings since my friend Barbara moved to Alaska (she always invited a bunch of friends over to eat and I got to make and take sweet potato pie), I went to Lake Tahoe.”

I thought of Rodney and his sweet potato pie, and I missed him. I hadn’t realized he didn’t have Thanksgiving dinners any more. I wished I could spend one more Thanksgiving with him.

I didn’t realize my friend Sharon – who I’ll see in a couple weeks – was by far my most prolific correspondent, and we shared a lot. But then I read of a disagreement we’d had, how she was upset with me, how we processed that out. I don’t even remember it, but I see how we worked it out, how our friendship continued, how it survived and thrived.

And then there are the letters from my mother. Most of my mother’s correspondence were notes, quick typing while she was at work, sending on some package or information and adding in a note. But then there was this:

“I’m reading Marilyn French’s “Her Mother’s Daughter.” If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a “must”! Explains – no, doesn’t explain, just makes me aware of all my frustrations over the years, yours, too – and how we see things so-o-o-o differently – and then just getting older makes certain realizations clearer – She’s not ‘easy’ reading – but she’s certainly thought provoking – READ IT! Particularly pg. 290-295. Interesting.”

I’m sure when I received that in 1988, I read it and put it aside while I was busy with work and life. But not in 2018. In 2018, I was blown away at this window into my mother. I immediately put the book on hold at the library and am working my way to page 290. When I get there, I’ll wish I could talk with my mother about it.

The greeting cards are still in recycling, as are the letters from acquaintances I already can’t remember. But the letters from friends, from family, they’re back in a special box.

There’s such a thing as premature de-cluttering. I’d written before that “while you’re still remembering and laughing, this is not the time to toss,” and Betsey commented “I think I’d keep it forever.” Forever it is.

I am who I am because of Vietnam

I cried in public. Worse: I cried while speaking publicly. It surprised me. Why? Because I was crying over the Vietnam War.

It was only the second time I’d cried speaking in public. The first was at Sophie’s bat mitzvah, and I blubbered so badly I served as the benchmark Worst Crying Mother for many years of bar and bat mitzvah kids. But that moment was intensely personal, a life cycle milestone, a sense of time passing, and a sense of family history. A sense of optimism and loss, hopes and dreams.

And so, actually, was Vietnam.

We were all gathered to watch the opening excerpts of Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War for public television. The speaker opened by asking the military members of the audience to stand, asking the Vietnam veterans to stand, asking those touched by veterans to stand. And then the program began.

There it was on the big screen, the same horrors in the jungle that had been on the T.V. news every night. Plus the things that had not been on the T.V. screen; the deceit and lies our government had told us that only came out afterwards. There were the marches, the protests, Kent State, the moratorium. There were interviews with Vietnamese people, with families whose sons never came home.

If you’re in your Third Third, you lived it, too. It was the most formative event of our First Third.

And when I rose to speak to the audience, I choked. It was incredibly embarrassing. Apparently, I still hadn’t recovered. Have any of us?

Because, I felt, we all needed to stand, not just the soldiers. The protesters, the people from Southeast Asia, the people still dying of land mines in Cambodia. The families split by the “generation gap.” The people who lost faith in government; the people who lost faith in generals. We were all injured by Vietnam.

When I was in London, I realized that war really happened there. Bombs fell, houses were destroyed, food was rationed. Whether you were on the front lines or on civilian rescue patrol, the war touched you.

Vietnam touched us. All of us. Bombs didn’t land on our homes, but they detonated in our lives.

I still have my black armband from the moratorium. I still remember watching the T.V., hoping my brother’s birth date wouldn’t be drawn “low” in the draft lottery. I still remember fights between “love it or leave its” and “peaceniks” right in our living room.

I still remember raising bail money for protesters, writing an essay for a friend’s conscientious objector application. I still remember my mother’s Another Mother for Peace stationery.

Later, I encountered returning vets, friends who’d gone to jail, men who came back from Canada. I visited the Vietnam Memorial. All I could see were the brothers and sons that never came home, and the broken, broken ones that did.

Many years later, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, I was astonished. I thought we’d all learned that lesson from Vietnam, that we didn’t mess with unwinnable wars. Even further, that we didn’t solve problems with bombs. And now, nearly 15 years later, we’re still recovering from that decision, from a government that lied to us about that, too.

But it’s different now. We can practically ignore this war. We have so many news channels, we can switch when the war comes on. We don’t see the same images; the war isn’t fought in our living room. Without a draft, we can safeguard our brothers and sons because “someone else” will do the fighting. As one friend put it, the news is about new prosthetics, not about whether we should be sending soldiers to be injured.

And yet, they’re still getting injured. They’re still dying. Families and hearts are being broken. Civilians are dying. Gains made are lost, “winning” is a meaningless concept. “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.”

There are just so many reasons why I cried in public over the Vietnam War.

Did you Duck and Cover?

If you’re in your Third Third, you know what “Duck and Cover” means. Maybe you hid under your desk at school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe you thought your father should build a bomb shelter in the backyard. And you certainly know what “Cold War” means.

Our trip through South Dakota included a thought-provoking counterpoint to all the natural beauty – the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site – with the potential to destroy it all. The wonderful visitor center took us through the Cold War and the arms race, mutually assured destruction, and ultimately, arms reduction.

You can see the visitor center; it’s above ground. Delta-01 Launch Control Facility and Delta-09 missile silo are mostly underground. Delta-01 is where the two missileers worked on 24-hour alert duty shifts, ready to launch ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) in the event of nuclear attack.

I thought of that word missileer. It sounded like Disney’s imagineer so at first I just didn’t feel the heaviness of it. It seemed creative, musical even. But the exhibit took us through the psychological pressures, about what it would take to be trained to “press the button.”

There were photos of little kids under their desks at school. Little kids wearing the dresses and hairstyles we wore in the early ’60s. They looked just like us. I still remember my Weekly Reader emphasizing that Florida was just 90 miles away from Cuba. My friend Denise grew up in North Dakota knowing they were a big X on the USSR missile map.

At the height of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had more than 10,000 nuclear warheads. The exhibit takes us through the build-up and the reduction. Acronyms like SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) suddenly make sense on a timeline.

And then we get to the last room, the one describing “the man who saved the world,” Stanislav Petrov. Petrov was the duty officer in the USSR on September 26, 1983 when alerts went off that five missiles were headed to the Soviet Union. He made the crucial decision not to alert his superiors, guessing that if the strike were real, the U.S. would have sent more than five missiles.

The tension he endured was immense. He guessed; we all won.

Apparently, a movie was made about this in 2015. I’m trying to get it on interlibrary loan. September 26 is Petrov Day: “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.”

That last panel goes on to describe other false alarms: one where a training tape of a Soviet invasion was mistakenly inserted into the early-warning computer, another where a Norwegian rocket on a scientific mission to study the aurora was mistaken for a missile.

These were equipment mistakes, technological errors; they can happen any time. But the humans staffing the machines have to be able to stay calm and process the evidence rationally. Always it comes down to the one person who might be the one who “saves the world.”

Many times in my life I’ve explored what it takes to make peace as opposed to making war. This exhibit put another layer on it: how do we train people to refrain from pushing buttons, to pause, to consider? Because so far, the only time the world was saved was when a button wasn’t pressed.

Bombs Fell Here

War happened here. You can’t spend an hour in London without knowing that bombs fell here, that World War II was very up close and personal. People tell you that newer buildings mean that the previous buildings were bombed out. Over dinner, someone mentions that the house next door was bombed out. Henry Moore’s drawings of crowds of people camped out in Tube stations are on display in several museums. Sixty percent of London homes were bombed out during the Blitz.

I was invited to a lovely Passover dinner in the home of a London rabbi. I sat next to Gabriela, who told me of her family’s escape from Germany in the nick of time. In a car ride home, I listened to Wanda tell me of her family’s escape from Milan.

On a tour of Farringdon, a neighborhood in London, the tour guide pointed out which blocks were destroyed. There are maps showing which bomb fell on which house on which date. He pointed out where the market was, that casualties were high because housewives had received notice that a supply of rabbits had come in for meat. He told us the difference between the V-1 and V-2 rockets; you could hear the V-1 Doodlebug, but the V-2 was silent. You would hope you could keep hearing the Doodlebug because if it stopped over you, that meant it was falling.

Everywhere, there are war memorials, big, stone monuments to valor and courage and tenacity. We have those in the United States, too. But other than Pearl Harbor and the Aleutians, war did not land on our soil in the 20th century. (Although I think I might count New York City.) That makes a difference.

We did not hide in Anderson shelters or Tube stations; we didn’t listen for the buzzing of Doodlebugs. We didn’t clean up rubble afterwards or overload our hospitals. And if we did, it didn’t permeate our national consciousness. Here in London, at first they didn’t let people camp in the Tube stations; they thought it would lead to a “deep shelter mentality” with people refusing to come back out.

In the United States, our government didn’t have to consider what to do if Americans became so scared they would be afraid to come out. War wasn’t on our soil. We haven’t known the invasiveness of this fear, the way it would pervade daily life.

Jane Churchill created an art exhibit here titled Echoes Across the Century, and I’ve gone back to it several times (once to meet her!). With the exhibit – and the help of 240 school children and their art – Jane ties together the experience of soldiers, families, and the workers on the home front who supplied them. We follow a fiancée (Jessie) as she mounts her moth collection and remarks on the “…thousands of men pinned forever to the map of France like moths pinned lifeless in boxes, unable to fly again.” We follow the makers of eyeglasses who began to issue spectacles to recruits because the Army could no longer reject soldiers with poor eyesight. And the students imagine what those soldiers see with their mind’s eye.

Jessie created lachrymatoria – tiny bottles filled with her tears – describing each memory she had of Will. We don’t know what of the exhibit is real and what is imagined – intentionally. Did Jessie make the bottles, or did the artist? Or did the students? It doesn’t matter: all of it rings true and all of it hurts. Fear and loss are very real, and everywhere we see and feel what happens when a whole country – all its people, sectors, laborers – are part of that experience every day.

I went to the movies and saw Their Finest; bombs fall on homes and people camp in Tube stations. Of course, I think, being here has readied me to watch this movie. The tours, the conversations, the exhibits have prepared me.

In the U.S., war happens to the unlucky few and their families. It’s something “somewhere else” to “someone else.” It occurs to me here in London that we Americans need to remember that. We need to understand our different feelings about War and Allies and Treaties and Protection. And always, we need to thank our lucky stars.

London with Someone Who Knows Where He's Going

Quite a while back, when Gene and I worked together at Out North, I always felt like he knew everything there was to know about theater. Not only did he know the stage part, but he taught me things about ticket numbering, about backstage, about fund raising, you name it.

Now, visiting him in London, I see that Gene just knows A LOT, period. I also see that his heart of gold is still intact. Not only did he send me all sorts of helpful stuff beforehand in a big envelope, but he gave me an outing in London that becomes the perfect example of London-with-a-capital-L. (You can contrast this with the next post, which will be the story of a bumbling day with Barbara.)

We started out at the Borough Tube station. (Gene knew to pick that because it has only one entrance so I couldn’t get lost.) We then walked down the street. He was going to take me into the oldest pub in London, the George Inn, but it turned out a film shoot was happening inside. It was a gangster film, and the gangster actors were hanging out, waiting for their entrance.

We circled around Guy’s Hospital, and Gene always found little nooks and crannies. At the hospital is a courtyard with a statue of John Keats sitting in a little stone nook and looking so poetical.

On the wall nearby, a blue oval (the sign that means something historical happened here) featured Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher bane of my year in graduate school. Wittgenstein was a drug runner!

“Goosey goosey gander,

Whither shall I wander?

Upstairs and downstairs

And in my lady's chamber.”

Gene took me to the Cross Bones Graveyard, for the “Outcast Dead.” Apparently, the prostitutes south of the Thames would signal their availability while waving and wearing white gloves. The gloves – arms hooked at the wrists – looked like geese, and these “Winchester Geese” were buried in unconsecrated ground, now decorated with ribbons of remembrance.

The rest of the rhyme speaks to the rounding up of Catholic priests by the Protestants, so we also stopped by the Anglican Bishop of Winchester’s palace as well as his private prison, “The Clink.”

“There I met an old man

Who wouldn't say his prayers,

So I took him by his left leg

And threw him down the stairs.”

Walking by the Desmond Tutu Room in Southwark Cathedral, we came upon double doors. Written in large letters on the floor:

Near the Cathedral, a large plaque describes the Legend of Mary Overie: Her father, a terrible miser, faked his death so his servants would fast for a day and save money on food. The servants were so happy, they feasted instead, which so enraged her father, he jumped up. The servants, thinking he was the Devil, beat him to death. Mary was so upset, she sent for her lover, who rushed to claim the inheritance, fell from his horse, and broke his neck.

Yes, this is the kind of story appearing on a historical plaque.

Mary, by the way, was so distressed, she used the inheritance to found a convent and was sainted.

Modern London is just as … irreverent. Their skyline, in order, is the Cheese Grater, the Gherkin, and the Walkie Talkie.

We went in a cheese-monger shop where giant cylinders of cheese were on racks and we could taste them by age. The Borough Market was an astounding feast of produce, jams, olive oils, teas, cheese, ciders, spices, fish, breads. It was an incredible display of raw abundance, a Costco of the homemade!

Every now and then, we’d wander (deliberately, because Gene knows where they are) into a little hidden gem of a park, a place with a pond or walk that was so quiet you wouldn’t know you were in the middle of London. It’s something so smart about London, creating quiet spaces. I think of how Anchorage’s parks are active spaces, and I appreciate the quiet oases here.

Then, of course, I had to sit in the Ferryman’s Seat, an ancient stone seat embedded in a wall in Southwark. The ferryman would sit there and wait for his fares. In reading Prophecy, the Cityread London book, they mention hiring wherries to go up and down the Thames, so it’s all starting to fit together!

After five hours on the trail of London’s history with Gene, we crossed to Trafalgar Square via the very special crossing lights:

Gene deposited me exactly on time at the National Gallery for my workshop, “Relaxing with Paintings,” for Slow Art Day. It was a brilliantly orchestrated day … to be contrasted with the stumbling serendipities I encounter on my own. Only later did Gene tell me that a few minutes after I entered the Gallery, a helicopter landed in nearby Trafalgar Square to medevac out a woman who got hit by a bus. I bet she was a tourist, I bet she forgot to look right, and I’m glad her injuries are non-life-threatening.

I never cross a street without looking both ways, multiple times, and only moving when someone else steps out, too.

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #2

Two hours into the Chilkoot Trail, we stopped for a snack break. I sat in a lovely spot under a tree … in a pool of sap. My pants were a sticky mess, soaking through to my underwear. When I pulled them down to go to the bathroom, it tore from my skin like duct tape. For the rest of the trip, I carried bits of the Trail with me, stuck to my pants.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was a “funny anecdote.”

The river had reached flood stage and the ranger warned us at the outset that waters were waist high. Fortunately, by the time we got to the worst part, the river had crested and people had laid out planks of wood to traverse the miles-long swamp. We had to climb over rickety debris to figure out the next path through the muck, tilting and turning, stretching to reach the next foothold. One false step and we’d be soaked and filthy.

This was not a problem on the Trail. This was an adventure. We called it the “jungle gym.”

The last thing on my to-do list before going was to sew and secure the buckle on my backpack. I didn’t get to it. After stopping at our first camp, Gwen approached me with a found buckle: mine! The trip would have been impossible without it.

This was a potential problem on the Trail that didn’t materialize.

The Trail includes a long suspension bridge. My fear of heights rose up and lodged in my throat. The bridge swayed, the slats looked rickety, the river below roared. I had to keep moving and force my way forward. Somewhere in the middle, I thought I’d throw up, but then I’d have to lean over the side or look through the slats. I made it over. I have steely resolve, after all.

This was a problem that foreshadowed a far bigger problem: the Golden Stairs.

When I'd looked at the pictures of the stampeders going over the Golden Stairs in winter, all lined up, it didn’t look bad: they were standing on two legs, there were a lot of them in a line. That’s winter, when 1,500 steps were cut in the snow. This is summer, when there are only boulders up the steep, 35-to-45-degree slope with orange wands planted intermittently so you can find your way.

This is what you have to do to climb the Golden Stairs: you reach up with your hand and find a stable boulder that holds its position. You search your feet around to find supports for them. You look ahead for the wand. Sometimes your head can’t lift because a jutting boulder blocks your pack; you have to reposition with a shifting 37-pound pack on your back. At all costs, you DO NOT look down. Your whole world is just your next step: choose a rock, test it, step up, fight off fear, don’t look down. Choose a rock, test it, fight off fear.

Hysteria nipped at my psyche. By then, I knew I was nimble and strong. On any other rocks, I would be scrambling like a monkey, sure-footed in my trusty, beloved new boots, but here I was high up on a steep slope.

I made it to the first false summit. There are three. It levels off for a bit so I calmed because now I couldn’t fall the whole way down anymore. Then it started raining. Then I became trapped behind a guide and an extremely fearful, slow-moving woman. Then the wind picked up.

The summit is less than halfway on that day’s hike, and there’s a hut at the top. I’m sure I read something once about a ranger there, about hot chocolate. It turned out to be a freezing closet that could barely hold eight people. When my teeth started chattering, I knew I had to get going. The next camp is four miles away over more difficult rock scrambling; shifting, eroding paths on the steep edges of water; hazardous creeks and icy snowfields to negotiate; yes, beautiful wildflowers and waterfalls.

It took 11 hours to go the eight miles from Sheep Camp to Happy Camp.

I walked into Happy Camp and two women offered me hot tea. “Do you have a cup?”

I stared. Cup?

“Here, use our bowl.”

After three bowls, I set up the tent in the pouring rain. Later, when Barbara and I were lying in the tent, she asked, “What exactly was the point?”

Tomorrow, the point. Or not.

Lessons of the Chilkoot Trail #1

Before I left for the Chilkoot Trail, friends described it to me as four days of hiking and one arduous day for the ascent of the Golden Stairs. At the end of the trip, Lee said in order to understand arduous, you’d have to re-think hard as if it were easy. Personally, I prefer grueling, but because it also involved fear, I’d add harrowing.

You can tell this whole experience is going to require some processing as I write about it. The lessons I took away – things I learned about myself – are multi-layered.

We were six women ages 60 to 70, and every one of us made it through safely and without mishap. I shared a tent with another Barbara, who regaled me with her summations of each day. At the end of the trip, Barbara said that when people will congratulate her for finishing, she’ll say, “It was the trip of a lifetime. Let me tell you all about it so you won’t have to do it.” The bottom line: if I were to advise visitors to Alaska, I would NOT send them on the Chilkoot Trail. I wouldn’t send myself.

Around this point, Cheryl would shout at our tent, “Stop introspecting! It was a great hike! I’ll come back in a couple of years and do it again.” And if you’re Cheryl – the only one of us who’d done it before – TWICE before – you’d be an energetic spark plug who simply loves the movement, the activity, the effort, the terrain, the rocks, the creeks, the sheer adventure of it all. There is no doubt that Cheryl thrives on this, and it was a pleasure and inspiration to hike with her.

What I love about backpacking:

• I love being in air that has not sat inside walls. I love the freshness and openness.
• I love having all that I need contained on my back.
• I love the simplicity of living minimally, wearing the same clothes for five days, not brushing my hair, having no chores outside of the ones on the trail.
• I love not being reachable by the outside world.
• I love sleeping in a tent where I am protected from mosquitoes and rain and feel utterly and completely safe.
• I love wildflowers, leafy foliage, babbling brooks, pretty rocks, the hugeness and awesomeness of Nature.
• I love feeling my own strength and fitness.

The Chilkoot Trail had all this plus history. Blueberries littered the bushes till it looked like blue jewels had been flung around. On one path, there were so many blue and green stones it looked like a blue Yellow Brick Road. Creeks and waterfalls and lakes just sparkled. Forests were magical, with rock punctuating every landscape. Dubbed the longest museum, rusty artifacts from the Klondike stampeders littered the path. The terrain was varied, shifting from rock to water to spruce to snow and back again, and it was exciting to follow a trail with cairns, steps cut into stone, and an improvised “jungle gym” (more about that later).

Before the trip, I was worried about my physical stamina. I didn’t know if I could DO IT – travel the 33 miles uphill with a 37-pound pack on my back. Within five minutes, I knew that was no problem. I literally scampered along the trail.

Lesson Learned #1: I am fit, powerful, and strong. I have physical strength and stamina as a product of the way I live and exercise. I can lay that question to rest. I don’t need to test myself on that anymore.

Before the trip, I prepared. I measured what I ate on camping trips, registering what amounts left me full and satisfied. I figured out how to package things so they’d be easy to pull out meal by meal. Because all trash has to be packed out on the Chilkoot, I minimized waste and packaging. I experimented and figured out how to keep my Wheat Thins unbroken and unsoggy! I took Tim’s sleeping bag to save 10 ounces, borrowed Mary’s tent and Thermarest because they were lighter.

I could do all this because Joan handled all the paperwork: registration for the Trail, permits for our campgrounds, hotel reservations before and after, train tickets for the return – even lunch on the train! She is a logistical wonder.

Lesson Learned #2: I am a diligent preparer. Not overly familiar with backpacking, I asked advice, aimed for minimizing weight, maximizing convenience and taste, and it worked! I came back with only eight ounces of a spare meal.

Lesson Learned #3: I have steely resolve. At the end of the Trail, when Joan described our state as being “depleted,” we realized that if we suddenly had to hike five more miles, we’d do it. We do what has to be done. Period. We six women are six tough cookies. On the trail – in life – we do what has to be done. Period. We may have known this before, but the Chilkoot Trail reaffirmed it.

All these valuable lessons, with beautiful Nature – what wasn’t pleasant? What lesson did I learn that means I don’t need any more Chilkoot Trails in my life?

That’s tomorrow.

Building – and Keeping – Traditions

Oh, I love New Things, but Old Things hold such comfort and warmth. Here in Alaska, far from our original hometowns, we’ve had to create our own traditions: our own Thanksgivings, New Year’s Eves, Passover seders.

Let me tell you how much I love Passover! In telling the story of the exodus from Egypt, we tell a story of slavery and freedom, injustice and social conscience. We do this while sharing a meal and enjoying each other’s company. It’s a thousands-years old tradition, but for us, now in our Third Thirds, our version is almost thirty years old, too.

We tend to alternate Thanksgiving with Bob and Connie so this year, Tim and I got the seder. This means that I got to pick the haggadah, the book we use to proceed through the rituals, engage our kids, and give meaning to the holiday.

I pull out my huge collection of haggadot and that’s where I see the years of accumulated Passovers. My very first: a faded, yellowed one on newsprint, the one we used back on Long Island, the free one from Chase and Sanborn Coffees. Mine has a post-it note on it, “Love, Mom.”

Then I have the college haggadot from Liberation Seders. Each year, we’d focus on another population that needed both freedom and our attention; One year, gays and lesbians, another year Ethiopian Jews. I had lots of them so they were the ones we first used in Alaska. This year, my new additions focused on refugees.

I remember that first seder in Alaska. Gathered together were maybe a dozen of us who’d all grown up with our own family’s Passover. We all thought that’s how seders had to be done, and then we encountered … deviation. “No, you’re not allowed to eat until we finish.” “My family always let us eat.” Sacrilege!

Mark reminded us about the time he’d been assigned matzoh ball soup. He’d had no idea what he was doing so he just got some matzoh and kind of broke them up and kind of stuck them in canned chicken broth and kind of made a mess of the whole thing. This year, he brought Brussels sprouts. Marla did the soup.

There are years of tradition in the charoset, the mixture of apples, walnuts, wine, honey, and cinnamon. One year someone introduced Sephardic charoset with dried fruit, different spices. One year, a newbie didn’t grate the apples or chop the nuts: it was like a chunky salad, not like the mortar it’s supposed to represent. And then, because one of the kids had a nut allergy, we offered a non-nut version.

Kids changed the Passovers over the years. Kids meant the introduction of the shorter haggadot, the ones with pretty graphics, the ones that didn’t take hours.

As we sat at this year’s seder, with Rebekah the youngest and so the one who had to ask the Four Questions, we looked around. Yes, there had been a time when Tim was the youngest. Max and Sophie used to do it together, and now Max is back at the table as an adult.

There was the year Sophie and I bought little toys of the Ten Plagues: rubbery frogs, little cows, plastic bugs. Somehow, when tossed out, they stuck to the ceiling. Throughout the seder, frogs would rain down on us. It was very profound. For months afterwards, I’d find plagues in the potted plants. I hope Sophie found a seder this year, that she’s creating her own traditions.

This is what I know to be true: every year, Connie will want to make the special Passover dessert; Celia will make gefilte fish from Alaska fish (halibut or salmon). Rebekah will usually slice all the eggs with my special egg slicer. Someone will grate fresh horseradish root, and I will repeat the story of the time I grated it, sniffed it in the food processor, and passed out on the kitchen floor. Karen will remember the time, after dinner, when her dog grabbed the leftover turkey plate and ate it all. Poor _____, not a Passover goes by without someone remembering the time as a baby he projectile vomited grape juice all over the single guy at the table. Things change, and things remain the same.

This is what tradition is: the memories that hold us together.

More than the sound of music

When I wrote yesterday about all that culture in New York City, you might have noticed a glaring absence: what, no music? Well, barely any: there were two Broadway musicals, but that was just incidental. I don’t seek out music. Mostly, I actively avoid it.

I don’t know if it’s being sort of tone deaf or the ulcer I got at age 12 from piano lessons. The day I quit piano lessons – and I was pretty far along – was the last time I touched a piano.

Oh, I love the Rolling Stones and a good dance beat. I like the early Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker and Laura Nyro; and lately, I’ve been experimenting with cello performances and I enjoy them. When Sophie played the bass, I loved the deep, enveloping sound. I’m thinking of taking bass lessons. So I’m not a music-hater, more like music-reluctant.

When Grant Cochran of the Anchorage Concert Chorus asked if I’d take the part of the narrator in this week’s (tomorrow and Sunday) performances of Verdi’s Defiant Requiem, so many alarm bells went off for me: music! Classical music! Religious classical music! Catholic religious classical music! And then, because these performances highlight the Requiem in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, more alarm bells: not another Holocaust-Jewish-victimhood story again! Jews having to perform for Nazis like little puppets.

Everything said No! … so I said yes. But I was worried that with two performances AND two rehearsals it would be a struggle not to fall asleep in front of an audience.

Then my world shifted.

Wednesday night was the first rehearsal, and I am STUNNED. No, let me put it more accurately: I have FELT music, and it is TREMENDOUS!

Even the first view of the stage can knock you off your feet: 200 singers and 80 musicians! It’s the Anchorage Concert Chorus and UAA Singers, 13 music professors, Anchorage Concert Chorus orchestra and UAA Sinfonia. They’re all there!

I sit with six basses, ten cellos. There are four bassoons. Way over the sea of violins are giant drums, more trumpets. And when the singers sing, it’s no anemic, barely-heard-above-the-music singing – it’s a thunder of singing.

Murry Sidlin, the conductor who brings the Defiant Requiem around the world, clarified things. The inmates of Terezín sang the Requiem – from one copy of the score, committing it to memory – for themselves, not for the Nazis. They were nobody’s puppets. Long after they’d labored all day, mostly starving, mostly sick, they sang. They sang for an audience of mostly starving, mostly sick, mostly beaten-up fellow inmates. When one survivor says this singing gave her “pure joy” – in a concentration camp – I started to understand. This music was their creativity, their affirmation, their expression of personhood in a place that sought to deny it. It kept them alive.

When they were forced to do it for the Nazis – just once – they sang it to their faces. They sang out their courage, their being human, their having dignity and character and music. The Defiant Requiem is a story of defiance, not victimhood. It’s a story of standing up in refusal to be beaten down.

Now I get it. Music-reluctant me gets it. When the trumpets do call-and-response, when sweet sounds come from some place I can’t locate, when the voices rise up with spirit and defiance; I FEEL it. When all those basses rumble, my insides rumble. When the whole chorus erupts in song together, something inside me boils over. My whole self gasps and stands up.

Is it the music or the history? I don’t know; I’m a music novice. But I suspect they can’t be separated. I don’t know the words; all I hear is boldness and will, just like the Terezín inmates heard. Do the musicians and singers inject the spirit? Did Verdi? Do we the listeners?

Or is it just the sound of the big life force of being human?

I don't get it.

Every now and then, I encounter a New Yorker thing that I just don’t get. Sometimes it just seems odd; other times, it’s a way of living that I don’t (wouldn’t?) participate in. Take, for example, the concept of “books by the foot.”

At the Strand Bookstore:

We can assemble a great book by the foot collection for you that will satisfy the mind and please the eye. Book by the foot collections can be made to order based on color, binding, material, size, and height to match your specific style and home decor.

Who picks their reading lists by color, size, and height? Oh, I see, they’re not to be read. And Steven Spielberg is one of their clients? Oh, I see, maybe he’s doing it for movie sets. I hope so.

I also don’t think New Yorkers cook meals, but that just may be New Yorkers who live in apartments. Or maybe that’s just New Yorkers who live in Manhattan in studio apartments. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this one.

My apartment has a dishwasher. As my cousin pointed out, there’s not enough room in the cabinets to have enough dishes to even make a load. There’s not enough room in the cabinets to stock any staples. A friend of mine’s fully-equipped, high-end kitchen still has only two burners. I was in a delicatessen one evening around 5:30. Suddenly, I was swamped by people ordering a half-pound of this, a pound of that. They don’t cook, they “heat up.”

New Yorkers and their kids ride scooters, not skateboards. Kick scooters, like Razors, the ones Sophie and the Alaska kids had when they were little and which are now clearly an old, dead fad. Not in New York. That’s what they ride here. My guess: in a crowd, it’s easier to pick it up and over a curb than bending down to retrieve your skateboard with your head in everyone’s butt. But that’s only a guess.

Runners. Runners here run in thick crowds, on concrete, around obstacles, on horrible paver stones. I am a spoiled runner. The idea of running in and around LOTS of people who are not running, who are strolling or just waiting for a bus – who are wearing suits! – is beyond unappealing. I can’t even believe these runners attempt what they do – why? They’ll ruin their feet on the concrete, and what kind of meditative experience is it? But that gets to Nature and wilderness and Alaska and me, and that’s a subject for another day.

I don’t get what the trucks are doing between 2 and 5 a.m. that can possibly make THAT MUCH NOISE right in front of the apartment building. The doorman thinks they’re unloading and reloading office furniture … every night of the week. I checked … and that’s what they’re doing!

Sometimes, the thing I don’t “get” is more profound. I spent one afternoon at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. They had an exhibition on operating in crises: 9/11, the power blackout of 2003, Superstorm Sandy, etc. Going through the 9/11 photos and video testimonials was powerful. Regular subway operators described how they encountered terrified people in the Cortlandt Street Station and stopped to jam them on the train because they were so frightened. Bus drivers ferried as many people as they could out and home. Photos of New Yorkers – more than you could ever imagine – walking across the bridges trying to get home.

I was in San Francisco on 9/11 for a week’s run of my one-woman show. Flight 93 was headed to San Francisco; it was full of locals. The City was put on lockdown, the Golden Gate Bridge was closed. 9/11 felt very immediate. We all know where we were when it happened.

But I wasn’t in New York City. Ground Zero was GROUND ZERO here. Regular old people in their regular old jobs had to take on emergency duties, had to take on life-saving duties, had to conquer their own fears and step up. Had to live with what happened that day.

9/11 wasn’t TV coverage for New Yorkers. It was right here, and they had to deal with it, go to sleep to it, wake up to it, live with it. We all know the “you had to be there” feeling, the way you just can’t describe something to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 were touched in a way that I was not. I have a new and profound respect for their ability to get up, get moving, help out, face grief. I imagine they look at each other and know, in their souls, “We were here.”

I wasn’t.