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.