The Horror

I cannot be more relaxed than I am right now in Jamaica.  I wake up every morning just as the sun is coming up. The air is still cool. The sky is a smear of grey and pink.  I walk for an hour on the road passing goats, chickens and the occasional car.  By the time I come back to the house, it's hot and the sky is golden.  Everyone else is still sleeping as I sit on the veranda to eat my breakfast and read the NYTimes on my computer.  I listen to the sea and stare out at the blue feeling very safe and content. 

Then I read an article such as this and wonder what the hell kind of world I live in where I can sit quietly on a veranda on a beautiful morning and just enjoy the view while women in Somalia daily live in terror in the most horrendous surroundings.

To EBook or Not to EBook

Well, I have read my first ebook and I am not impressed. 

As an experiment, I downloaded the next Kinsey Milhone mystery, "V for Vengeance," on my IPad so I could read it in Jamaica.  Even though "V for Vengeance" was just a mystery and not "serious literature", i.e. perfect vacation reading, I felt like I was doing something trivial and silly by carelessly flipping those pages on the IPad with my finger.  I mean this is the same device I use to play way too many games of Boggle.  I definitely see the convenience for travel even though I restrict myself to paperbacks when I pack for a trip.  But for sure I'm not planning to give up the printed page.  There's nothing quite like snuggling into a nest of pillows on a day bed set on a shady veranda in Jamaica overlooking the ocean with a good BOOK propped up on my lap.

Jamaica

I went to bed last night tucked under a mosquito net with the sound of the ocean sending me off to dreamland.  Yes,  I am in Jamaica again.  I'm drinking rum and sorrel, getting sweetly high, playing backgammon, eating jerk shrimp, and just chillin' on the veranda of Shakti Home, my little getaway in Treasure Beach. 

I love being in Jamaica.  Where else can I get a proposal of marriage while waiting at the bank.  Sorry, I had to tell the security guard, it's not happening, but thanks anyway.

My New Role Model

I want to be Claudette Colbert.  I watched her today on Turner Classic Movies in "Since You Went Away," as the brave and beautiful Anne Hilton whose husband is away at war leaving her alone to take care of the family in his absence.  We never see him in the movie.  It's all Claudette.  She is adorable and perky and positive and a good and understanding parent to her two daughters.  She never loses her sense of humor or compassion for others and she rarely shows her grief and loneliness.  I loved her and the movie although both made me cry.  I know it isn't easy to be brave, to try to be good all by yourself.  I was really glad at the end when she got the phone call that her husband was alive and coming home.  That's how it happens in the movies, just not in real life.

How Many Days to Hanukah?

 

It’s pretty sad but the only reason I know Hanukah is coming is because a plastic menorah is now sitting on the front desk of my building.   None of the candles are illuminated yet but it must be happening soon.

Growing up in Yeadon, Hanukah always seemed a poor substitute for Christmas to me, especially when compared to what when on down the street where Anna May Heritage lived.    Anna May’s parents were older than mine and she had an older married brother and a “maiden aunt” who lived with them.  The result of having all those adults around was that she was showered with presents at holiday time,  a fact that made me green with envy.  I’d walk in her house and be overwhelmed by the mountain of presents under the tree,  all I imagined for Anna May.  Her mom and her aunt would be in the kitchen making dozens and dozens of Christmas cookies.  Every surface in the house was covered with cookies and candies, all red and green and smelling very delicious.

Back at 850 Church Lane, my mom tried her best to make our Hanukah compete with Anna May’s Christmas.  She hung a Happy Hanukah sign in the dining room; she baked cookies in the shape of Jewish stars and dreidels and even constructed and iced one big one to look like a menorah.  We lit the candles every night, sang songs and got eight separate presents, a fact I emphasized to all my non Jewish school mates every morning.  Bah humbug!  Somehow it still felt like we were missing something.

The other side of the coin was the intense scorn I felt for those Jews who celebrated Christmas.  No way was a Christmas tree going up in any house I lived in, let alone a stupid “Hanukah Bush.”  Christmas was for Christians and we weren’t.  Anyway how dumb was it to buy all that stuff at retail prices when you could wait for the after Christmas sales and save.  

The closest my family ever came to traditionally celebrating the holidays was when we got all dressed up and went out to some fancy downtown restaurant to celebrate my parents’ birthdays--my mom’s on Christmas Eve and my dad’s the day after.  If anyone asked, I was very vocal about why we there--for birthdays NOT Christmas.

Getting Ready for 2012

Last year was all about surviving.  This year--I'm still standing!--is all about finding meaning.  What to do with my life, how to spend my time in a way that makes me happy, teaches me something new, brings me friends.  It's about being alone but not feeling lonely, feeling sadness but not being overwhelmed by it.  Looking forward but not forgetting. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls...not me

I've never been a big fan of Ernest Hemingway.  His books are too male, too unadorned, and with female characters that lack any semblance of reality to me.  But I have just finished working my way slowly but surely through For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Slowly is the operative word here.  I usually zip through a novel hanging on to the story or falling in love with a character or reveling in the language but this book was a disappointment on all three levels for me. There were some snatches of effective writing and the final chapters depicting the battle and the blowing of the bridge had real power but there was so much to put up with before that--truly horrible writing about sex, extremely stilted dialogue and repetitive philosophizing about war, death and the meaning of life.  Maybe it's a book you should only read if you're young and a male, ideally in adolescence. 

Of course this is the opinion of someone who loves Henry James and thinks Middlemarch is the greatest book ever written.

The End of an Era

So today I lost the last vestige of my youth--a baby tooth that has remained in my mouth for some 60 years.  I was sad to see it go.  It's so cute and tiny.  If I were a visual artist, I would mark the occasion by making it the center of an art work.  But instead I'm going to place my little tooth in the little white shoes, the first I wore as a baby, that my mom presented to me as a momento mori  on my 40th birthday.  So sweet that she kept them all those years. 

The shoes, now with the tooth nestled inside, will sit on a shelf in my study.

A Poem

A beautiful poem, "Still Falling for Her," by Sharon Olds in last week's New Yorker.  Here are the closing lines:

"I think I may go on falling, like my own
flesh, for the rest of my life, and maybe I'll
still be falling for my mother after
my death--or not falling but orbiting,
with her, and maybe we'll take turns,
who is the moon, and who is the earth."

Read the whole poem here.  Sharon Olds is one of my favorite poets.  Not surprisingly, Liz introduced me to her.  I've often felt challenged by poetry but her work I find immediately accessible and deeply moving.  My mom loved poetry but I've come to it fairly late in life.  I'm always struck by how so few words can hold so much meaning.  

In My Shoes

Have you ever been told you look as good as margarita pizza?  That's what some South Philly cuz told me when I went for a stroll down Passyunk Avenue this afternoon with Liz and her girl friends.  I think he intended it as a compliment.  At least, that's how I took it. 

He was no looker himself looking more like the brisket sandwich he told us he had just finished eating at the restaurant on the corner.  He bragged that he ate that sandwich three times a week--it was that delicious!-- and I could believe it given the way his belly hung over his belt.  I'm sure he washed down each time with a couple of beers. 

Having just come back from four nights in Miami for Art Basel, it felt good to be visible once again even if it meant being compared to a pizza by an overweight, aging would be lothario.  In Miami, any woman over 30 is virtually invisible.  There is a constant parade of young or desperate to be young women marching down the street or preening in the bars wearing impossibly high shoes and barely any clothes.  It's a really depressing, even disturbing scene. 

Thank god I don't have to wear those shoes.  There are definitely benefits to being invisible. 

What Next?

Great article in last week's New Yorker by George Packer about Occupy Wall Street. 

"As long as Occupy Wall Street speaks the language of inequality and powerlessness as simply and directly as the the self portraits on Tumblr, it will resonate with millions of Americans.  The most important facts about our society, widely known  but seldom mentioned, are now the first order of conversation. . .the use of the phrase 'income inequality' in the media has now more than quintulpled since the beginning of the occupation.  In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has already done its work.  The point is what was happening on the Broadway sidewalk.  No one should expect this protean flame to transform itself into a formal political organization with a savvy strategy for enacting reforms and winning elections.  That's someone else's job. "  

So who or what is going to do it?  I'm not very optimistic we will ever fill find the right person for that job description.