Author: ellen

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It’s starting to get ugly

Is Boston’s finest hour over? All our neighbors who lost life and limb, those who dug deep into themselves and performed heroically without a second thought, those who courageously kept a community safe–has the honor of those moments come down to this: a shabby anti-tug-of-war over the body of the dead bomber?  You take him–no, you take him.  As if the ground isn’t big enough–hasn’t always been big enough–to hold both saints and sinners. 
Does it take one bit of honor away from the injured, the first responders, the newly dead to find within ourselves the common decency to allocate a scrap of land in which to lay this body? Does  burying him condone in the slightest way his despicable actions?  Is this puny villain the worst history has ever produced that there should be no earth that could receive him?  Doesn’t the earth cover equally those whose memories are blessed and those who are reviled?
Is the gentleness, the kindness we had for one another three weeks ago now doomed to be replaced by free-floating hostility and suspicion.  Does this cruelty do anything to help anyone heal? Is it going to help our city? If hatred and meanness become the legacy of our experience, all the flowers and the teddy bears left and the tears shed at Copley Square will mock us.  
Boston, I am sad to say you are looking a little less strong. 
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Read these books!

My friend Lora looked at my bookshelves and said, “So many old friends…Laurie Colwin, Penelope Lively….” So I knew I could trust any book recommendation she would make.  She suggested, “When We Were the Kennedys,” and I got it immediately and, dear reader, now I recommend it to you.
“When We Were the Kennedys” is Monica Wood’s memoir of childhood, specifically 1963, when she was 9 and her father died suddenly and her family’s life was upended. And, as the title suggests, it takes in the events of November of that year, when another little girl lost her father suddenly, unsettling the life of a nation. 
It is beautifully written, filled with tenderness for Wood’s child-self trying to figure out her new “Dadless” life and for the people around her. She is forgiving of flaws, whether in people or in Mexico, Maine, the town where she grows up with its dominating paper mill–”the Oxford”–and its way of life about to vanish. She forgives the Norkuses, the landlords who complain of “too much stairs,” terrorize visiting friends, and snoop through the family’s garbage. She forgives the missteps of her adored uncle. She forgives her mother’s desperate turning to the oblivion of sleep. Although it’s possible she may have come to this only later, she gives her younger self the ability to see huge generosity around her: an older sister who comes home to run the household, the younger sisters who don’t hold it against her that she often abandons them for her friend Denise, Denise’s parents who wrap her into the wholeness of their family.  
Yes, the book begins with death, but it is about life: that’s what I’m saying as I urge it on  people. Actually, that’s what I said about Will Schwalbe’s luminous “End of Your Life Book Club,” too. And about “Last Friends,” the third novel in Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” trilogy. Yes, I realize I’m pressing these books on people with the disclaimer that “it’s about death, but it’s really about life.”  (Even as I drive a friend to a radiation appointment, I’m touting one of these books. Really?) 
Maybe it’s some confluence of beautifully-written books that seem to have this common element. Maybe it’s my age and the fact that each new day seems to bring new worries for friends. Maybe right now it’s the fact that it is two sunny spring Mondays past Patriot’s Day in Boston and you never do know, do you? But maybe, too, it’s a  recognition that that’s what life is. 

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Passing understanding

To say the week has been eventful here in Boston is quite the understatement. When you think of last Saturday, with its preparations for the Marathon still underway and all the people still alive and well…The events have been horrifying, frightening, enraging. And most of all, baffling, at least to me. The things I don’t understand pile up: What kind of person methodically plans for the greatest possible harm to the greatest number of people and then casually walks away? How many of the daily small insults life hands all of us add up to wanting to maim and kill everyone in sight, people you’ve never met, people of all ages gathered in celebration? How angry does someone have to be to want to rain down thoughtless destruction?
During the day of lockdown, I thought about how frightening it felt to be a few miles away from where the main action was going on and how much more so it must have been in the immediate area and I wondered how were parents explaining this to their children in a calming and helpful way.
Last night, after the capture of “suspect #2,” I understood the outpouring of relief and people pilling out into a mild spring evening that suddenly felt safe. But after the first few minutes of the televised jubilant outpouring, I was baffled once again. The shouts of “USA,” which at first felt like shout-outs to all the police and other responders who had handled the crisis with professional efficiency, admirable openness, and great courage began to feel like something else, something ugly.  And I thought about a Facebook post in which a group of people held up a hand-lettered sign offering sympathy to the people of Boston and noting that this is what life is like every day in Syria. I thought about the courage it must take to wear a hijab or an Arabic-sounding name in 21st- century America.
Among the acts of generosity that came out of these days was an e-mail I received from my temple.  Temple Israel had cancelled sabbath services because of the lockdown and the clergy had created a cyber-service we could attend wherever we were. There were some words that helped balance my sense of bewilderment. 
This Shabbat was one of the few during the year in which two Torah portions are read. They are Acharei Mot (my daughter Deborah’s bat mitzvah portion) and Kedusha. As our senior rabbi, Ronne Friedman, explained, there is a lesson in simply knowing the translation of the names: Acharei mot–“after the deaths,” (referring to the incomprehensible deaths of Aaron’s two sons) and Kedusha–”be holy.” One of our other rabbis, Elaine Zecher, talked about how when what we think and know reaches our hearts and moves us to do what we know is right, we can “make our lives a blessing.” 
There is still so much I don’t understand about the past five days, and I’m know I’m not alone in that. But these three phrases are tools to build today with: Make our lives a blessing. After the deaths, be holy.
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Waking up this morning in Boston

The day after the marathon in Boston is usually a little exhilarating, a little morning-after. The race winners are the kings and queens of the city. And anyone, in fact, who’s limping a little, wearing their BAA jackets, or simply came here from out of town to watch is treated like company. Where I used to live, two blocks from the finish line, it was easy to get cynical about all the ectomorphs crowding the neighborhood and the police barricades that made crossing the street even on foot a challenge and the helicopters whap-whap-whapping overhead all race day. 
But marathon day is Boston’s day to shine. It’s a huge city-wide party. The schools are closed–it’s a legal holiday, Patriots’ Day–and the mood is festive. Nearly every inch of the 26.2 marathon route is lined with spectators. The Sox play an early game that finishes right around the time the first runners are heading into Fenway territory and the fans, uplifted or disgruntled, pour out into nearby Kenmore Square to cheer them. 
But today, of course, is different. Today “Boston” has become the same kind of code word as “Newtown” and “Columbine” and, even earlier “Dallas.” All the facts of the city drop away and what remains in the name is a single ugly moment. The Internet is filled with symbols of solidarity with and prayers and wishes for that Boston.  In time the city and even the marathon will recover and reclaim its identity, adding this to its history and going on, But right now, this morning, “Boston” stands for only one thing and it will be a long, hard convalescence.
The poetry reading I was supposed to be part of tonight has been cancelled: its location is now a crime scene. Dr. D. said this morning, though, that maybe the poets should go and read our work on street corners. Strangely, I was part of a reading two nights after 9/11, and the room then was packed with people who clearly felt the need to hear poetry.  Because after all glass and gore is cleaned up from the streets and after the wounded have been tended to and the dead begun to be mourned, after the investigation has unearthed whatever clues and answers are to be found, what, finally, can offer an answer? Maybe only poetry has answers for us at a time like this. Poetry, which tells us nothing really, that we didn’t know already at some deep level, yet which we devour for its important secret message. Who knows why people make careful plans to maim and kill? Who knows why this keeps happening with sickening frequency?  
For today, a poem by Yehuda Amichai: 
The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range – about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometres away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

(Translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes.)
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In praise of old poets

I was just reading David Ferry’s new collection, “Bewilderment,” winner of this year’s National Book Award. He is a wonderful poet who has had much well-deserved recognition in his career. Now in his late 80s, he is writing heartbreaking and brave poems about mortality. No, with a nod to Elizabeth Bishop and her command to write it: he is writing about death. The deaths of friends, of his wife, of Eurydice and the warriors returning from Troy. And in the not-very-distant future, his own. Considered unflinchingly. The book is astounding. 
I have felt stunned like this reading late poems by Galway Kinnell, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, and a few treasured others. What grabs me is the wisdom, the clear-eyed ability to just write it.–to write about our inevitable end, to mourn our lives during our lives, to be sad to miss what we will miss.  This is the great subject, what Henry James called, “the distinguished thing.” 
Reading this work feels like stepping into a sacred place where nothing need be left unsaid. There is sadness here, regret. But it feels as if these autumnal poems hold a hand out to all of us companions in finite time. 

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The every day of your life book club

When I gave my friend Carol this book for her birthday I had to cover the title with a little note that said, “The Living with Books Book Club,” because I didn’t want her to think that 60 was anywhere near “The End of (her) Life.” But that worry aside, I knew she would love this book. In fact, I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who loves books, which is just about everyone I know, fortunately for me.
Will Schwalbe’s “End of Your Life Book Club” is a exhilarating book. Yes, it’s about death, but it’s so much more about life, about an extraordinary woman, and about the pleasures of time lived in the company of books.  “What are you reading?” Schwalbe asks his mother as they wait for her first chemotherapy appointment for her newly-diagnosed pancreatic cancer. The ensuring conversation lasts the rest of her life. Really, though, it had been going on ever since Will Schwalbe learned to read.  
From the minute we pick up the book we know one part of the ending, which is appropriate since Schwalbe’s mother always reads the last page first. 
(I was happy to know that, since I am always tempted to do that–get the “what happens at the end” out of the way so to concentrate on what the book is really “about.” I’ve felt guilty about that impulse, but now, seeing that Mary Anne Schwalbe, a person I would respect on many levels, did that, maybe it’s okay for me to do that, too.)
There is a lot of discussion about what we learn from books about living and about people. And there is a sense, too, of the great pleasure of being immersed in an engaging book, doing the kind of reading that blocks out everything around you, the kind of book you put down or even finish only with great reluctance. And those pleasures are magnified by the intimacy of sharing a book’s ideas with someone you care about. Or even someone you hardly know but come to care about because you share them. What is a better vehicle that this for creating connection?
The book includes an indirect ongoing discussion of the experience of reading print versus screen. Mary Anne reads only hard copy; Will switches back and forth between the two.  I do that, myself, and have little patience for seeing an either-or argument. But when Mary Anne finished a book, she often handed it off to someone else or left it somewhere to be picked up by an unknown next reader–a generous impulse consistent with the way she lived her life. Late in the book comes a quietly powerful argument in favor of paper. Will looks at Mary Anne as she is days from death and sees her surrounded by books they have discussed, books she has loved, books yet to be read. And he looks at his slim e-reader, giving up no clues about who has read it, who has dog-eared pages, slid in bookmarks, even underlined. It show no mark of the hands it has passed through. There are no inscriptions from gift-givers or signatures of authors. And he notices that there is a kind of soul that a print book carries that an e-reader does not.  Don’t get me wrong; I will continue to flip back and forth between formats. I will not again lug vacation suitcases filled with books when I could carry them all and more in a few ounces. But I will certainly never stop reading printed books, noticing the tactile pleasure of paper, and introducing a newly-read book to its alphabetical neighbors on the shelf. Plus, of course, there’s the problem that it’s a little harder to turn to the last page first when you’re reading onscreen.
“The End of Your Life Book Club” doesn’t really end with Mary Anne’s death. It ends with more living: a list of the books they talked about. Page after page of them, some old favorites of mine, some I’d never before heard of. I added a lot of them to my own “to read” list. The world, after all, is filled with wonderful books. Reading them and talking about them could last until the end of your life.
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Friends of our hearts

This weekend I visited my friend Sheila in the hospital. She was feeling comfortable and we talked about things we had done together, about good meals we had each had recently, about books, and music. We exchanged advice. I refused to tell her about the season finale of “Downton Abbey,” which she had yet to see. It was a good visit. 
Sheila’s life was not easy right from the beginning, when she was born with a challenging defect. It didn’t get easier: when she was four her mother died and she very quickly acquired a stepmother who, to say the least, was not always kind. Her life was punctuated with harsh physical and emotional struggles. It was, she would have told you, a life filled with…good fortune.
Even on Saturday in the hospital as her physical problems were becoming increasingly severe, her attitude was one of acknowledging the problems but choosing to concentrate instead on what there was to enjoy. Her close relationships with her beloved grandchildren, her marriage in mid-life to a man she loved dearly and who cherished her as she deserved, an upcoming celebration she was looking forward to, not to mention a dress she was planning to buy for it. 
Wherever she went, Sheila made deep connections with people. She would sit down next to someone and she would have a new friend. “I keep meeting the most amazing people,” she once told me. “I can’t understand how it happens that I meet so many interesting people.” “Sheila,” I told her, “those people are all meeting you.” 
I recently finished reading Gail Caldwell’s “Let’s Take the Long Way Home,” the wrenching chronicle of her friendship with Caroline Knapp, who died in 2002  at the age of 42.  And, visiting Sheila, I was thinking, too, of the rich vein of women’s friendships that,  if we are lucky, nourishes our lives. Some of the friendships are modest, limited to a specific piece of our lives–work, children, the gym. Other women are the “friends of our hearts,” the ones we live our lives with and can’t imagine our lives without.
What was I reading just yesterday about women’s friendships that ended with an exhortation to make a call right now to a woman who is one of those “friends of the heart”? I don’t remember. But it feels like good advice.

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What I’m learning this week

I am having an extraordinary week, taking an online intensive poetry workshop with Gail Mazur through the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. There are six of us studying together in our cyber meeting space, sitting at our desks in Maine and Georgia and California, getting to know each other through poems and commentary. There is Gail, with her generous daily offering of instruction and encouragement. And there are assignments which we are told to do “before breakfast.”
I. Do. Nothing. Before. Breakfast. Within minutes of rising I am at the table, paper spread out, coffee and a hearty high-protein breakfast at hand. Not this week. And the first thing I have learned is that I thrive on the immediate turning to the task of writing. It seems to be the energizing equivalent of many grams of protein and much caffeine.
Gail says (and I have a feeling those are words I’ll be using a lot with myself) that to change the work, you must change the habit. I think there is wisdom in that but I think this particular change of habit changes more than the work: writing before breakfast–even a fast first draft–is a way of telling my mind and body that this is what I do, what I value, how I spend my most important time. This is the next thing I’ve learned.
And it occurs to me that this works for more than writing. Who we are, at our most basic, is who we are from the first moment we start our day. What is important to us, what we want to accomplish, what we dream of doing, what we value doing most–those are the things we need to make time for first, aren’t they? And then whatever tiny accomplishment we have from those minutes reverberates through our day, tells us who we are and what we do. Maybe it sets the course for the rest of the day. Maybe it whispers to us while we are doing other things: this is what counts, this is what I do.
Of course we are rushed from the minute we leave our beds. There are multiple claims on our time and our energies. But they make it too easy for us to slip back into our beds at night not having done what we think or say we most want to do. My dear aunt Alice, whose wise sayings I often rely on and quote to others, used to say, “All you can do is all you can do.” Now I am thinking of another version of that: what you can do is what you can do.
Yes. Thank you, Alice. Thank you, Gail. Thank you, poets who have shared this week with me.
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Where the poem comes from: Marion Brown

I realize that, despite the name of my blog, I haven’t posted an “occasional recipe” in quite a while.  But today I offer a poem about food. It’s from Marion Brown’s new chapbook called “tasted.” The book’s cover shows an apple that’s been devoured down to the core and the book is filled with poems with titles like “Self-Portrait as Red Delicious” and “Eating with Fingers.” One, “Turns in the Kitchen,” is written in two stanzas: his, in which the “he” is meticulously following recipes in “the cooking torah” while in the “hers” stanza, the cook is improvising wildly and with gusto.
Marion, whom I know through my friend Carol, is a lifelong New Yorker who comes from a family of cooks and is a former Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardener. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Barrow Street, Big City Lit, Kestrel, Poetry International, and DIAGRAM, among others.  Her poem “In the Dock Fagin Reflects” recently won first prize from the Portico Library
in Manchester, England.
“Stone Fruit,” a poem from her chapbook, came about this way, she explains:
“On Poem-A-Day, the daily email from the Academy of American Poets, I came upon John Taggart’s “Magdalene Poem.” Its repetitions and elliptical diction, leaving much more unsaid than said, seduced me. Repeating words or phrases are powerful; I don’t use them enough. “Magdalene Poem” made me want to read more Taggart and also to write a poem, a poem with short lines and echoes though no religious context. 
“The day before, I had crossed the country from my home on the East Coast to visit my daughter in Seattle. After she went off to work, I took myself to Café Vitta, one of her favorite coffee shops, and composed a first draft of “Stone-Fruit” on my iPhone. It is the only complete draft I have written on my phone, a terse poem with short lines.  Afterwards, rewritten on my computer, “Stone-Fruit” grew taller and gained a hyphen. Without it, the two words of the title would mean fruit carved from stone, not peaches, apricots, and their kin.”
Stone-Fruit
Have you seen an apricot
hang on its twig, bound
to blush 
in sunshine, hard 
under golden skin—
blush like remorse, chagrin
or flush of passion—
passion the current
that roils a stream
current that takes you
drags under to drown you
deep
deep
down?
Unhinged, an apricot
falls
and wrinkles,
tongued by time
where it lies on the ground,
in the air
a sharp twinge
when it opens, unasked, 
unasked, 
unbound—
stone still closed,
a nub like a wrist 
bone stretching 
the skin— 
loose on the ground.
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In the aftermath….

…of Friday’s devastation, I took a look at the NRA website. Just out of curiosity.  I wondered if they were going to offer some responsible, thoughtful words. Maybe something on the order of, “yes, we’re in favor of guns, but we’re also in favor of laws that make sure they are used in a responsible way.” Maybe something like, “we, too, are outraged that someone has once again used guns to commit an unthinkable, indefensible act.” Maybe something like,” this is not what we’re about.”

Dream on. No mention of Newtown. The most recent posting was dated 11/27/12 and was headlined, “More Guns, Less Crime in VA,” It concluded with these words: “…gun owners and the NRA have been right all along. It’s the criminals, not the law-abiding gun owners, who are the issue.” 
Why aren’t the NRA and all those “law-abiding guns owners” condemning this horrific mis-use of guns? Why aren’t they standing up and shouting, “This is not what we stand for.” Why aren’t THEY calling for some control of lethal weapons that have no use in hunting and no possible purpose but killing people quickly in large numbers? 
The answer is that this IS what they stand for. Guns available to one and all as a right. We and our children and the 6- and 7-year olds and their teachers in Newtown and all the other victims–those whose names are burned into our memories, those we’ve never heard of, and those of us whose world has been diminished by the losses–all the rest of us–we’re all just collateral damage.