Author: ellen

My high school reunion just got canceled. For the second time. And, though no one in the class wants to think so, given advancing age versus lingering virus, what was first being called “postponement” is likely to remain “cancellation.”

One of the organizers sent out the news in an email signed “lovingly.” “Lovingly, Mary Alice.” I’m not sure but I think she was a class officer, maybe a cheerleader. Definitely someone remembered widely, I’d guess, with much affection.

Maybe for an earlier reunion a casual “see ya next year” might have felt appropriate. Or something on the order of “stay well and stay tuned.” But with our high school years pretty distant in the rear view mirror , the tenderness of “lovingly” feels exactly right.

Tenderness, an idea I’ve thought and written about, feels totally at odds with what’s in the air around us, virally, societally, where things feel harsh and unsettled. That quality of loving acceptance, forgiveness, drawing near. It’s what feels comforting right now. It’s what I want and what I had been looking forward to at this reunion.

Early on, school reunions can feel a little show-offy. Look how well I’ve done, look at what I’ve accomplished in the 5, 10, 25 years since you last saw me. Yes, since YOU saw ME—those early ones may be a little more about that. But later, later if we’re get the chance, it’s about MY seeing YOU, and especially this year, checking in on how YOU are, all of you, the close friends, the ones I didn’t know so well, the ones whose names ring only distant bells. We share so much of who we are and I care about all of you.

Those later reunions are for recognizing that much of what passes for accomplishment can be laid at the doorstep of dumb luck. When we gather in those years, it is in gratitude at our good fortune.

And now it’s cancelled. Here we are again, after the hesitant , optimistic tip-toeing out in May and June, retreating again. We’re ordering a new supply of masks, crossing out dates on the calendar. And this time, instead of shock and determination, it feels a little more poignant especially when we cancel the occasions we’re not sure will ever happen. Now we are trying to set up a Zoom gathering, sharing hellos on Facebook. We’re thinking of who we’re not going to be seeing after all and worrying about who hasn’t been heard from. We’re remembering times we haven’t thought about in years, that added up to what our lives became.

Yes. “Lovingly.”

When my people celebrate redemption from slavery, we sit around the table and say, “Dayenu.” Dayenu—it would have been enough. The recounting of blessings is long—if we had been freed from slavery and not had the sea divided for us, not crossed to dry land, not been led to Mount Sinai. Etc., etc. You get the idea–every miracle would have been enough, every reason to be grateful enough and yet we were grateful that there were still more miracles to come.

For COVID Passover. with only two of us at the table, we named more personal miracles—the health of friends and family, satisfying work, the love and companionship we share. Dayenu. If we had been given only one of these it would have been enough. But we were grateful, too, that the blessings continued.

And in W. S. Merwin’s glorious poem, “Thanks,” he begins a litany of gratitude with “night falling” and “with our mouths full of food.” But then it gets complicated. Then “back from a mugging” and “after funerals” “we go on saying thank you.” And finally “with the animals dying around us” and “with nobody listening” still “we are saying thank you/ thank you we are saying and waving/ dark though it is.” Dark though it is.

And so we come to Juneteenth and I am looking at this celebration with these echoes of gratitude. It is not my celebration except as I celebrate every attempt to create a better, more just America. This is not mine to revel in, only to support and, on behalf of my country and my fellow inhabitants, to stand in amazed gratitude that in Texas on June 19, 1865 those enslaved for 2 ½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation—not to mention after 246 years of brutal enslavement–reacted in celebration of what they were reclaiming, rather than in bitter regret at what they had been so long denied. (Maybe the enslaved people already knew about their freedom, but needed the word to go officially to enslavers: no more. My people look always for midrash, the possible stories behind the stories.)

So there was January 1, 1863, the moment of the Emancipation Proclamation. and then there was Juneteenth—dayenu. And there was the brief optimism at the end of the Civil War, when in an astonishingly short time, the formerly enslaved people created schools and businesses and became elected representatives of the public. Dayenu That was followed by Jim Crow and the KKK, but still the descendants of the formerly enslaved volunteered to defend America in its wars—dayenu—even when they returned home to injustice. They fought and died for the right to vote and, when they could, turned out in impressive numbers—dayenu—although they are now watching that right being eroded in state after state. And it has been the descendants of the formerly enslaved people who have stood up time and again for justice for themselves and for others who have been denied it. They have been the true believers in what we like to think of as the promise of America.

And so it is Juneteenth across the country—dayenu. But not yet enough.

Don’t we wake up every day now upset about something? There’s enough worrisome news to go around. Enough to fill our every waking—and wake-up—moment with concern, if not with outright despair. But my issue on this gray Monday morning is this: in the early hours of Sunday morning someone tried to burn the contents of the ballot drop box outside the Boston Public Library.

Yes, I am outraged and horrified that this could happen in one of our country’s great foundational cities outside one of that city’s most significant public institutions. But what gets me just as much is that the Boston Globe’s story about it ran in the second section. Ok, in a banner on the first page, but still the second section. “Metro” is a perfectly fine, important section, the place where you expect to read about who’s considering a run for mayor and how remote learning is working in the schools. But am I the only person who thinks the burning of ballots is a page one story?

The B1 placement feels like part of Boston’s—oh I hate to say it because I really do love this city, but—smugness. Its assumption that destroying ballots might happen in, say, Alabama or North Dakota. But. Not. Here. Feels like part of Boston’s history of looking away from racial inequalities and injustices that exist, yes, right here. In what we need to recognize is a majority minority city.

We should not be looking away from any of it. We pat ourselves on the back at the outpouring of counter-protestors when a “straight pride” or anti-Black Lives Matter or whatever demonstration occurs and, yes, of course, there are more people of good will than not. And we’re happy and relieved to know that. And we are a city in which big first steps toward greater justice for more people have been taken. But we can’t take anything for granted.

We’re not there yet if “there” is a place of equal opportunity and equal dignity and respect. We can’t look away from that. Here is where our country began its struggle for self-government. It’s also where someone tried to burn ballots.

On this morning when Louise Gluck has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and in light of last night’s vice-presidential candidates’ debate, I am thinking two things.

1—I once heard Louise Gluck say that she didn’t describe herself as a poet, but, rather, as someone who has written poetry in the past and may write poetry again in the future.

She was, at that point, the author of several books and was a past Poet Laureate of the United States and the possessor of many other credentials attesting to her stature as a, yes, poet. And I thought, oh no, isn’t that depressing? If SHE can’t consider herself a poet, who can? Certainly I, who place myself in the category of less than minor poet, have no standing.

But at about 11 pm on November 8, 2016, I began a long silence as a writer of anything, including poetry. And in that silence, Gluck’s words began to seem hopeful. I HAD written poetry in the past. And as for the future, how can anyone ever know? Maybe.

As it turned out, my silence did end, finally, but I still consider it freeing to think that what I have done in the past and may do in the future is not a given in the present, but a gift. Poetry may come to me, maybe even easily from time to time. Or maybe—and more likely–only after long, hard work. but it may come. How can anyone ever know?

2—The fly. Was there ever a more famous fly in history than the one that sat atop Mike Pence’s head for a full two minutes and three seconds (someone—not I–timed it!) while he talked first about racism and then about the administration’s respect for the military? As if beckoned, it landed just as he said the word “minorities.” Memes and comments ensued, of course. The Biden campaign, within minutes, debuted its new fly swatter; I have no doubt that, had the fly landed on Biden’s snowy peak, they could have have easily turned that into a win., too.

But the fly got me thinking about still life painting, which I love. All those luscious ripe fruits, the abundant meats and cheeses, flowers at the peak of their bloom. All presented ready for savoring. And there, almost unnoticed, is the fly. The small insistent reminder that the things of this world, no matter how golden, are waiting for their inevitable ending.

I voted by mail the other day. Got the ballot in my mailbox, filled it out right away. Within the hour it was on its way. And the big surprise to me was how exciting it was.

Admittedly, my experience of voting has been positive, even when the outcomes have not gone the way I hoped. It’s hard to write about voting easily knowing that is still not a right that every eligible citizen can count on. I am fortunate to have never had my access to this right impaired or denied. But I have lived in the country that resulted from elections in which, for many, that could not be said, and I have tried to help ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

But this year for me and so many others, voting is different. (Well, what isn’t different this year?) I wasn’t sure what voting by mail would feel like.

I’m a person who has never missed an election. Not a mid-term, not a primary. Certainly not a presidential. I relish it, every bit, even the long lines. Another caveat: a long line where I have voted is not the same as a long line in neighborhoods where there are those who want to discourage voting. I know I’m lucky. I love the Norman Rockwell-ness of the moment, love thinking about the historic pageant I am part of. I love seeing the supporters standing with their signs the specified distance away and smiling at the ones for my candidates.

I love seeing the some of the same familiar poll workers year after year and even having the same sudden uncertainty—which ward? which district? Worrying that I’m not coloring in the ovals properly. Watching the ballot slide into the machine.

I even love the borderline hokey “I Voted” sticker, and I am not unmindful of its sacredness for those whose right to vote is not an automatic privilege of citizenship.

So how would it feel to do it all by mail? To mail an absentee ballot (which the current president says is “good’), which is exactly the same thing as a vote-by-mail ballot (which he says is “bad”)? I did vote by absentee ballot once before, but that was because I was going to be away on election day. (I heard from a tour guide in Kakadu National Park in Australia that Clinton had won.)

This time there was no question: I was certainly not going to stand in a line to vote with an uncontrolled virus abroad in the land! When Dr. D. and I got our primary ballots in the mail the other day, we immediately opened them and carefully filled in the oval on the one contested race we were thinking about. But there was another one: register of probate. And here’s where the voting at home option works so well. We had no idea whom to vote for for register of probate, so we did a little online research and cast a more informed vote than we would have in person.

And then Dr. D. and I made it into a little moment. We took our ballots to our corner mailbox and took photos of each other mailing the ballots as our “I Voted” moment. It felt, surprisingly, every bit as momentous as pulling the lever. It felt real, a little scary, a little exhilarating. It felt like democracy. Does that sound as hokey as the stickers? Maybe. Made me feel a little teary, too.

I was delighted to read this morning that “Apeirogon,” a remarkable book by Colum McCann, a favorite author, is long-listed for the Booker Prize. It’s a truly outstanding and prize-worthy book and I’m definitely going to finish it. Someday. Soon.

Why do we not finish books? I can’t be alone in not finishing a book. Or I finish it but only, as with “Apeirogon,” after taking a long break. For a variety of reasons.

One reason is what happened when I read the David Blight biography of Frederick Douglass. The book won lots of awards and had excellent reviews, but I didn’t like it. I’ve heard Blight speak and found him interesting and engaging, but not in this book. What I kept thinking as I read was I wish Ron Chernow had written this. Chernow, who falls in love with his subject, who maybe wants even a little too much for the reader to love him (yes, so far always him), too. He makes us feel we know Grant, Washington, and Hamilton (even before L-MM) and if we don’t completely understand them, then at least we see the human beings they were.

When I read Blight’s Douglass biography I got interesting information, but none of that sense of seeing the person, no sense of how he became arguably one of the most significant people of the 19th century. Here was this remarkable man who, only a few years after he freed himself from enslavement–where learning to read and write was an act of bravery, ingenuity, and luck–was speaking and writing eloquently, persuasively, with great sophistication and who went on to live a life of enormous influence. In search of that person, I took a break from the biography, read Douglass’s three autobiographies, and only then went back to finish the Blight.

Zadie Smith is a whole other matter. Her writing is so gorgeous that I kind of get full, as if I’ve had too much chocolate, and I have to stop. I finished “White Teeth,” but since then I just read until I’ve had enough and then I stop.

Of course there are books I just don’t like enough to go further with. One like that just last week, in fact. I won’t name names: someone worked hard and just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean other people wouldn’t.

“Apeirogon” is in a category as unique as the time in which I’m reading it. I bought it in March at the wonderful Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, as I was traveling through the south seeing 1960s Civil Rights history. Square Books is across the street from a Confederate statue, erected in 1907 in retro honoring of those who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” Ok, well. I started reading it right away at the end of each long day of sight-seeing.

And then on March 14 I came home. Through an almost-empty airport on a half-empty plane to the world of COVID-19 and shut-down and masks and staying home; a world of illness and death everywhere and venal ineptitude here. How could I then resume reading this tragic story, even one so beautifully written? No, I immediately began immersing myself in plague-related books. And strangely, also books set during the Holocaust, as if I needed the reassurance that people—even fictional ones—have gone through hard times before and survived.

One of these days I’ll finish “Apeirogon.” I only have about 50 pages left. But I want to wait until I can put the sadness before me into the background enough to honor the story Colum McCann is telling, to feel the power of that story’s sadness without the daily sadness intruding.

Don’t you love it when two books you love–each a treasure on its own–talk to each other? So it is that my now second most recently re-read book, “Happiness,” by Aminatta Forna, is in a relationship with my newest read and immediately re-read book, “The Light of the World,” by Elizabeth Alexander.

It hardly seems to matter that two of the people whose company I want to continue living in are fictional and two are real. And, though I mention these four, there are also others–a fictional nephew and two real sons–whom I want to spend more time with.

All right, maybe any book with a glimmer of sunshine in it would grab me these days, situated, as we are, in a sludge of fretful time. My recent obsessive reads have been Holocaust- or plague-related that I seem to need to assure myself that people have survived worse times. And if that makes me sound despondent, I am not. I feel fortunate, hunkered down as I am in health and comfort and with my favorite person. The only day I felt actual despair was the Fourth of July, but let’s not go into that.

Even as I wrote the word sunshine, I was a little taken aback, given that both “Happiness” and “The Light of the World” have much sadness and darkness in them. So there’s that survival aspect. But what these books really have in common is love. Savoring the world’s pleasures. Choosing to see them. Savoring the company of those one loves, family and friends. Saving up the events of the day, the mundane and those that sparkle, for later recounting. Enlarging the joys by sharing them with a beloved.

I read “Happiness” onscreen, which for me means on my phone. I know, it doesn’t sound inviting to some and I mostly prefer the actual page. But when I started reading on my phone I was surprised at how much I liked it as a way to have my book with me all the time and also be in what felt like an intimate relationship with it, there in the palm of my hand. Maybe I’m channeling e.e.cummings and carrying it on my phone is the closest thing to in my heart. In his new book, “Convenient Amnesia,” my friend Donald Vincent carries favorite reading, poems by Matthew Dickman, “in my backpack.” Whatever works, especially right now. We want to keep close what we love. And so, not wanting to be without “The Light of the World” when I have to return it to the library, I think I’ll buy it to carry with me.

Already I can see it’s hard to part with. I press it on Dr. D. to read, then snatch it back so I can continue my second reading. Did I mention there are recipes? I’m planning to try a couple. Maybe, I can invite all of them—Aminatta, Jean, and Attila, Elizabeth and Ficre, to sit at down together with Dr. D. and me. Maybe, since we can’t be in anyone’s actual company, that vision is as real as any other plan I might make. We could all enjoy the food, drink some good wine together, laugh and talk. Everyone would enjoy each other’s company. There would be a lot of love around the table. What we need.

“Seeking Justice” That’s what it says on a button I wore this morning to join the ranks of those standing up in cities across the country in the wake of yet another police taking of a Black life they didn’t think mattered.

We stood quietly, masked and appropriately distanced, spread out along a busy stretch of street. We waved at the honking cars that passed. And the honking garbage truck. And the two honking city buses.

It’s been a long sad week in America. George Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Amy Cooper, short-leashing her dog as she called the police on bird-watching Christian Cooper, told the 911 operator an “African American” man was threatening her. A third man was arraigned for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through a Georgia suburb. And all the while the deaths of Americans—a disproportionate number in communities of color—crept past 100,000 in the face of federal lack of preparedness and disinformation.

That those of us whose lives have been made easier by the color of our skin must stand up to demand change is beyond question. That this has gone on far too long is also beyond question. It is late, but if we are more lucky than we deserve to be, maybe it is not too late.

This morning those of us standing on that street and streets through the country did a small thing. We showed up. We stood with others. We bore witness.

As I stood there, a young black man walked past me and said quietly, “Thank you, guys.”

What a comfort in this moment when we are battened down in our own tight worlds to read Redhead by the Side of the Road and enter Anne Tyler’s. Hers is a world where connections aren’t taken lightly, but are, instead, thoughtful and deliberate, even a little awkward. Maybe a place like where we’re all living right now.

Redhead fits right in to what we think of as Tyler’s world, with Micah and his modest and just slightly odd life. On the surface he appears to have connections to a lot of people. He’s a tech expert and gets calls for help every day. One of his several sisters—Tyler’s men tend to have hovering, attentive siblings nearby, often sisters—checks in and expects his presence at family gatherings. As superintendent of his apartment building he knows not only who needs a new towel bar or light switch, but the state of their health or dating life. There’s also his girlfriend and a preppy teenaged boy who appears on his doorstep in a slightly paraphrased are-you-my-mother moment.

But he experiences them at a slight remove; his business name, Tech Hermit, speaks volumes. Not that his distance has rough edges. He’s not pushing anyone away, at least not consciously. He just isn’t entirely noticing that they’re in his life. He’s there, but a little bit not. Sort of like being on Zoom.

In our quarantine moment, when our attachments to each other are maybe a little too close or sadly too far, we’re all right there with Micah. All our relationships need to be thought through; nothing can be taken for granted. Like him, our daily life doesn’t just happen. It takes some thinking for him to fit activities and people into a regimented life: he has days and times allotted to running, mopping floors, and cleaning out one cabinet at a time in rotation. He lives his life the way he sees it, even if his vision is a little circumscribed. Even the redhead of the title is—spoiler alert—the product of myopic Micah’s going out for a run without his glasses.

So isn’t that pretty much where we are right now? Trying to think through the kinds of daily activities that only recently were routine? Trying to figure out why our connections to other people suddenly feel a little baffling and in need of conscious attention? But Tyler doesn’t leave us without comfort or guidance. Micah is redeemable. He’s willing to take the trouble required. He listens and opens himself to the deeper connection. He sees the value in trying out a new normal. If he were here right now with us he’d be venturing onto Zoom.

The virus may be new, but the response feels familiar for anyone who was alive 35 or 40 years ago. Then the panic was around a mysterious cluster of diseases. Rare conditions suddenly appeared—a severe pneumonia, bizarre cancers—and usually treatable conditions became dire. No cures were available; death often swiftly followed diagnosis.

This is ugly: A heavily affected group then was also considered by some to be a throw-away, not the old folks (as in “ok Boomer”), but gay men and IV drug users. The larger community didn’t start worrying until some of them became infected.

There was so much unknown then about the nature of the disease and how it was contracted. Both then and now, because testing was problematic, it was impossible in the early days to know who was and who wasn’t infected, who could and could not transmit the illness. The key, the only weapon, was education. In the earlier case, education about the use of condoms; now, education about physical distancing. The magic bullet was information.

And this is the really ugly part: In both cases the occupant of the White House was far from proactive in offering the information.

The first official government mention of deaths from what would eventually be known as HIV or AIDS came in June, 1981. By 1985, When Ronald Reagan first mentioned it, more than 12,000 Americans had died.
And now we are on the verge of having this President announce an end to the physical distancing so many of us are practicing in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19. Most of us who are staying at home are healthy. We are doing this for the communal good to stop spreading the virus. But the President is impatient, it’s said, unhappy with the effect on the economy. He wants this shutdown to be over. When distancing is our only weapon against the virus, he is contemplating taking that away. Instead of urging patience and reminding us how important this sacrifice is, he undermines it and questions in every public word and action, even as the medical experts try to contradict him. (It was Anthony Fauci, of course, who led the effort that ultimately made progress against that disease, too.)

Just saying…