LIFE – Page 4 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Cancer, Courage and Rage

Cancer has taken so many people I’ve loved and admired. This new interview with two hugely admired and much-loved celebrities reminded me of how deeply it affects us all . We know, in our heads, that the presence of beauty, courage, fame and an amazing marriage and family can’t keep the monster at bay. Neither can being the most respected broadcast journalist of the past 30 years; Tom Brokaw had cancer too. So did my husband, by the way. Thankfully, they are still with us. But it’s a roll of the dice, not fame or fortune, or even education, that’s made it so.

So why are we not all enraged? Why do we refuse to keep this plague at (or at least near) the top of our agenda? We face so much right now: attacks on women, racial tension, income inequality, climate change, declining education systems and infrastructure – fill in your own particular blank. But no matter how we feel about any of these issues, we all grieve for those we’ve lost to cancer; we all long for their presence in our lives and know that it is just a lack of knowledge that took them from us.

No family is untouched; the lucky ones face it among older members but so many lose loved ones — family and friends, well before they’ve seen their children grow up, or get married or find their way in the world and before they’ve exhausted the gifts that brought so much to all of us. I’ve been thinking about them a great deal recently, and have felt, for some time, a need to honor them once again here. Many died before there was an Internet but I’ve added links where I could.

We were young journalists together:

Margot Adler

Mary Halleron

Mark Harrington

Joan Shorenstein

Teachers, mentors, friends:

Maggie Morton

The Dearest:

When the “Homeless Problem” Lives Next Door

Homeless, homeless, Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake – Paul Simon

This is the alcove between our house and the building next door. Our neighbor has been here for a couple of months now and we have to figure out what to do. This being San Francisco, we are all – to varying degrees – terribly uncomfortable with the decisions tied to such a situation.

For a long time those of us who were most uneasy hoped we could just let him stay. We live right at a busy bus stop though, and there’s a 4-year-old upstairs from us and a preschool across the street. And I remember…

We lived in Manhattan, on Broadway and 79th St, in 1970’s and 80’s, when the city, and many of its inhabitants, were broke. Homeless New Yorkers were placed in “welfare hotels” – beat-up old places nobody wanted; there were 3 or 4 of those within blocks of our building. An island with trees and some greenery divided the uptown/downtown sides of Broadway. Many lost souls slept there too, especially where we were, above 72nd St. – and on the sidewalks and benches.

Once after school, when my older son was around five, we stepped off the bus on Amsterdam Ave, right outside PS 87’s playground, to find ourselves two steps from a man sleeping on the sidewalk next to the playground fence, his penis hanging out of his pants. Other times the men (they were mostly men) suffered serious mental illness, yelling at voices none of the rest of us could hear.

Because the circumstances were so troubling, we worked to find ways for our kids to feel even a little bit empowered to help. They always wanted to offer money. We asked, if they did want to help, that they provide food, since so many just bought alcohol with spare change. They did this often – buying a bagel or some juice at one of the neighborhood bodegas and passing them on. We also got involved with Paul Simon’s Children’s Health Fund, which sends medical vans and doctors to New York’s underserved neighborhoods. In the 80’s the vans spent much of their time at family shelters and welfare hotels. Our younger son chose it as his portion of family donations for years. No effort, however, eliminated the fear.

We’d be walking through the discount stores on the Lower East Side and there would be a couple of homeless guys outside a door or on the corner. I’d feel a little hand move into mine and, usually, squeeze pretty hard. My husband, who worked in inner city medicine, always said “Don’t forget, they won’t hurt you; if you blew on them they’d fall over” but that information was only partly successful. No matter how much they understood, no matter how much compassion they felt, many of these people scared them.

In other words, my personal experience with my own kids slams into my sense of that old Greater Good. I know that a little kid getting scared once in a while is nothing compared to the ordeal the man next door faces every day but I keep remembering those small hands reaching out to mine and what I know remains, however faintly, from those daily encounters. I know, too, that I’m partly hiding behind the interests of the lovely little boy upstairs and the school across the street. Social services are limited by budget, so I’m reluctant to act and struggling to figure out what I think we should do. No ending here – ending to come.

A Gift from Grown Sons

My sons are gifted givers of love. To their wives. To their sons. To us. The richness of this awareness is indescribable.

To watch a man, a son of yours, arrive home from work, lift his infant son and greet him with such easy confidence and comfort and tenderness, help his toddler handle his anger, joke with his wife, ask with deep concern “how is Dad feeling?” well – you can’t imagine. If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

To watch his brother conduct serious conversations with his one year old, read to him, laugh with him, unabashedly speak of his love for his wife and child and offer small acts of kindness to us – and to so many others – well – you can’t imagine. If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

I know many families share in these blessings. But I’m writing it now because I woke up this morning thinking this, feeling so full of gratitude you can’t imagine. If you’re lucky, maybe you can.

Dirty Dancing and Planned Parenthood: a Perfect History Lesson

This showed up in my Facebook feed Thursday night and blew me away. It may have been funny to many, but it left me breathless.

I don’t know if it’s possible for younger people today to know how terrible that time before Roe was for so many young women like Penny, who faced the terror and hopelessness of an unwanted pregnancy, or what a real miracle it was that she was rescued.

Dirty Dancing is set in the summer of 1963, just before Francis “Baby” Houseman is about to leave for Mt Holyoke. I left only a year later, for Smith. So she and I are cousins, if not sisters. Each wanting to change the world, each with a wonderful, trusting father, each falling for a bad boy with such a different history from our own … and each inexperienced in realities such as those faced by a pregnant dancer with no money whose illegal abortion goes terribly wrong.

She nearly dies — saved only by the skill of Francis’ doctor father. The film is a fairy tale – in the love story for sure, but also in the story of the damsel in distress rescued by a fatherly wizard who brings her back from the brink. Most women in those pre-Roe days – and many again now, in states where abortion rights are savaged every day — faced real back alleys and unskilled procedures on kitchen tables with no wizard, or anyone else, to save them. Penny’s story was as real as they come, and it’s no joke to remind us that her fairy tale is in real danger of once again becoming the dark horror story it used to be.

So yes – it’s always fun when cultural references inform reality. But it’s hard to enjoy even this clever comparison when the lives of so many Pennys and her sisters are in such terrible jeopardy.

The Jews of Girona, Their Exile – and Bruce Springsteen (Seriously)

This is Girona, home to a large, prosperous, and effective Jewish community until a confluence of events took it all away.

In a single year, two historic moments changed western history and Jewish history, too. It was 1492. The very Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, partners in a marriage made to consolidate power, threw all the Jews out of Spain. Immediately. Convert or get out.

At the same time, of course, these same “Catholic Kings” sent Christopher Columbus on his way to the “new world” and forever changed faith, power and geopolitics.

The Jewish History Museum of Girona beautifully documents much of this story:

Two "JIDE" - Jewish figures from the 1050 "Creation Tapestry" and also seen here. — Two “JUDEI” – Jewish figures from the 1050 “Creation Tapestry”

The letters floating above these two little people say “JUDEI” – Jew.

This 14th Century mikvah was found only recently. How haunting, especially with the recent mikvah scandal, to see before us evidence of how long women have honored this commitment.

Words from a tombstone (see next picture)

For some reason, this just felt extra sad. There are so many little boys in my life – and some big ones – so maybe that’s part of it. Beyond that though, the humanness and loss felt so real, and the suffering of those times so much more concrete as I absorbed the words of this one grieving parent.

But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with Bruce Springsteen? Well, as I entered the lovely museum gift shop, attended by this equally lovely gentleman, I heard Bruce on the radio. Gradually, I realized that he was singing My Hometown.

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed Talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown

Exile and loss, pain and deprivation can be understood on so many levels. Just as the Jews were brutally ejected from the homes and community they had so painstakingly built, so were workers throughout this country as the factories and mines and mills that had sustained them for so long collapsed. Although on a different scale, they too lost everything they knew and the life they had loved, and were forced to find another, unknown place to call home. Although less brutally required to depart, they had no choice, really.

Loss of home, love, family and community is a hardship experienced by more and more people throughout the world. Hunger, terrorism, civil war, drought, economic collapse and religious, gender and racial discrimination hurt in different ways and to different degrees, but the pain is the same in nature if not in degree. The only thing that changes is the faith, or class, or color of the refugees. We still certainly don’t seem to have learned to care much more today when it happens to people who aren’t us.

Don Draper, Dick Whitman, Peggy, Sally, Joan, Coke, Mad Men and Us

The farewell to Mad Men, at least on Monday’s morning news programs, was all about “the Coke commercial” (indeed a brilliant, brilliant presence in the episode) the 60’s, advertising, capitalism and a Don Draper not at all like the man he described to Peggy in this phone call:

“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am…. I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. and made nothing of it.”

or his physical transformation – messy hair, plaid shirt and jeans – that returned him, at least briefly, to the “Dick Whitman” he once was. Even his expressions were those of a country boy with a squint.

Joan faye peggy2 — Joan, Peggy and Faye in the elevator in especially poignant episode about the women of Mad Men

Preoccupation with “the commercial” overrode discussion of how important Mad Men has been to women: not only those who were teenagers as Don ascended and for whom so many scenes brought back memories of the scandalous neighborhood “divorcee,” of the Women’s Clubs and Garden Clubs and all the other “activities” suburban mothers created — but also for those who came after, for whom some of what they saw of women’s lives was just a relic but way too much was way too familiar.

Don Draper’s journey, from brothel to executive suite to Esalen, is very much that of America through the 60’s and beyond. It was a traumatic, scary, strange and exhilarating time, and whether you were there or you arrived later, it’s clear that Don’s misery and confusion mirrored what many of us, and, even more so, our parents felt every day.

Oh, and that Coke commercial? It was so perfect I laughed out loud as it appeared: all that we had hoped for and dreamed of, laid out in an air-brushed, multicultural, Benetton panorama. I don’t think we knew then how far we would be today – maybe forever – from that dream, but watching it now, it seems quaint how sentimental we were, even in our days of rage. Just like Don.

My BB King Story – Farewell to Such a Lovely Man

BB King carried music in his hands and in his heart, joy at the sound of it and commitment to the making of it. All you had to do was hear him for three minutes and you knew that. And he faced down plenty to keep doing it. As the BBC tells it:

He played more than 300 gigs on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit, the collection of performance venues in what were then racially segregated southern states where it was safe for black musicians to perform.

King said: “I have put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.

“Touring a segregated America, forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most ‘cos you didn’t realise the damage. You hold it in.”

I met him once, and the memory of that morning haunts me still.

It was, of course, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW (are you sick of those stories yet?) I used to go in early to hang out in the green room when someone I admired was going to be there. Of course, that included the morning BB was coming. He arrived with his musicians – no entourage, no fuss.

That morning, the Canadian singer Anne Murray was also on the show, appearing earlier than Mr. King. As we sat there quietly, watching the show, she told Bryant Gumbel that she was taking “a few months” off from her touring schedule to “recharge.”

King glanced up at the screen, looking sort of sad. “A few months” he said. “I could never do that. I can’t do that.” The disparity of income between blues musicians and the rockers they inspired was well-known, so much so that a foundation was established to help those who never made a dime from their royalties.

Even so, although he told the BBC in 2009, at the age of 83 “I can’t retire, I need the money,” I was never sure if his reason that day was money, or love of the road, but he said it with such longing, and with such an expression of regret, that I can see it right now. Clear as day.

I will always love his music and love his spirit and humor and warmth, and be grateful for his legacy. In my mind though, as he leaves us, it’s that peek into the life of a blues man – even a great one – as he made his way that I remember most.

So Much Pain

All women are sisters. If you don’t believe me, write about a miscarriage and see what happens. A week ago I described my own experience, now more than 30 years old — memories made fresh by a private newsletter conversation.

Two amazing (but not surprising) realities emerged: 1) This is one pain that stays right there – buried under daily events and worries and happy times — but not gone. Never gone. 2) It is a gift to have a place to discuss or describe the things that wound us, change us, leave silent but permanent marks. Offering that space is one particular gift women give to one another. Here are three who shared my “place:”

Nobody ever talks about it but the reality is that many people have been through it (multiple times even) and I think there is comfort in shared grief.

I like to be tidy with emotions (I never am – HA!), but the grief I feel about these losses have a layer of guilt around them – as if I shouldn’t be so upset. But I am.

I am in tears! I was on Facebook, saw your post on miscarriage and just oh my goodness. I have had 2 miscarriages in the past year. It been hard, but it’s made so much harder that the whole subject has a weird taboo around it. It’s not like people won’t ask me when I’m planning to have kids. I’ve heard a thousand times “when are you going to have children?” and had to make light of a situation that I was still really sad about.

That’s all.

My Miscarriage: Memories that Don’t Fade

A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage - from The Nib — A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage – by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, from The Nib

NOTE: In a newsletter, Nona Willis Aronowitz posted two stories about miscarriages. As I began to respond, this emerged:

My sons are 40 and 35. Between them I had a miscarriage. She was a girl. It was the first day I had told anyone I was pregnant and begun wearing maternity clothes.

It happened on Election Night 1978 and I was in the studio producing the “house desk” results.

When the pain got serious I raced home, lost most of the fetus in the bathroom, and called our OB. We went immediately to the hospital; in the morning I had a D and C. It was devastating.

Then came the reaction:
VP of News: You work too hard.
Secretary to Pres of News: What were you doing working all night? Didn’t you want this baby?

On the other hand, I also got notes from people ranging from my aunt to a colleague, all with the same message: “I’ve never told anyone before but I had a miscarriage (anywhere from 1 to 30) years ago.” The pain for each was still real.

I was lucky though. My OB was from Czechoslovakia. He had a real (maybe European, maybe Socialist, maybe just father of daughters) respect for professional women and, as he had been in my first pregnancy was wonderfully supportive. He ran a cell test to determine whether there was a distinguishable cause (there was – a serious genetic issue – although we didn’t learn that for months, it has been a comfort.) He explained the D and C, urged us to take time to grieve but also reminded us that we were far from finished with efforts to have more kids, kept me in the hospital an extra day so I could pull myself together before I went home and had to tell our nearly-three-year-old son.

He wanted to know where the baby went. I just couldn’t handle a literal answer so even though I wasn’t at that time religious at all I told him the baby was with God. I needed him to understand that she was somewhere where she would be as loved as he was on 79th and Broadway.

Several years later when I worked at TODAY, with the support of our Executive Producer, I produced a series about miscarriages. The narrator was an OB himself, one of the TODAY stable of experts. I’m not naming him because this is what he told me (to his credit:) “Thank you so much for doing this series with me. I’ve been an OB for 25 years and I never realized the pain that this causes women.” Seriously. I was grateful that he was emotionally available to admit this but can you imagine? Never realized.

One more thing – partners are NOT sufficiently supported when this happens. They need FAR more attention than they usually receive. My husband has said for years that he wished we could have had a funeral or some sort of service so he too could have a vehicle to grieve.

NONA thank you so much for raising this and for the links to those powerful pieces. The graphic one was particularly evocative as it reminded me of small moments I’d forgotten.

For the record – our second son was born 2 years later. Both my boys are fabulous men and exquisite spouses and dads. I am grateful for them both and the sorrow of our loss is not in any way linked to how I define my unambiguous and grateful love of them.

Even so – the fact that, 32 years later, the silence and shame and insensitivity remains is a travesty. Please share this with doctors, nurses, midwives, preschool teachers and others who are on the “front lines.” Maybe we can help to break the chain.,

Remember When Claire Underwood Was a Princess?

OK I know this is facile and a little silly maybe, but House of Cards starts Friday and when The Princess Bride theme slid onto my Spotify feed last week, I remembered that Robin Wright, (Princess Buttercup!) is now the notorious Claire Underwood: monstrous friend, cold manipulator and, of course, ruthless First Lady.

Art imitates life, right? This is a great reflection – hugely distorted and grotesque though it is, of what has happened to so many of us — women and men –particularly but not only in public life.

We walk such thin lines most of the time. We flee innocence and dependence in pursuit of ourselves. We watch what appears to be the slow crumbling of every trusted institution. We struggle to learn how to be — and remain, moral, whole adults, able to stand alone, able to love and share, able to support, able to seek and accept help when we need it. And still, we feel – women and men and our country itself – that we’re losing what’s best in us.

Claire has jettisoned most of these qualities, if she ever had them. The conspiracy she shares with her husband has tethered her to his malignant pursuit of power at any cost. Their “arrangement” is beyond toxic; even a desired pregnancy must be sacrificed. What would Princess Buttercup – or even the Dread Pirate Roberts – think of these two?

The Princess Bride was released nearly thirty years ago, in September of 1987. It’s possible that was a nicer time. The 5 top grossing films that year were 1) 3 Men and a Baby (corny/cute), 2) Fatal Attraction (boiled bunnies – not so cute), 3) Beverly Hills Cop 2 (bloodshed and mayhem amid the jokes – also not so cute), 4) Good Morning Vietnam (Robin Williams, war, music, grief and rebelliousness celebrated in the film but not so popular today), and 5) Moonstruck (love, family, fairytale new beginnings.) Also among the top ten were the venal comedy The Secret of My Success (7), Lethal Weapon (see Beverly Hills Cop above) (9) and, perhaps a distant cousin to The Princess Bride, Dirty Dancing (class, romance, first love, politics, music) (10.) Cumulatively not as dark a worldview as in House of Cards, but not all sweet little stories, either. Even so, add Dirty Dancing to The Princess Bride and Moonstruck and 1987 offered us at least three fairy tales. No fairy tales dare show their faces at the Underwood caucus, do they?

Even more interesting are the films IMDB denizens took the time to vote for that year. 1) Full Metal Jacket (more war), 2) Predator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and, 3)The Princess Bride herself! Behind her, The Untouchables (Costner as Ness), Lethal Weapon (see high grossing: cop comedies), RoboCop (robot – um – cop), and – again – Dirty Dancing. Wrapping up the top ten, Spaceballs (funny space stuff), Wall Street (“Greed — is good.”) and The Running Man. (more Arnold.) Probably Oliver Stone’s Wall Street comes closest to our current Netflix White House.

Last year, when the Underwoods took over the presidency, the highest grossing films, not a fairy tale among them, included six sci-fi/fantasy films including three from Marvel, a witch, a Hobbit and some Transformers. The list concludes with two animations, an American sniper and one Dystopian teen rebellion.

Those garnering the most IMDB votes included eight sci-fi/fantasy films including five from Marvel, an end-of-the-world time/space and time travel adventure and two outer space monster invasions. That list concludes with a fancy old hotel, icky, nasty Gone Girl and … a different Dystopian teen rebellion.

Not altogether sure what all this means except that we’ve lost much of our 1987 capacity to cherish whimsy and gentle humor, Grand Budapest Hotel or not. OH and that we need all that escape these days — really badly. If I were to guess, I’d say what we’re escaping from is a world where, although certainly not in the White House, the Underwoods have taken over, for real.