Author: ellen

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Affecting images

Recently I went to a benefit dinner for the incomparable organization Facing History and Ourselves, which was founded by my friend, the incomparable Margot Stern Strom. Attendees were asked to name an image that has had a lasting impression on them. There were plenty of iconic ones to choose from and people mentioned the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, images from the ‘60s civil rights struggles in the South, RFK’s funeral train. This being Boston, someone even mentioned the Red Sox’s curse-breaking moment.

Along with all the public images I thought about was a private one, a photograph that is a touchstone for me. I described it this way in a piece I wrote about my late friend Adele Margolis:

“I have an old photograph, a picture of a surprise party given for (my aunt) Alice. It is during World War II and she is about to move from Philadelphia to Washington where her husband will be stationed in the Navy and she will work in a government office. Adele is there, with all the friends and relatives and everyone is smiling, even the ones whose husbands are already overseas, even my father who has not yet gone to Italy and been wounded.

“At the moment of the photograph there is a kind of glamour about them, in their peep-toe platform shoes, drapey print dresses, and upswept hairdos that look deliciously retro now. Certainly no one was wearing anything expensive and probably many of the dresses were mended, but there is an elegance about them. They look unselfconsciously like grown-ups. I can’t imagine any of them spending time wondering about the state of some celebrity’s marriage or asking, “does this dress make me look fat?” They have dignity. Not in some stuffy artificial way, but they seemed to have a sense of themselves as people with a purpose. People who looked for the best of what a far-from-perfect world was offering them and who tried to make something beautiful, something large of their lives.”

What that photograph says to me is that we have only this one time, this finite moment we are given, and that we, at least to some extent, get to choose how to use it. We can fill our time with things that will have little consequence, even to us, in the long run. Or, as Adele and Alice were wise enough to see from a very early age, we can consciously create our lives. They both created art but they also both created deep, rich relationships that nurtured them and those around them through long and sometimes hard years. What keeps them in my mind as role models is their insistence on not frittering their time away, but in using it thoughtfully for pleasure, for greater understanding of the world, for being human in the fullest and best possible sense.

They might have been astonished that I hold them as role models. They didn’t think they were doing anything unusual or heroic, just living their lives the best way they could. But that’s exactly the thing that shines out from that photograph, that continues to be a beacon for me.

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Small Connections

One of my little favorite New York Times features is Metropolitan Diary, a column of little stories of the city that appears on Monday. Over the years I’ve been in it a couple of times and am even in the book of collected columns.

In today’s Metropolitan Diary a contributor named Mimi Alperin, wrote that, in the ’70s, her son would travel to and from school on the Fifth Avenue bus. During his daily trips he made friends with two of the route’s bus drivers. Alperin related how her son insisted on inviting one of the drivers to his bar mitzvah. And she told how, just recently, the other driver saw her husband and asked about the son, who is now an adult with his own children.

The story involved two things I like to think about. One is what’s now called “free range children.” Back when I and my children grew up they were just called “children.” But now that the world feels dangerous to us, we are reluctant to let children do the things we took for granted, like taking a bus or walking around the neighborhood alone.

It’s astounding how we no longer notice the absence of children. Not little children who appropriately cling to a parent’s hand when they’re walking down the street. But children who are old enough to begin, one small supervised step at a time, learning how to navigate in the world on their own. There’s a street near my house where, from time to time I have glimpsed a boy, maybe about 10 or 12, walking. Just walking. By himself! A free-range child! I am always happy to see him and I applaud the courage of the parent who has gone against fears of danger and criticism to allow him this freedom.

I also live near a college attended by some of the world’s smartest kids who seem not to know how to cross a street safely. I always think they could have benefitted from a little dose of free-range activity when they were younger.

The second thing I loved about Alperin’s story was the way it acknowledged the relationships we have with all the people in our lives with whom we share an almost unseen connection. We don’t know their names and we hardly do more than nod or smile to each other. The person bringing our mail. The supermarket cashier we like to go to even if her line is a little longer. The gas station attendant who knows right away that we want regular and we’ll be paying cash. It’s these almost unseen interactions that make a neighborhood, that help make us who we are. If we move or if they retire we won’t say goodbye. We might not even notice the absence for a while. But these faces we recognize make our daily lives recognizable to ourselves.

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Our ancestors were wandering Arameans

For those of you who haven’t spent time around a Passover seder table, the reference to wandering Arameans comes from a classic line in the seder narrative. For me, Passover 2011–or, more properly 5771–carries faint echoes of a book I just finished about a father who was, at least in terms of language, a wandering Aramean.

The book is “My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar. Sabar is an American-born, California-raised journalist. His father, Yona Sabar, was born into a 2700-year-old Kurdish Jewish community in Iraq and ultimately became a world-renowned scholar of Aramaic, the nearly -extinct language he grew up speaking.

The book is a fascinating account of Yona Sabar’s journey and of Ariel Sabar’s often fraught relationship with a father different from all the other Southern California fathers. Its references to Baghdad and Mosul and other places so prominently in the news in our new century, remind us of another aspect of the area’s long history. It tells us of a time when such harmony and respect existed among Muslim, Christian, and Jew that Muslims would share the “holiday bread”–matzah, of their Jewish neighbors. And, for me, it opened a door on a community I knew nothing about.

But at this season of sitting around a table and handing down ancient tales, the book was a reminder of how much can be lost between generations and how much the transmission of our history–human, familial, cultural–relies on retelling the stories. Retelling and listening.

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The puzzle of poetry

The phone rang and Cameron, age 8, wanted to know if I could tell him the name of a specific type of poem. Oh, the pressure. He described the poem: four lines, one word per line, one letter changed in each word, and all the words somehow related. I had no idea. “Umm …..puzzle poem?” I tried. “No,” he said, “every poem is a puzzle.”

So true and how wonderful that he already knows this. Mention poetry in any random group and you can see people’s tension levels rise like boat-lifting tides. The truth is, even the savviest people can be nervous around poetry. But I’m thinking that Cameron is on the right track. A poem is a puzzle. It should be. It shouldn’t give itself away too easily. It should hold something in reserve for a second, a fifth, a fiftieth reading. And the reader shouldn’t approach it as a fence to scale–or worse, to be shut out by. It should, instead, be a puzzle to pick away at, getting satisfaction with each piece that drops into place.

I tried the puzzle challenge Cameron gave me:
bare
bark
lark
lurk

and:

love
live
life
lift

There was no name for it. Cameron finally confessed that he had made up the form. So we’re calling it the mind-twisting thought-confounding letter-changing four-line poem. Try one!

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Elizabeth Taylor, AIDS Crusader

Maybe you don’t remember what the early 1980s were like in AIDS history. The briefest timeline: July, 1981, the first New York Times mention of a strange illness affecting gay men; September, 1985, President Reagan finally mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time in response to a reporter’s question. There was no cure, only prevention and there was public squeamishness about using the words that could educate enough to save lives.

It was a time when landlords evicted sick tenants, when funeral homes refused to handle the bodies of those who had died of AIDS, and when hospitalized AIDS patients had their meal trays left on the floor outside their rooms. Each year brought frustratingly few answers and rising numbers of deaths.

In this atmosphere Elizabeth Taylor spoke out. She was brave, she was relentless. She raised money, she raised awareness. She appeared in public with AIDS patients, touching people who had been pronounced untouchable.

At the time I lived in New York and was a volunteer for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. It was a remarkable time. Among all the hateful things that happened, I also saw astounding courage. I knew people whose willingness to respond was nearly unimaginable. There were others I did not know personally whose humanity shone like a beacon in those dark times. I will never forget them. Elizabeth Taylor was one.

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Sticking it to books

Where was that book? I was sure I had it on the shelf, but now, when I want to read it again, I can’t find it. (The book was “Had Slaves,” a beautiful, powerful collection of poems by Catherine Sasanov written after her discovery that her family, three generations ago, had owned other human beings.)

Well, I’ll order up a used copy from Amazon…hmmm…”very good condition.” Ok. Click

So imagine my horror when I opened the package and found this lovely book with a sticker marring its very good condition. The sticker said, “Sell me back” and had the name of the book reseller I had bought it from. Ok, I’ll just peel the label off…but no. This was stuck on with world-class adhesive. Supersonic jumbo jets could be held together with this adhesive. When I finally managed to remove a little edge, the spot remained sticky. So just forget about putting it on the shelf, unless I wanted Sasanov to be permanently attached to Schor.

In horror I sent an e-mail to Donovan, the head of the company that sold the book and got a note back saying that most of their business was in books for college students who “typically do not have any intention of keeping a book.”

I’ll leave aside the thought that “Had Slaves” would be a book one would want to get rid of. This wasn’t “Introduction to Organic Chemistry” after all. I’m going for the bigger picture here, the total disconnect between the people who sell back their books as soon as they no longer “need” them and those of us who add and add and add books to our shelves. Since I’ve had my Kindle I’ve given more thought to this–which books do I simply want to read and which do I want to own?

Ownership of type on a screen does feel fundamentally different from ownership of a bound set of pages. And I’m guessing that the prevalence of e-books changes our relationship to the physical object called “book.”

Donovan, whose company stuck the sticker on “Had Slaves,” thanked me for my note and said they were checking to see if their supplier could find stickers that could peel off easily. That made me feel better. Until I realized that he had said stickers that “peal off.” Was that like crossing his fingers behind his back, or in this case, his screen? If so, I hope he doesn’t have any of my books.

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Disappointing birds

We were tested and found wanting. It looked hopeful for a while. Maybe I jinxed it by worrying. Last week I woke one morning, pulled up the blind, and there, on the arbor outside the window, were two mourning doves. Just sitting there, looking round and self-important. I had never seen doves up there, but there they were. For a long time.

And the next day, too, not first thing in the morning, but later on in the day, they came back, sat there for a little while. I thought maybe they were looking over property, finding good real estate for a new home. We have nice real estate. Choose us.

The third day one of the doves nestled in among the dried wisteria twigs. Trying it on for size, I thought. Are they going to pick us? Are they? Are they?

In baby (bird) mode, I got excited, starting looking out the window more and more often. Started the bird equivalent of knitting booties–wondered if I should leave food out, what kind, where.

Then I began to worry. Squirrels can climb up onto the arbor. That’s not safe. And once we saw a hawk. It’s exposed up there–shouldn’t they find a more hidden place?

Maybe I worried them away. I haven’t seen the doves in several days. Maybe they’re looking over other properties, still considering. But I have the feeling they’ve turned us down. I try to cheer myself up by thinking about how much hosing down of the patio would have been needed. And maybe the chirping would have been annoying. But we would have had a front row view of the nest-building, the eggs, the babies, the learning to fly, the flyig away, the empty nest. Oh, well..

At least it looks as if spring may really be on its way.

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Michael Cunningham’s “By Nightfall”

Did you read “By Nightfall?” I’ve just finished it and am thinking about it and would be interested in knowing what other people thought about it. At first i thought it was pretentious. Then I thought it was wonderful. Then I thought it was appalling. Then I thought it was kind of wonderful. Then…

There is much here that I love to see in a book–flawed human characters with at least a minimal amount of self-knowledge, serious thinking about art and its creation–and much that I dislike–coy references to the tragically hip, plotting that sometimes feels driven more by what the author needed to have happen than what the characters might have done.

And yet….and yet….I think I liked it, I really liked it. You…?

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Best in Hounds


Here’s a baby picture of one of my favorite dogs. Awwww. I’m posting it in honor of one of my favorite television events which begins tonight, the Westminster Kennel Club Show. I happened on it by accident a few years ago and fell under the spell of Margot, a Scottish Deerhound who was chosen Best in Hounds. You can see a picture here of a deerhound, though not Margot, who was ever so much lovelier. I have never before been spellbound by a dog, but Margot was something special.

She was elegant she was sleek, she was self-possessed. And something more, something that is, I think, the reason I remember Margot with such fondness: she had dignity.

Dignity is hard to come by these days. It’s a lost virtue that sounds old-fashioned, a little fusty, a little doddering. We hardly ever think about dignity any more. Certainly few people aspire to it in these days of reality tv and tell-all media exposure. Even my blog feels so much more public than anything I’ve written before and I’m never unaware of the balance between trying to maintain privacy and veering toward over-sharing. I confess it’s more than a little embarrassing to admit that I’m a groupie for a former Best in Hounds.

There is a grace to dignity, a willingness to leave some things unsaid, some aspect of our selves private. The very public nature of so much of our daily discourse has good points, to be sure. But there remains something attractive and compelling about not pouring ourselves completely into the common well of conversation. If we hold back something, something just for ourselves or those closest to us, part of what we keep is dignity. That’s not just for hounds, is it?

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Humbled by their voices

The news is mesmerizing, all the people orderly and thoughtful, gathering to insist their voices be heard. Although I cannot read the signs being held up, I am awed by the reasoned comments I have heard, the women and men standing insistently and surprisingly patiently, waiting for Mubarak to announce that he is leaving, confident that he will do so. Listening to them speak, I cannot help but think about what passes these days for public discourse in my own country, the self-proclaimed beacon of democracy. What would a similar demonstration look like here? Would there be similar camaraderie and mutual support in evidence? Calm discourse? Trash pickup and recycling? How long might it be, if the demonstration were here, before someone opted for a “second amendment solution”? We have no idea what will unfold next in Egypt but right now all I can see is a lesson in democracy and in the ideal of human rights.