RESURRECTION

Yesterday, I made my third trip to the Holocaust Museum. I went with my sister-in-law and her 16 year old boy who said it was on the top of his list to visit. He wasn’t sure why. Just had heard about it.

And my experience was similar to the first two times. The brief black and white grainy film of Hitler’s rise to power…the shtetl with its magnificent photos of a small village, photos stacked up three floors high….sisters, mothers, uncles, babies….all lost. And then the shoes. The room full of shoes with their absent color and musty smell – without size or decoration, a dark leathery pile.

I saw again the emaciated faces of men in striped pajamas and the arrival of Eisenhower’s men to shepherd survivors back to safety after documenting the Nazi shame for all of us to see.

What was different this time were the new images in my mind and heart. Images of my unborn grandchildren who are Jews. They are not yet in this world. I have not met them but am already connected to them through my daughter, my son-in-law and his parents and extended family.

In March, I found myself in Straubing, Germany through a series of totally unexpected events. My brother-in-law’s surgery in a German hospital and the resulting complications… the phone call from my sister asking me to lend a bit of support. So there I was and one night I went out for some food and was carrying back a box of German pizza to the hotel where my sister waited. And I heard the siren. The same police siren that I associate with the Nazis – you would recognize it from all the old movies. I heard the siren and I began to cry – walking with the pizza box. I rested the box on a wall and wept loudly for what seemed like a long time. Beneath me were bricks and I knew that below them were stones and eventually, dirt. I felt the footsteps of those who had walked this street and the stones and the bricks that carried their energy. I cried alone in this strange country for those whom I later came to learn had been massacred or cast out of Straubing, not in the 1930s and 40s but in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Absurdly, I wept in the spring rain in the evening shadow, carrying my pizza box, knowing no one.

Since that time about six weeks ago, I have reflected on the persistence of all that comes up through the ground – pushing through dirt toward the light. It is in the tulip and the daffodil which make again their amazing debuts each year. It is in the dogwood with its bloody crosses floating almost horizontally against the dark bough at the edge of the woods. And it is also, persistently, in the human spirit. Those who will not cower and will not stop. Who carry their cherished past and with a great degree of grace rise again to the day, pushing back against the stones.

LIZA

There she is. Shiny as a new penny and filled with new life. It’ a strange experience for Paul and me to kick back on Monday nights and watch her on NBC. We are happy that it makes her happy and that she and Afro Blue are bringing jazz to a new generation. Whether they win or not, they have already won.

Liza always loved the stage, often, paradoxically, in a shy way. We didn’t know her voice had matured into a strong, clear soprano until we heard her solo in Guys and Dolls at Moon Valley High. She began the lines of “If I Were a Bell” and we both wept.

Her path to Howard was a private one. I don’t think she thought much about being in an environment where she would be a minority – she just went for it. And when she auditioned for the top a capella group, she was selected. It was that simple. Nothing special. On the bus I ride every day, she has a cheering section of five African American women who tell others on the bus about Liza noting that, “She’s the Caucasian one.”

When Paul and I were growing up, differences among races were like walls. Prejudice and anti Semitism were everywhere. A woman might be referred to as a Negress or a Jewess, just so you’d know they were the “other”. It wasn’t necessarily mean-spirited or thought through, just common practice. All kinds of ethnic distinctions were made – “Manny, the Portagee baker”, “ Gina the Italian woman from church”. Distinctions that our kids’ generation have thankfully set aside.

And there’s Liza getting to sing jazz – one of the greatest gifts that African Americans have given the world – and she joins the harmony of ten kids with the world in front of them.

You go girl!

JUNE 5, 2011

So here you are and here we are all these years later … today is your 64th birthday! When we met, we were both 21. I looked up from my poetry anthology and cardboard bowl of French fries in the Rhode Island College cafeteria and you were standing there with one of my best friends. She introduced us and I was astonished to feel a bolt of lightning strike. You were polite and warm, pretending not to notice the flash of light.

We grew up together, battling our own insecurities, finding our way. We married. We moved. We earned degrees. We moved again. We brought up our fabulous girls. And we were good for each other as we are now. You with your stores of common sense and me with the crazy optimism that, in the end, has served us both well.

You have been everything I wanted in a partner and the best father imaginable for Eliza and Diana. Your talents and preoccupations have been passed on to them – music, language, history, visual art. Beyond that you have given them – and me- so many lessons in kindness that our spirits have grown just by knowing you and your generosity.

And today – crossing another temporal threshold – I rejoice in you and in my hopeful way look forward to the coming decades spent together. Happy Birthday, Darling.

Being Satisfied

When my life is ended and my time has run out
My friends and my loved ones, I will leave there’s no doubt
But one thing’s for certain, when it comes my time
I’ll leave this old world with a satisfied mind (Hayes and Rhodes)

Turning 64 felt like any other birthday at first. Then a few days later, I realized that something was shifting in my thinking. I had been perseverating on the mild dissatisfaction I was feeling at work – some challenges with controlling personalities and the frustration of bureaucracy. By the time the gifts were opened and the cake was gone, my job and my life were looking different.

Today I have been 64 for five days. Here are the things that constitute my life:

I live on a mountain in a lovely warm house with a fireplace and a grand piano which I rarely play because I have never been satisfied with my degree of talent.

My partner in life is an amazing, loving, sensitive, handsome man with whom I often grow impatient because he can be so unconventional.

My children are two exceptional, bright, caring women who light up my heart like a candle. I complain when they don’t call me often enough or if I don’t understand their decisions.

I have three sisters who are each unique. They are as different from me as they are from each other and sometimes those differences cause me consternation.

My friends are fantastic. I have made many new friends in the past five years and continue to dote on the old Rhode Island friends. Sometimes I don’t hear from them and I whine.

But I declare all that to be over because I am truly satisfied and will now focus on that satisfaction for the years that I have left. If you hear me complain about what I don’t have or what’s wrong, you can tell me that:

On the long train ride to work at 5:30 AM, I get to see the beauty of dawn breaking in the Maryland sky.

When my low back aches, it’s a gentle reminder to strengthen it with more exercise.

When I look in the mirror and see that I’m no longer young, my spirit has no age and my mind-only the limits I impose.

When I look in my bank account and worry about retirement, I don’t really want to stop working and if I inherited my Mom’s genes, I have lots of good years left.

And so I enter my 65^th year with a better attitude - lacking nothing, open to the last stage of winter as it gives way to spring.

BEYOND BLAME, BEYOND SOLUTIONS

What happened in Tucson on Saturday was begotten by laws.
The laws that allow mentally ill people to go untreated.
The laws that allow guns with fancy magazine clips to be easily purchased.

Guns that are clearly not for hunting animals.
We made those laws because they reflect our values as a community.

That’s where our laws come from.

Good mental health treatment is expensive and voluntarily purchased by people who can afford their problems.

We don't want to spend the money that provides treatment to those who can't.

Only those who demonstrate that they are a danger to themselves or others can be court-ordered for treatment. If they are planning or plotting or getting ready to act… if they are frightening their classmates with their bizarre behavior… they are still free agents.
We agreed to this.
So rather than blame Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or anyone else for senseless violence, we can look to our laws for root cause.

And we can look to our history.

We are and always have been a violent country. We have settled our grievances with guns and with bombs. We covered a swath of states with 620,000 corpses from 1861 to 1865 over an essential disagreement. We have destroyed Japanese cities and napalmed Vietnamese villages. We have sanctioned and carried out political assassinations.

This is how we do business.
Our films and our television shows reflect this. We like “action”. This is rooted in our DNA.

And so when one of us goes over the edge, whether it be at Virginia Tech or at a Tucson Safeway, we look for someone to blame.
If we truly wanted to prevent the violence, we would have done it by now.
We haven’t.
So now we need to look into the eyes of our nine-year-old children and carefully explain to them why Christina Taylor Green had to die.

The Tree

It’s more beautiful this year than ever before.
We say that every year.
Which doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It holds our memories-
and celebrates our survival as the most delicate of ornaments survive with us.
Each one has a story.

This is the baby carriage that was on Paul’s first Christmas tree

And the one that we added when Diana was born.

This was the flower that Liza wore in her hair in Hawaii.

She wore one like it in Glendale.

This is the snowflake that my friend Kathy made for me.

And this is the sled that Diana made in third grade. (She will know if that’s right or if it was really second grade).

This is my personal favorite that I bought in Wickford, Rhode Island on a lovely day with Jo-Anne.

This was a gift for Eliza (collector of Pigbos) from Jo-Anne this year.

This is one of thirty wooden hearts. Paul made them for the Christmas of 1987 when we were very broke. He was painting goose plaques in Fredericksburg and the hearts were the throw-away part of the plaques. They are the ornaments that we can never lose.

This is the 2008 bride and groom commemorating Liza and Jon’s wedding.

And this is the dreidel that brings Hanukkah to the tree.

Here is the elephant that we just bought in New York to help us remember Thanksgiving with the Berkons.

And this is the whole tree on Christmas Eve.

Lastly, here we have a very tired Christmas poodle.

The end.

Happy Anniversary

“Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be…”

We heard these words of Robert Browning when we were kids. I can remember rolling my eyes at the thought of life being better when you got old – when your hair turned gray and your hands were as lined as Shredded Wheat. I saw my elderly neighbors the Budlongs, the Belgers, Marsha Soar’s grandparents. They moved slowly – sat for hours on the porch – took the front steps gingerly.

My mother had no use for aging. She fought it with everything she had. She refused to tell her age and kept her hair blonde and her dresses pink. She encouraged us to kiss her octogenarian mother’s cheek “even though her face is so wrinkled”.

And so it has come as a big surprise that the “best” is indeed coming to us at this time of life. Paul and I celebrated our fortieth anniversary a week ago and realized that our fortieth year of marriage has been the best yet. Despite the inevitable marks of age – the graying hair, the lined faces, the stoop at the neck – we are laughing more and feeling more simpatico than at any other time.

Our married life began when we really had very little in common. He was the artist and intellectual, and I, the political junkie and party lover. We discovered early on that there was something powerful and ineffable that connected us to each other and have yet to define it. But it’s still there – after all the relocations, the dashed expectations and the hard-earned successes. It’s been reinforced by all of that and by the joy of our daughters from their births to the immediate present. Our interests now seem to have converged. He's come to appreciate my passionate devotion to Chris Matthews and Hardball and I am finding new beauty in slightly injured ladder back chairs and peace in the small stretches of the Appalachian Trail we've been exploring.

Marriage is a mystery. We will never know what really goes on the in the marriages of others and we barely know what’s really going on in our own. That said, I thank my dear husband for being by my side all these years and promising to hang out with me here on the mountain for as long as we have left. It’s a great wondrous ride together.