Tag Archive | on the cusp of fascism

Joyous Effort

Nov28
In a way, my gratitude starts with potatoes. Some of my mother’s ancestors left Ireland and came to the U.S. when the subsistence potato crop failed catastrophically in the mid-19th Century. Some had left Ireland a century earlier, perhaps just sick of potatoes, and successfully established themselves as scions of their new country in both military and business leadership.
I’m grateful for all the elements of this, and every, lunch…

I am profoundly grateful for more than enough. In this unequal world where the rich are currently getting shamefully richer and the poor and disenfranchised are about to get hit with even more egregious existential assaults, I have enough. I’ve never been dangerously hungry, never slept out in the cold except by choice. One thing I’ve learned in recent years is not to tell others what they should do, a principle of live and let live that the politicians who’ve hijacked my ancestors’ Republican Party, and on which the formerly Grand old party was based, have lost sight of. But what I desperately wish, is that those Americans, those people everywhere, who have more than enough, would quit grasping for more and more and more. For there are so many humans, so many sentient beings of all species, who currently suffer because of the insatiable greed of the wealthiest one percent. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t sustainable. And it will only get worse from escalating profiteering and shrinking scientific and rational grounding, without strong, consistent resistance to the new world order that looms with this incoming regime.

I’m grateful to live in a supportive neighborhood, with strong and helpful friends, including one who has shoveled my pathway and helped clear my driveway, and one who came to help Wren set up a new bed-couch.
I’m grateful for nourishing moisture, even though this week’s precipitation caused numerous tree limbs to come down. I haven’t been able to get out and look around much, but can tell just around the house that several junipers didn’t withstand the heavy wet snow and ice; including the sentinel by my front gate. I’m grateful my car wasn’t parked under it, though that limb already broke off a few years ago and landed just behind the car.

I’m grateful for a cozy, solid house to shelter from the elements during snow and ice that brought awesome power to the forest; grateful for good fortune, for the choices I made throughout my life, and for the inheritances from several generations of long-ago Irish farmers and German Lutheran immigrants who made it big in banking in the 18th Century. That’s right, in the 1700s, in St. Louis and in Washington, D.C. (I’m grateful for findagrave.com which helped me follow my initial question about the provenance of my great-great-great-grandfather, Gottlieb Grammer, son of a Lutheran minister in the German state of Wurtemburg.) Some of those ancestors were no doubt One Percenters at a time when the discrepancy wasn’t quite so astonishing as it is now. It definitely been a case of trickle-down economics, in which some descendants turned a fraction of a fortune into their own wealth, and some (myself included) did not. I am the end of my mother’s line of the family, though her brother’s children are now becoming grandparents. We cousins haven’t gathered on Thanksgiving as a clan since the death of our common grandmother in 1990, whom we called Grammer, which was her middle name… What a rabbit hole! All to express that I’m grateful for my mother and her ancestors, who contributed to the illusory sense of security I experience this bright winter day.

I dug this old photo out of a trunk of Auntie’s a couple of years ago but only recently got it into a frame. I knew it was of our ancestor Gottlieb, and learned in my research today that he bore at least three daughters. Was this our original Alice, grandmother of our grandmother? This ancestral matrilineal inquiry is actually quite in keeping with the novel I’m reading… I’m grateful to be fascinated by my own mind.
I’m grateful for my now-consistent nighttime arm-warmer. Once an occasional occurrence, Topaz now sleeps here every night since I returned to the bed post-surgery.

Grateful for another perfect loaf – maybe the most perfect loaf ever – of homemade bread, and for all the little potted plants thriving under the light; grateful for the good fortune to have all the ingredients from salt and flour to solar-powered electricity and an oven and a counter and running water everything else that is more than enough to enjoy being alive in this precarious time. I wish for everyone who reads this to be grateful for what you have.

I’ve read that you should let your bread rest for at least an hour, better yet several, before slicing it, to retain moisture and allow some alchemy to happen inside. But really, who could resist a loaf that perfect, so I sliced off an end and enjoyed a deconstructed cheese sandwich for lunch, with triple-cream Brie, a cold chicken drumstick, half an avocado, mayo, and of course dark chocolate M&Ms. At the sunroom table, sitting in a comfortable chair, reading The Volcano Daughters. I’m grateful for every single element of this moment, and all the causes and conditions that led to it, including but not limited to: every bit of food and how it was grown and/or processed, and the people who did that, and the people responsible all along its trajectory from farm or factory to my table; and for the table and the tree it originated as and the craftspeople who made it, and the stone of the sunroom floor and the craftsman who gathered and laid it, and the placemat from China I bought at a little store in Kilmarnock with Auntie; and the Kindle and the technology and people behind every element of that, and access through a digital library to literature from around the world, and to Gina Maria Balibrera for writing a marvelous fable for our time about greed, fascism, insanity, myth, persecution, and survival with fabulous female characters; and for the tired old leather chair given new life with sturdy cushions, one bought, one gifted, and for the giver of that gift… Indeed I have more than enough.

Wren surveys the damage from the snow: half the tree will need to be cut down. Will it make sense to keep the remainder which is clearly losing strength, or is it time to remove the entire tree? What a change it will be either way.

I’m grateful that at just over ten weeks post hip replacement I have the strength and energy to shovel snow, that I’m able to bring joyous effort to the task, and able to reflect with equally joyous effort on all that I have to be grateful for. I’m grateful to people out there in the wide world – you – who find my musings worth reading. And I’m grateful for a surprising inquiry from a fellow sangha member this morning, to wit: We all focus this time of year on what we are grateful for or whom we are grateful to; let us consider in addition, who or what might be grateful to or for us? And so I’ll spend the rest of this Thanksgiving evening basking in the reflection of the dogs, cats, friends, students, my mother, my auntie, even trees, and anyone else I can think of who might be or once have been grateful for or to me, just as I am.

Mushrooms

Oct28

That last eye-candy puzzle was child’s play compared to the one I’m working on now. Last season Philip wanted to get the hardest puzzle Liberty offered, and I think he succeeded. I finally pulled it off the shelf just over a week ago, and it’s been challenging me ever since. This gorgeous image was done by Adolphe Millot, a 19th Century entomologist and painter who was the senior illustrator at the French National Museum of Natural History.

Each of the 141 mushrooms is numbered and there’s a key on the Liberty website. I sorted the 743 pieces into mushrooms, other whimsies, numbers, and everything else, before starting to find order within the chaos. It got easier once I looked at the boxtop closely enough to see that there are actually two pages of mushrooms joined in the middle, with numbers 1-69 on the left page, and numbers going from right to left on each page but not exactly in order.

Oh wait, those aren’t in the puzzle, they’re in the kitchen!

I was heartened this morning as I puzzled away to listen to an hour-long discussion between Robert Hubbell and Jay Kuo about the illusion of polls, major media’s integrity failure, billionaire manipulation of misinformation, the fundamental goodness of the American people, and other rational election analysis. If you’re worried about a possible fascist victory, and/or violence around the election, I recommend listening to this conversation for a healthy and reassuring perspective.

But then I was shaken to my core when I dared to venture a question at Cousins’ Zoom this afternoon. “I know we don’t discuss politics, but I’m curious if the Hitler comments have changed anyone’s opinion about Trump,” I said politely. One cousin pounced and vehemently proclaimed that he now supports Trump even more because those were despicable lies. Another said mildly, “Yeah, let’s don’t talk politics,” and I immediately tried to shut that can of worms or Pandora’s box or whatever I had opened, but it was too late, almost everyone had to throw in their two cents. One cousin said, “Three hundred and thirty million Americans, and we have to choose between these two clowns?”

I thought, If I can’t even talk about this with family, how did I ever think I could talk with strangers? So I pushed out of my comfort zone awhile later and called another one of the cousins, curious about her comment on the zoom. We had a civilized and affectionate conversation, in which she framed the choice as “the lesser of two evils,” asked me if I’m sure Kamala isn’t a Communist, and acknowledged that she hasn’t been paying attention. I reminded her about January 6 and the facts revealed during the subsequent Congressional hearings, the implications of the Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling, and spoke about the dire collapse of women’s healthcare. What if her granddaughter gets pregnant from rape, or needs a medical abortion as a couple of my young friends have when their embryos were catastrophically malformed? Women are dying every day because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe I gave her enough information to persuade her to vote for Kamala, the only candidate defending basic rights for all Americans, and the only candidate who isn’t a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, and adjudicated a sexual predator. I’m committed to doing at least one thing every day to contribute to saving the American democracy that five generations of my ancestors have fought to preserve.

Where’s Wren?

Bibliofillies

Jan11
Books I unearthed while sorting through boxes in the attic…

I’m grateful for books. I’m grateful that my big brother taught me to read when I was just three years old. I remember sitting on the floor in the doorway between the well-lit kitchen and the dim living room where our parents sat, with a book between us, and him teaching me to make sense of the letters. I’m grateful that I love to read, that I have always loved to read, that my parents gave me lots of books, and that I have always had access to anything I could wish to read. I’m grateful that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, and grateful that someone (though it’s not clear exactly who) invented the novel. I’m grateful for bookbindings, libraries, magazines, and Kindle, and for paper and ink, typewriters, and Pages.

Today I’m grateful for the Bibliofillies, a bookclub Ellie started in April 2005, which has always had a cap of ten people, and still retains five founding members. There are currently nine of us, and we all live in the outskirts of our little town. For all those years we’ve met on the first Wednesday evening of each month, rotating among our homes, and our format has evolved through the years but a few things have remained constant.

We start each meeting with an author report by the hostess. OK, one thing has remained constant! There was a time when the hostess often chose to make a full meal for the group, but it’s always been ok to serve chips and dip instead. In summer we’ve met on patios, in winter we’ve carpooled through deep snow. Since Covid, we’ve met monthly on Zoom, and here’s the second thing that’s constant: the camaraderie that has developed among us through the years.

The first book we read was Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, a novel published in 1881. I remember meeting in Connie’s cozy adobe living room, and there was much dissent about the book. It was a good realization that we can sometimes have even more engaging conversations if we don’t all feel the same about a book. Since then, we’ve had an ongoing discussion on “What is Literature?” One husband calls us “The Smarty Pants Bookclub,” because there’s another book club in town, which many call “The Fun Bookclub.”

I can’t remember half of these, but here’s a (nearly complete) list of the books we read in our first ten years together:

  1. Portrait of a Lady Henry James
  2. Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
  3.  O Pioneers! Willa Cather 
  4.   A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
  5. Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia 
  6. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  7. The Haunted Monastery, Robert Van Gulik 
  8. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe 
  9. The Cave, Jose Saramago 
  10. Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence 
  11. A Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata 
  12. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  13. Passionate Nomad, Jane Geniesse 
  14. Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan 
  15. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
  16. East Wind: West Wind, Pearl S. Buck
  17. The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
  18. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
  19. Dearest Friend:  A Life of Abigail Adams, Lynne Withey
  20. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 
  21. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami 
  22. The Blind Assasin, Margaret Atwood 
  23. Dakota:  A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris 
  24. Arthur and George, Julian Barnes 
  25. Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer 
  26. The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz  
  27. Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov 
  28. Herzog, Saul Bellow 
  29. Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
  30. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
  31. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner 
  32. In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant 
  33. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
  34. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee 
  35. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller 
  36. Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett 
  37. The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley 
  38. The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love, Oscar Hijuelos 
  39. White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway
  40. The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
  41. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
  42. Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing 
  43. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 
  44. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
  45. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis 
  46. The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo 
  47. The Leopard, Guiseppe de Lampedusa 
  48. The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney 
  49. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery 
  50. The Quiet Girl, Peter Hoeg 
  51. Rabbit is Rich, John Updike
  52. A Mercy, Toni Morrison
  53. Desert, LeClezio
  54. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
  55. The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
  56. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
  57. The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
  58. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
  59. Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner
  60. Little Bee, Chris Cleave
  61. That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
  62. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
  63. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
  64. The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
  65. The Appointment, Herta Muller
  66. Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
  67. The Help, Kathyrn Stockett
  68. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
  69. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson
  70. Even Silence Has an End:  My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle, Ingrid Betancourt
  71. Tinkers, Paul Harding
  72. Dog of the South, Charles Portis
  73. Trading Dreams of Midnight, Diane McKinney-Whetstone  
  74. Undaunted:  The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, Dorothy Wickenden
  75. The Elephant’s Journey, Jose Saramago
  76. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
  77. Reader’s choice: Mario Vargas Llosa
  78. Killing Mother, Rita Clagett
  79. Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Christie Watson
  80. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
  81. The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness, Clay Jenkinson
  82. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
  83. The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
  84. The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
  85. The Invisible Ones, Stef Penney
  86. Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith & Love, Dava Sobel
  87. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
  88. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bolgakov
  89. Room: A Novel, Emma Donoghue
  90. The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
  91. The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
  92. The Stone Raft, Jose Saramago
  93. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
  94. Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder
  95. Mary Coin, Marisa Silver
  96. The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
  97. Proust at the Majestic, Richard Davenport-Hines
  98. Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
  99. What Maisie Knew, Henry James
  100. Reader’s choice: Books by Mo Yan
  101. The Sumbally Fallacy, Karen Weinant Gallob
  102. The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
  103. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Kay Joy Fowler
  104. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
  105. Americanah, Chimananda Adichie
  106. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Poe Ballantine
  107. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
  108. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
  109. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
  110. The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
  111. The Emperor of Paris, C.S. Richardson
  112. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast
  113. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Philipp Sendker
  114. Submergence, J.M. Ledgard
  115. The Antagonist, Lynn Coady
  116. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty 

Who can say we’re not fun? Now, I don’t have permission, so I can’t share the screenshot I took of us toward the end of our meeting tonight. It’s not Wednesday, you might be thinking if you’re on your toes: No, but last Wednesday we were derailed by circumstances beyond our control, which several wanted to keep watching on their screens, so this was our makeup meeting. If I could, I’d share the screenshot, and prove to everyone that we are too fun! Last month we read Louise Erdrich’s dystopian novel “Future Home of the Living God,” which started out a page turner, and ended up a colossally distressing parallel, in some ways, to our own current precarious political and societal cusp between democracy and fascism.

None of us gave the book a full Thumbs Up, and several gave it a solid Thumbs Down, and after a record-short discussion there was a pause that cried for some levity. I put on a pig nose and ears, and gave a tutorial on Zoom video filters, and soon we were all laughing. Rosie sat by the seaside with a pirate patch and hat, Candy wore a mustache with the cosmos behind her. Many combinations of backgrounds, frames, antlers, hats, noses, spectacles and hirsute adornments later, we called it a night. Smarty pants indeed! I am indeed grateful for my smarty-pants, big-hearted, open-minded, thoughtful and funny Bibliofillies.