LIFE – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Big Birthday Memory #2: Home and Heartache

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from December 4, 2006.

Yeah, we’re home – and as usual it’s like walking into an electric fan. We landed, unpacked, did laundry, slept (until 3AM) then Rick went back to the airport for a fund-raising trip to California. I’m working on several major projects and wanting to organize for when the boys come home for the holidays. Grocery lists and activity planning in addition to many hours of business obligations.

Lots on my mind. Today a friend told me about the last conversation she had with her father and I was ambushed by a deluge of memories. It’s tough to come to terms with the loss of a parent. Both of mine have been gone for years and there isn’t a day I don’t think of them — and, often, wish I could ask them something – or tell them something — or just feel their love again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time and it surprised me. I just wasn’t expecting the intensity.

I once sent my dad the lyrics to a Judy Collins song about her father. It’s a wonderful evocation of the love between fathers and daughters and the bitter-sweet realization that one’s life will exceed that of a beloved parent. It’s what they’d wish for us but it’s complicated. Anyway there wasn’t a moment of my life when I doubted the love for and faith in me felt by both my parents.

There were also circumstances in my life that led me, in my memory at least, to be less attentive than I wanted to be. I think it will haunt me forever- times when finances or my own parental responsibilities kept me from visits; times when I let my dad tell me not to come because he didn’t want us to “see him like this.” — all those things we all wish we’d done differently. I am beginning to think that this is a real issue for me and one I’ve got to get some clarity about.

This is the second time in the space of the 90 days or so I’ve had this blog that my dad has come up and he’s been gone since 1991. Somehow though I’m more at peace with the loss of him. I can summon memories that make me smile and I know that he had a profound and lovely effect on my sons, which adds to my own fond remembrances of him.

My mother, who died in 1998, haunts me though. I know things in her life frustrated her – and that she would have liked to do more in the world outside the house. My husband told both her and me that I was guilty that my arrival had pulled her out of a promising career but she insisted that that was HER choice and I should get over it. That she loved raising the three of us. I don’t doubt that she loved raising her daughters but I also think she needed more than she was able to get in life as a suburban mom. I don’t know – all I know is that I feel a need to be particularly helpful to elderly women on the street, or the bus, or the synagogue steps. As if I can do for her by doing for them. Agh. I don’t know. I’m going to bed to see if I can beat the last of the jet lag. This is too sad.

Big Birthday Memory #1: My Mother’s Sisters

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here. Today -from June 30, 2007: the end of a generation.

They’re all gone now – my mom and my aunts. Here they are at the wedding of Barbara, the youngest, who died this week. My mom, Jeanne, the oldest, gone since 1998, is the one on the right – that’s my dad next to her. On the left side of the photo is Bettie, and my Uncle Jim.

Growing up in the Depression, they were wartime girls – my mom worked for the Office of Price Administration — the agency that controlled prices and tried to prevent gouging and war profiteering. She met my dad there – his hearing loss prevented him from active military duty so he fought unscrupulous businessmen instead. Bettie was in the WAVES. Barb, the youngest, came of age closer to the war’s end; her husband Bob was a Ranger, decorated several times.

The Depression had been hard on them. My grandfather was unable to bring in much. It was so traumatic that once, when Bettie started to talk about putting cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes, my mother cut her off. We were in a car, the three of us, and Bettie was just kind of spinning yarns. But to my mother she was raising things better left alone. I have always understood that these three sisters – so lovely and happy here — went through plenty. I also understood that they were not alone; no one their age was untouched by the Depression and the war.

I’ve come to realize over the years that my parents’ Depression experiences had a profound effect on me. Not only did I read menus from the price to the item – and check dangling price tags before examining clothing on a rack. That was the obvious stuff I inherited. Beyond it though was a sense of sadness for them all. My mother, who was an artist, got a scholarship in education, so she because a teacher. My father, who wanted to be an architect, got a scholarship to law school so he became a lawyer. My Uncle Bob was to be a veterinarian but his wartime injuries impaired his movement too much for him to be able to lift the animals so his dream died too. That was just how it was.

In some ways, they were the lucky ones; all three sisters and my father and uncles — were able, on scholarships, to go to college. All three marriages, despite tensions and tough times, survived with a real friendship between spouses for most of their lives. Each had three children who were smart, interesting, and self-sufficient. Even so, the bounty of choices they gave to us was so much more than they had had themselves. The young women in this photograph, and their husbands, never had the luxury of dropping out of school to campaign for Eugene McCarthy or majoring in music or theater or spending years doing trauma medicine a couple of months a year to pay for a life of mountain climbing and exploration. There was no give, no leeway, in the lives of those whom the Depression and the war that ended it – had stamped forever.

None of that shows here, of course. It’s a wedding. There’s no hint of all the scars the Depression had left on them, no hint of the loved ones and friends lost to World War II, no indication of the profound pain of watching a father who couldn’t support them and a mother who was permanently enraged. Nope. This was a wedding day and a lovely one at that. Tonight – well tonight I’m thinking of what it must have been like as the third sister, the baby sister, married. Who, I wonder, was missing – lost to the war. Who, I wonder, were the absent friends lost to the jolt of economic inequality when their parents retained a steady income and my grandparents could not. What are the stories my sisters and cousins and I will never know?

When we cleaned out my mom’s apartment I found the strangest thing: the Phi Beta Kappa key of the husband of one of my mother’s best childhood friends — a woman whose first husband had died early in the war. Why did my mother have it instead of her? What, if anything, had been between them when they were young? To me, the key is a symbol of all that was never said – the reserve of this brave and noble generation who didn’t want us to know how tough it really was. One picture and so many random thoughts — probably self-indulgently cobbled together here.

I’m writing this at the beach — the ocean slamming against the shore just steps away. This little barrier island on the Jersey shore has been a family destination since I was little –well more than 50 years — so I’m probably more available for all this nostalgia as memories rise up unfiltered on the sidewalks and sand dunes and ice cream parlors. But that’s not all it is; these thoughts are never very far away and when my sister sent this photo tonight many rose to the surface. I so wish I had asked more questions and said more often “You guys were great, so brave, so remarkable.”At my mothe’s funeral I said something to an old friend of hers about their role as “the Greatest Generation.” He laughed. “We weren’t great Cindy. We just did what we had to do. If you have to, so will you.”

Look at this photo and think of all that touched these young women and their families. If, as they did, we faced more than a decade of economic and political upheaval, wiould we be as strong, as determined?

So long girls. I know we always loved you, but appreciate all you were and all you never got to be? No we didn’t do that. At least not enough.

Grief, Prince, Bruce and a Lost Friend

This is one of just many musical tributes to the loss of a great artist and since it’s Bruce, it’s especially meaningful to me.

When a celebrity dies, the public memories of respected peers add a kind of emotional gravitas that helps all of us who love the mourner or the mourned – or both.

Personal loss. though, has a weight and impact hotter, sharper and deeper.

Sunday, we went to a “shiva,”a home memorial services held for a friend. We’d met him and his wonderful wife on a cruise, sailed all through the Mediterranean and had a great time; we were so happy they lived nearby, especially since we shared so much: they’d been married as long as we have, also had grown kids and grandkids and, it turned out, lived just across San Francisco Bay from us.

Gerri Larry tender fixed2 — Gerri and Larry Miller Summer, 2015 Outside Gironda, Sp;ain

Larry was a blast to be around, intense, funny, smart and curious; he and his wife Gerri were a great pair and it was so very hard to see her grieving so intensely.

As I near my 8th decade with very little sense of age, I’m so aware of each loss of a peer and remember my dad telling me with astonishment every time one of his friends left us; it seemed to impossible to him. Like so many other things, I understand this so much more now.

Of course it’s easier to grieve the loss of a public person, no matter how admired: the sharp reality of a more personal one, deep feeling for his family and realigning of each memory of them, especially in the years that we become so much more aware of our own mortality, cuts and lingers so much more.

Pandas, Pandas, Pandas! Even Cooler than You Think!

You’re looking at — forgive me — the dream of a lifetime: a personal, face-to-face meeting between my husband Rick and Ching Ching, a 1-year-old giant panda. He’d wanted it forever. After all, he spent a pretty large percentage of this trip’s temple visits taking photos of resident dogs and neighborhood monkeys while everyone else went after the remarkable beauty of the temples themselves. We set a pretty large detour on our China visit so this could happen and I don’t think he’s come down from his happy place even three days later.

This is the Dujiangua Base of the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda, in Shiqiao (‘Stone Bridge’) Village,in Dujiangyan Prefecture, 40 miles from the city of Chengdu. Our brilliant guide Selina, suggested that, since Rick wanted to “hold” a panda, which the better-known larger facility no longer permitted, we visit this brand new almost-open facility on a cool, grey morning.

Unlike the closer, more frequently visited Chengdu base, Dujiangua sits in a lush, quiet forest, panda enclosures set into the woods, a path allowing visitors to be just yards – and a low wall – from them. It’s so quiet you can hear them chew their bamboo or draw a deep breath. No noisy crowds to mar the sense of peace provided by researchers and volunteers, just a sense of closeness, and wonder.

When someone we love is able to do something this personally meaningful, it brings at least as much joy to the rest of us. The additional gift: meeting these amazing animals and being so grateful to be along for the ride.

Cambodia, the Buddha and the Past

We weren’t supposed to bomb Cambodia, but we did. I remember the day that the revered Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield first learned of Nixon’s “secret” attack on what seemed to be a gentle, somewhat innocent country for which he held considerable affection. He was almost trembling with rage. I know now that his anger arose from what he knew would happen to Cambodia as a result of this assault on a nation so far not actively involved in the conflict.

Here are the tenets of Buddhism described by our guide YuKu; they inspired gentle Cambodia then and still do today: Neutralism, Tolerance, Compassion and Sympathy; Learn to know, Learn to do, Learn to be, Learn to live together. In many ways, our bombing wiped out the capacity to follow them.

In the years before Richard Nixon ordered the bombings in 1970 (there were, to be fair, Viet Cong racing over the Vietnamese border into Cambodia to avoid US and South Vietnamese troops) Buddhism offered a foundation, and the Cambodian economy was growing well. The bombs put an end to that growth and threw the country into the vicious chaos that brought on the killing fields. In thosse terrible years, the Khymer rouge herded most of the people into the countryside to farm. Those who were were well educated were often executed instead. More than 2 million met torture and death.

For me, the visit to the temple and the rest of our day were haunted by my growing awareness of just what our bombs had retarded or destroyed. Not just temples and Buddhas. Not even just the futures of the educated or political. No.

We destroyed lives.

Cambodia has had to build or rebuild much of its infrastructure from roads to hospitals to schools.

We visited a school. And we met Monica.

We all know poor countries have fewer resources to educate their children but the gap between our worst school and this one is pretty big. The kids go to school free but must buy their books, workbooks and supplies. And the teachers? Their documents and supplies are stored in a dusty filing cabinet in the one-room office. Not a computer in sight.

This is a tiny school that lets tours pass through once in a while. I know it’s a tourist resource but there is no way to fake 41 kids singing to you about hygiene and brushing their teeth. Or to imagine the poverty and determination that surrounds their classroom. They lost so many years — maybe chunks of a generation, in fact, and are still far from recovered from those years.

For the village farmers it is the same. The simplicity of their homes and paucity of resources is shattering.

Part of the reason it is so painful to remember those days, whether here in Cambodia or in the US, where US universities exploded and four students died at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard, is that it doesn’t take long to determine that there is a basic sweetness in the Cambodian people that ill-prepared them to face down what landed upon them once the bombs began to fall.

You can see it in the face of our guide here as he sang to us before we left the bus to fly to Vietnam. I know this post is all over the place but I kept rewriting it and there’s so much more to tell you about that I’m just going to leave it as a meditation on a terrible time. Being in Cambodia and even more in Vietnam (that’s next) has awakened all kinds of things in me. Which is what is travel is for. It doesn’t help Monica and her friends though.

Searched at the Airport But This Is Not About Me

I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t. But something beeped.

“Which are your belongings?” I was asked. “I need to bring you over here. Please bring them with you. You were a random selection, that’s all.”

I followed the young, blue-shirted woman to a station behind the airport security line where she patted me down — not quite thoroughly, it turned out.

“Please put your hands out in front of you.” As I obliged, she ran a damp pad over each palm – up and back, up and back and then ran the pad through a machine that beeped again, producing a bright red bar on the monitor.

“Oh” she said. “I have to get someone to pat you down. I’m not allowed to do it.” She shouted something to someone and began walking, indicating that I should follow her.

“Is the privacy booth on this side or the other?” she called to a colleague; then followed her directions and led me there. We walked into a smoked glass booth just beyond the X-ray belt. As I entered, she pointed to a table in the corner. “Just put your bag over there. I have your phone and your Fitbit. You need to wait; she’ll be here in a minute.”

Not much beyond that time, in walked a large, gruff young woman with a soup-bowl hair cut. With no greeting or acknowledgment that I might have a name, she began:

“I am going to pat you down. Is there any part of your body that is injured – where it might be painful?

“No” I responded unsteadily. I was scared. Mortified really. Near tears, too, which sucked.

She began a detailed exposition – sounding more than a little like the author of a bad porn novel.

“I will move my hands up and down your legs, inside and out. Up, down.” She demonstrated, her arms extended, running up, then down as she spoke.

“I will feel your arms and down the sides of your body. Then your breasts and under.”

“And the buttocks.”

“And the groin.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, struggling to speak.

“Face your *unintelligible*”

“What?”

“Face your articles” – she meant the table where my stuff lay – over in the corner of the booth.

“Put your arms out at your sides.”

And she began — telling me each time she was about to move to a new area. Groin last. Of course. As impersonal as it could be, but still pretty dreadful.

Afterward, the young woman who’d first pulled me over turned to me and, as I was gathering my coat and backpack, pointed at the corner of the table “Don’t forget, I put your phone and your Fitbit over there.”

And it was done. They both just walked away. Like nothing had happened.

And I guess nothing had – really, but I was devastated and humiliated and angry as hell and not for me alone.

Through the whole thing, I kept thinking about all the arrest narratives I’d heard or read on-line, particularly since Ferguson, often recounted by Facebook friends — almost all African-American. Of TV producer Charles Belk, photographed sitting on the curb in Beverly Hills with his hands cuffed behind his back. Of Elora Nicole’s son. Of Eric Holder stopped in his own neighborhood when he was a US Attorney.

This only happened to me once. For so many people of color, especially male, this is just another part of what happens to them. More than a few times to many of them. Their experiences are often combined with real fear. That fear echoes daily in their hearts and in the hearts of those who love them.

I had felt so alone, and so violated. I had had to fight to keep tears of humiliation and shame at bay. Though it happened over a week ago, I put off writing about it because I was so freaked out. Even now, as I write, my heart is pounding and I again feel that lump rising in my throat. I’ll never go through security again without fear.

And it only happened to me once.

Can You Hear Me Now? Bruce Springsteen in a New Way

Classy as ever, Bruce and the band posted their Chicago River Tour concert for 2 days of free download. It’s so far beyond amazing that I’m back in mourning that we’ll be out of the country when he comes to SFO. I’d almost recovered but this is a major – if probably brief – relapse.

There’s nobody more capable of evoking super highs, and then tears – as he takes us on a journey with him. This time though, my journey is different: Springsteen was born in 1949; I’m a first-year Baby Boomer, born in 1946. We’re no longer kids, certainly, but still grateful for the music and where it can take us. For me, Bruce is the number-one tour guide. Always will be.

Now this next thing is hard. I listened to this concert a whole new way — my iPhone is paired with me new (hang on) hearing aids! I was so mortified when I learned I needed them and a nervous wreck when I went to be fitted but they’re great. I met a woman in the (where else?) ladies room at a big event yesterday and we were laughing at our worries and how surprised we were at what a difference they make.

Nothing – not the embarrassment or the nervousness or the appalling cost of these little things – none of that – comes close to the feeling of being able to walk around without headphones, sit at my desk without headphones — do almost anything without headphones – and still hear Thunder Road and Meet Me in the City and 31 other LIVE performances.

So hearing aids mean aging and I have to face that. But they also hosted a real party today.

The Internet of Women: 1996 But No One Would Listen

Ada cartoon — Ada Lovelace, Computing Pioneer

Women were always going to thrive on the Internet. Connecting, enabling connections among others, sharing information and more importantly, support and wisdom — these are some of the reasons we belonged online from the beginning. I knew it as soon as I saw my first browser, Mosaic (later Netscape) in the early 90s.

After early obscurity, women have become more and more visible and successful online, not only creating content but entire media operations. Numbered among them were the pioneering iVillage and BlogHer and agencies like Clever Girls, Blogalicious, Women and Work, Sway Group, and The Motherhood. There are plenty more.

When I saw this story today about the emerging Internet of Women, led by Cisco’s Monique J. Morrow, I’ll admit I got a little sad. I had tried to write a handbook (Internet Bootcamp) for women online in 1996. A friend hooked me up with a celebrity agent I could have never enlisted on my own, and my proposal went to some serious publishers. The response – and I wish I still had the precise language, was that the writing was “engaging” but women would never buy such a book. I just pulled it to take a look and am posting it here. See what you think. If nothing else it will evoke memories of modems past.

Here is Morrow’s basic message: (We agree, right?)

From connected homes and cars to monitoring our health through smart devices, a woman’s view point in this new age of digitization has never been more critical.

I invite you to follow our publication, the Internet of Women and be part of this movement.

Saint Joy: the Agony of a Good Girl

The commercials for JOY, created by and starring the spectacular crew from Silver Linings Playbook make the film look like a comedy, but that’s not what it is. It’s a glum story about a much put-upon young woman with a good idea and a family almost as selfish as the siblings in Transparent.

Nobody in her overflowing household can take care of herself, or anyone else. She, along with her divorced parents, ex-husband, grandmother and two children share a tiny house with a big mortgage. Each of them depends upon Joy for everything, not just financial support but also plumbing repairs, accounting for the family business — and dinner.

She’s sacrificed what we have learned are her great engineering and creative potential as well as her crack at going to college to stay home and help her ridiculously self-occupied and soap opera-obsessed mother deal with her divorce. Everything sucks.

She’s always there – to pull up a couple of boards and stop a leak in the pipes, pack lunches, cook dinners, make money, raise the children, act as her mother’s therapist, her ex-husband’s landlord (for free) and her father’s refuge (also for free) when his second wife throws him out.

At the same time, she manages to invent “the Miracle Mop” – a truly ingenious product that she knows other women will want because she could sure use it at home when she’s cleaning the bathroom floors. (Did I mention that she also does all the cleaning?)

The film is the story of her victory over these enormous odds, even when her father sells her out to please his rich girlfriend.

When we walked out of the theater, I was angry — trembling. It took a while to figure out why. The film closes with a description of all that happened to Joy after we left: big house, great business, loyal friends, generosity with aspiring entrepreneurs she meets. It then goes on the tell us how this virtuous, long-suffering woman, as she always had, continued to love and support her family — faithless father, feckless sister and hangers-on despite the fact that they even tried to sue her to steal her company. As far as we know, except for her ever-loyal ex-husband, her best friend and supporter and her kids no one related to her in biology or spirit was worthy of her kindness.

Forgiveness and love are important – and the fact that she “continued to love” this grotesque crew is understandable. What the narrator describes, though, is the classic “good girl” doing everything she is supposed to do no matter what. She may have had the strength to build her dream and fight for her vision, but she couldn’t ever say “‘Enough’ – go take care of yourselves you blood suckers” to those who betrayed her.

Leia and Rey: The Ancient Grief of Women, Turned on its Head

One of the most important scenes in The Force Awakens does not appear anywhere on the Web – not as a film clip or a screen shot or even a publicity still. I know why, I think. Its power rests largely in its unexpected, heartbreaking, surprise. You know what it is: that desperate, grieving embrace between General Leia Organa and the pilot-scavenger Rey.

Since time began, women have mourned the loss of loved ones in battle. Since time began we’ve stayed at home waiting, worrying: Penelope, Catelyn Stark, Mrs. Miniver, Sisera‘s mother, the women of WWI

Through the window she looked forth, and wailed,
The mother of Sisera, through the lattice:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why are the hoofbeats of his chariots so delayed?” — The song of Deborah, Judges 5: 24-31 s

“[I] wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him.”— Vera Brittain (Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913-1917)

But these two brave warriors, forced into battles that would steal their loved ones — their grief is different. It is the grief of fellow soldiers, not docile ladies-in-waiting. It is also a passing of the torch – literally and figuratively – between two powerful, wise women: one a grand figure from the last generation, the other an emerging power in the present one.

The loss of Han Solo, lover of one, father figure to the other, at the hands of Kylo Ren, his (and Leia’s) own son, and the near death of Ren himself in his battle with Rey, brought a grief shared by two warriors at opposite ends of the war against the Dark Side. Despite the pain of loss – and near loss – Leia comforts – and seeks the comfort of — of a younger version of herself. The battle between Rey and Kylo Ren in no way inhibits the joining of their pain and loss. It’s similar to the reality male soldiers have described so often: the loss of a beloved buddy in battle.

For women though, that loss has usually been at a distance, learned of and mourned far after the death itself. Now, just after the United States military has granted women soldiers access to the same combat duties and responsibilities as their brothers, and even as it portrays the generational legacy, the Star Wars tale depicts the same parity. These preservers of The Force fully share it all as, now, do our own soldiers – and equally know loss as battlefield comrades. Consider this, too:

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity. — Dwight David Eisenhower, 1946