it's new year's eve, which seems to call for some sort of statement. resolutions, wise observations, witty comments on the passing year. all of which seems beyond me at the moment. personally it's been a pretty good year. thanks to this blog i've written more of my own stuff than i have in years. i'm mega grateful for the 'co-authoring' i've done for others, especially susan love, and --book plug warning--the fifth edition of the breast book that came out in october. i'm proud of that writing, which is more creative than it may sound; and being part of susan's important work is in itself pride-worthy. but the blog is more directly mine, and the fact that it actually gets read, sometimes by people i don't know in countries around the world, is encouraging. further this was the year i finally caved in and got onto facebook, so i know what friends i never see are up to, and above all, what castle kids past are doing.
politically, what can i add? obama has still been better than anyone else would have been ---mc cain and palin are even scarier now than they were when they were campaigning. but the democrats have proven the accuracy of most leftists' cynicism; mostly wimps at bests and collaborators with the rich and richer at worst. the cynicism of the republicans' overt lying is fairly depressing, and of course their wins in november are horrifying.
sarah palin sees herself as mama grizzly; i see her as mama 'alien,' with her spawn destroying human lives--those ghastly, unintelligent, smarmy females who certainly prove that women can be as vile as men, given half a chance. it's been fun watching jan brewer's meltdown, sharon engle's pompous comparisons of herself to thomas jefferson and jesus, and of course the ever popular non-witch and antisexual flirt christine o'donnell. and perhaps it's somewhat comforting to learn that except for the already-in -power brewer, they lost. even more comforting to see the loss of the official republican [male] candidate in alaska to the snubbed incumbent with her write-in campaign. i'd certainly rather have seen the democrat win, but mckowski is a big step past miller, and the write-in's success comes close to real democracy.
don't ask don't tell. a shaky victory, given who will be in congress next year. but a victory nonetheless.
echoes of old songs--the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; empty pockets don't ever make the grade. it will be a hell of a year, for the unemployed, the underemployed, the lower middle class, and the people even obama is terrified to mention----the poor. the rhetoric of liberals can no longer embrace that class, as though being poor is important only as a danger to the middle class, not as a horrible reality for those who never got near middle class. more islamophobia seems inevitable, more gay bashing.
maybe, maybe, maybe more resistance. the memory of those 800 emerson kids marching against the homophobes is warming. one hopes. i hope.
happy and productive new year.....
Friday, December 31, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Scylla and Charybdis--and the Democrats
So they have passed The Bill. the compromise that, depending on who you listen to, really was or wasn't a compromise. progressives are vehemently divided on this point, within and outside of the Democratic Party. the one clear thing that is that no progressive liked it. even obama, who has proven himself far from progressive, didn't like it. but with the recent elections, the Democrats were trapped between two awful choices, so obama and most of the congressional democrats went with what they felt was the least awful one. scylla and charybdis.
interesting story, the original s&c. as the Odyssey tells it, in order to get home to Ithaca, Odysseus and his crew had to go past one or the other. Scylla was a multiheaded monster who swallowed up all who came close to her; Charybdis was a giant whirlpool. Scylla would kill six men, one per head. Charybdis would kill them all. Odysseus chose the lesser horror. end of story.
but not quite. there was a third option, about which Odysseus lied. "Of Scylla I said nothing," Odysseus narrates, "lest my friends, held fast by fear, desert their oars and cringe down in the hold."
in fact, his "friends"--the sailors he commanded--would likely have done more than that. they were leaving a paradise, ruled by the beautiful demigoddess Circe, who would have been perfectly willing to have them stay. It was 20 years since the men had left Ithaca; some, maybe all, might have preferred to stay on the goddess's island rather than risk a terrible death on the hope of getting home. So Odysseus lied to them, and in the end, after many more deadly adventures, all but he himself died.
So now, we have a Democrat who, during two years of an administration, has clung to his
precious but peculiar goal of 'compromise' with an enemy no more interested in compromise than Scylla or Charybdis. he betrayed a constituency that had believed in his rhetoric of change. doubtless he was fooling himself as well as us, making him perhaps less culpable but also less shrewd than Odysseus. and no less dangerous to the people that followed him. he ended up with a new mega-conservative majority in Congress. he still bleats his favorite word, 'compromise,' as though the situation he helped create will somehow make the conservatives more, rather than less, willing to negotiate. his scylla will swallow up her fewer victims, leaving a few temporarily better off. in the long run, i very much fear we'll end up with Charybdis after all.
**********************************************
compromise makes strange bedfellows. let me be clear; i believe in getting rid of the pernicious 'don't ask don't tell' policy, for the obvious reason that it is a result of bigotry. it has to go. but there is something odd about fighting to get more people in the military, so they can risk their own lives and very likely kill other people in a war that two presidents have foisted on us. leftists of my generation spent a lot of time marching against the war of our youth, encouraging young men to avoid the draft in whatever ways they could. in stirring demonstrations, some of the bravest [or most reckless] among these men publicly burned their draft cards. These soldiers of anti-battle helped pave the way for the elimination of draft cards and of the draft itself. Remember 'what if they gave a war and no one came?'? i have recently made contact, after many years, with a friend i last saw when some of us visited him in canada, where he had fled and where he happily remains. some straight guys pretended to be gay in order to get that coveted 4F--the category for draft-age men whose health or other factors caused the military to reject them. some stayed underground in the US. some went to jail.
there's no more draft, but there are two grim wars with countries that the US invaded. and now we find ourselves in the absurd but necessary position of protesting the wars while trying to enable more soldiers to fight in them. so what would i say to a young gay or lesbian fighting to fight? passionately i would support them: you have every right to be an army along with straight people. passionately i would then add, but for god's sake, don't do it!
dear old sylla! dear old charybdis! dear old dying, disintegrating planet!
interesting story, the original s&c. as the Odyssey tells it, in order to get home to Ithaca, Odysseus and his crew had to go past one or the other. Scylla was a multiheaded monster who swallowed up all who came close to her; Charybdis was a giant whirlpool. Scylla would kill six men, one per head. Charybdis would kill them all. Odysseus chose the lesser horror. end of story.
but not quite. there was a third option, about which Odysseus lied. "Of Scylla I said nothing," Odysseus narrates, "lest my friends, held fast by fear, desert their oars and cringe down in the hold."
in fact, his "friends"--the sailors he commanded--would likely have done more than that. they were leaving a paradise, ruled by the beautiful demigoddess Circe, who would have been perfectly willing to have them stay. It was 20 years since the men had left Ithaca; some, maybe all, might have preferred to stay on the goddess's island rather than risk a terrible death on the hope of getting home. So Odysseus lied to them, and in the end, after many more deadly adventures, all but he himself died.
So now, we have a Democrat who, during two years of an administration, has clung to his
precious but peculiar goal of 'compromise' with an enemy no more interested in compromise than Scylla or Charybdis. he betrayed a constituency that had believed in his rhetoric of change. doubtless he was fooling himself as well as us, making him perhaps less culpable but also less shrewd than Odysseus. and no less dangerous to the people that followed him. he ended up with a new mega-conservative majority in Congress. he still bleats his favorite word, 'compromise,' as though the situation he helped create will somehow make the conservatives more, rather than less, willing to negotiate. his scylla will swallow up her fewer victims, leaving a few temporarily better off. in the long run, i very much fear we'll end up with Charybdis after all.
**********************************************
compromise makes strange bedfellows. let me be clear; i believe in getting rid of the pernicious 'don't ask don't tell' policy, for the obvious reason that it is a result of bigotry. it has to go. but there is something odd about fighting to get more people in the military, so they can risk their own lives and very likely kill other people in a war that two presidents have foisted on us. leftists of my generation spent a lot of time marching against the war of our youth, encouraging young men to avoid the draft in whatever ways they could. in stirring demonstrations, some of the bravest [or most reckless] among these men publicly burned their draft cards. These soldiers of anti-battle helped pave the way for the elimination of draft cards and of the draft itself. Remember 'what if they gave a war and no one came?'? i have recently made contact, after many years, with a friend i last saw when some of us visited him in canada, where he had fled and where he happily remains. some straight guys pretended to be gay in order to get that coveted 4F--the category for draft-age men whose health or other factors caused the military to reject them. some stayed underground in the US. some went to jail.
there's no more draft, but there are two grim wars with countries that the US invaded. and now we find ourselves in the absurd but necessary position of protesting the wars while trying to enable more soldiers to fight in them. so what would i say to a young gay or lesbian fighting to fight? passionately i would support them: you have every right to be an army along with straight people. passionately i would then add, but for god's sake, don't do it!
dear old sylla! dear old charybdis! dear old dying, disintegrating planet!
CHRISTMAS EVE CONCERT AT ALL SAINTS CHURCH
[Each year, my holiday greeting card is a poem, which keeps me writing poetry at least once a year. so here is my season's greeting to you all....including, most certainly my new FB buddies]
Stained glass refracting churchlight rays and
the chorus singing like it knows it's sacred.
In the back seat, alone, an old lady cuddles
a doll she thinks is jesus.
When they sing silent night she mouths the words quietly
and tears fill her eyes.
Who is she?
She could be you, she could be me.
It is the holiest of evenings: she could even be god.
Stained glass refracting churchlight rays and
the chorus singing like it knows it's sacred.
In the back seat, alone, an old lady cuddles
a doll she thinks is jesus.
When they sing silent night she mouths the words quietly
and tears fill her eyes.
Who is she?
She could be you, she could be me.
It is the holiest of evenings: she could even be god.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
God Help Us, Everyone
i love christmas. i love it fiercely, passionately, irrationally. i loved it as a catholic child, and i have loved it as much through my adult life as a quasi-pagan agnostic. i love the tackiness that has grown into it over the past century, as much as i hate the crass-materialism that infests it. capitalism and banal religion, those inevitable bedfellows, have tainted it, turning the impulse to give and the love of ceremony into greed, competitiveness, and pettyness of soul no grinch could possibly match. but they can't destroy it. for one thing, it's older than its specific origins. it goes far back into pagan, and probably pre-pagan, times. sun-worship, tree worship, fear of dark and of winter cold, huddling together for survival. for another, its own variant of the ancient myth is indescribably moving: hope, love, redemption, born where it is least expected, and in the least expected form, the birth of a lower-class infant. that child in the manger. that poverty-born outcast of the rich. i can never understand how so many apparent believers in that child can claim in his name the right to be rich, the right to throw away the health and lives of other children. anyway, i'm digressing, and this is about to turn into a different piece than i want to write now. the point is, i love christmas and its images of faith-hope-and, the greatest of these, charity.
so, 'tis the season. for a lot of stuff, including the annual battle to keep christ in christmas, by god! it starts each year with the first signs that anyone who isn't christian dares to challenge the celebration of the myth. one of the glories of this country is that we are not a theocracy. no one denies that christianity is the dominant belief system; that the puritan forefolk were christians determined to live out their own form of christianity but whose beliefs didn't appear to extend to those who lived out other visions of ultimate truth. nonetheless, as the various states and statelets started moving toward nationhood, someone figured out that it was a bad idea to have any religion control the law.
we have continued growing into a multi-beliefed society. most christians seem to accept that. some have even learned to respect the range of other beliefs. but too often this apparent tolerance is merely condescension. if you're dumb enough to believe something different, go right ahead. just let me do everything i want. don't impose your belief, or even worse, your disbelief, on my awareness. we are 'tolerant,' as long as nothing gets in our way.
christmas brings this out, bigtime. some jews, some atheists, some agnostics don't want christianity shoved in their faces. they know it will be--they're not stupid. they walk past churches every day. they realize that people's lawns will have plastic mangers with haloed virgins and haloed babies with kings and shepherds kneeling plastically in front of them.
but some unChristians prefer not to see such images in spaces defined as public. it's one thing to walk past neighbors' homes and churches; it's another to be accosted by an alien faith in non-parochial schools, courthouses, or other places that are part of all our lives.
it isn't really a lot to ask. if citizenry is shared, it has no business being represented by symbols of a specific religious creed. and for the most, that's all the nonbelievers are asking. whether santa claus has much of the 'saint' remaining in his iconography is dabateable, but who really suffers when we get frosty the snowman in his place?
i have an uncle who is a lovely person, but who gets upset when people want to eliminate christian iconography from public places. he is convinced that they are trying to eliminate it from private places. last year he told me that he was going to put a christmas tree up in his living room, and no one could stop him. i assured him that no one was trying to. finally i offered a promise. if anyone tried to stop him from having a tree in his house or indeed anywhere on his property, i would enlist the help of the ACLU to defend his christmas tree.
personally i like the trees. and i love the creches. as a kid, i went with my mother and brothers to 6 o'clock mass on christmas morning--we walked in the dark, and at the end of the sparsely attended mass we went up the creche and lit candles to the baby jesus and his mother. when we left, it had turned light, and that banal, daily miracle of morning merged with the miracle of jesus's birth. the church, and the world around it, smelled of holiness. it's one of my few happy catholic memories. i'm glad there are christians who have creches in their churches, in their houses, on their lawns. i get to see them there; why do i have to see them in community spaces?
of course, the hard core atheists can be something of a bore. and sometimes, inadvertantly comical. a friend once told me of her neighbor, a very serious marxist, who in mockery of religion, put up a tree one christmas and decorated it with hammers-and-sickels. point made, she thought, looking at the tree through his window. she thought the same thing the next year--and every year thereafter. she wondered when it had ceased to be mere mockery and became instead a ritual followed...well, religiously.
but atheists, like followers of any religion, vary greatly, as H.L. Mencken showed in a wonderfully funny 1944 New Yorker story. 'there are as many variations in doctrine between infidels as between christians,' he wrote. i have seen such variations among my atheist friends, some of whom i think of as fundamentalists. two such freinds, unacquainted with each other, faced serious and life-threatening illnesses, and each declared that we were not to pray for them. the less orthodox of them softened his ultimatum: if we wanted to pray for him, he couldn't stop us, but he insisted that we do it quietly and not tell him about it. i refrained from asking him if that was also true of sending healing light, and assumed that i had the same rights as his prayer-prone acquaintances. i have sent light for years.
i made the mistake of reassuring my other friend that i didn't pray, i sent light. she was appalled and made me promise never to send her light. i asked if i could wish her luck, and she said, certainly, and she wished me luck as well. i have honored the promise i made her, and in my daily ritual, i lurch out of the white light long enough to silently wish her luck. if a little light sometimes seeps into the luck, there's nothing i can do about it.
my other atheist friends are fine with it; pray, send light, invoke the roman or hindu gods; it doesn't bother them. they like people wishing them well.
though these freinds are scions of a long line of atheist jews, they have no problem with christmas. in fact, we always spend christmas together, along with my ex-catholic brother and his culturally jewish wife, who have too much skepticism to embrace atheism. my freinds enjoy my wishing them merry christmas, and they wish me the same. they could as easily wish me happy hanukkah or happy Eid or happy Saturnalia--they like happy.
i have other jewish friends who dislike christmas intensely; for them, the birth of jesus was the beginning of centuries of oppression, and they try to get past the season with as little attention to it as possible. they don't like hearing 'merry christmas.' astonishingly, to me, they have friends who insist on wishing them merry christmas and even on giving them christmas presents.
it seems to me to a deeply unchristian, and bizarre, thing to do. why, celebrating the idea of love of one's fellow human, would they inflict discomfort on others? if you're going to make someone feel less merry, haven't you pretty much defeated your own purpose?
if this is 'politically correct,' as so many people love to say with a sneer, so be it. 'p.c.' is an unfortunate expression, whose inventors have no doubt lived to regret it. what politically correct really comes down to is doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. i don't want people to shove their ideals down my throat. i don't want to use an expression of joy as a slap in the face. if this means saying 'happy holidays' instead of 'merry christmas' to people who might find that phrase offensive, i can manage that [though i find it funny that religious people object to hearing wishes for happy holy-days]. if i have reason to think someone doesn't like even 'happy holidays', i can try to shut up about it altogether.
one of my favorite small, perfect moments occured a few years ago at the end of the semester. as the students dribbled out of the last class, i wished most of them a happy holiday. one was a boston-irish lad, and i grinned and said, 'you, i can wish a merry christmas!' and he beamed at me. he was followed by a quiet young muslim; i was pretty sure there wasn't a muslim holiday upcoming, so i wished him a good break from classes. he smiled gravely and said, 'merry christmas.'
that was a gift, a magi-worthy gift. it was offered in the spirit of whatever good force exists among us, from whatever source it comes. and i remember it and cherish it every year. is this politically correct? sentimental? i can plead guilty to both. and to anyone who reads this, i wish the joy of every season, in whatever way joy offers itself to you. you can't get much merrier than that.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Stupidest Legend in the World
i enjoy legends; they're rarely realistic, and they tend to lack the depth of real mythology. but they're fun and romantic and often tell us something about the ways we think. then today i came across this one, in a catalogue called 'collectables.' it seemed so bizarre that i wondered if they had made it up, so i ran to my computer and googled it. yep, there it is.
the product is a lovely pendant and earring set with images of the forget-me-not. there are several legends about this flower, some more interesting or reasonable than others. but here's the one the catalogue used:
in medieval times, a knight and his lady were walking along a river. he saw the flowers and bent down to create a bouquet. alas, the weight of his armor pulled him into the river, and he drowned. but as he was going down, he threw her the bouquet, crying 'forget me not.' and since then women wear them as signs of faithful and enduring love.
none of the places i looked said when the legend began, but i'd guess at the height of 19th century romanticism. it certainly didn't began with anyone who knew anything about the middle ages.
why is this guy wearing armor to walk along the river with his beloved? i'm not a scholar in the field, but i know enough to be pretty sure you didn't wear your armor for courting, or for any reason at all except a battle or a joust. the stuff is heavy! and if you've fallen in the water but are close enough to the shore to throw a bouquet to someone on the ground, you're probably close enough to grab onto the shore and dig in until she can get someone to come and help yank her idiot lover out of the water. unless of course she's too busy laughing at you. in which case, women would wear the flowers as a sign warning other women not to get involved with madmen who are running all over the place in their armor. faithful and enduring, indeed......
the product is a lovely pendant and earring set with images of the forget-me-not. there are several legends about this flower, some more interesting or reasonable than others. but here's the one the catalogue used:
in medieval times, a knight and his lady were walking along a river. he saw the flowers and bent down to create a bouquet. alas, the weight of his armor pulled him into the river, and he drowned. but as he was going down, he threw her the bouquet, crying 'forget me not.' and since then women wear them as signs of faithful and enduring love.
none of the places i looked said when the legend began, but i'd guess at the height of 19th century romanticism. it certainly didn't began with anyone who knew anything about the middle ages.
why is this guy wearing armor to walk along the river with his beloved? i'm not a scholar in the field, but i know enough to be pretty sure you didn't wear your armor for courting, or for any reason at all except a battle or a joust. the stuff is heavy! and if you've fallen in the water but are close enough to the shore to throw a bouquet to someone on the ground, you're probably close enough to grab onto the shore and dig in until she can get someone to come and help yank her idiot lover out of the water. unless of course she's too busy laughing at you. in which case, women would wear the flowers as a sign warning other women not to get involved with madmen who are running all over the place in their armor. faithful and enduring, indeed......
Saturday, November 20, 2010
emerson college dancers..a not-quite-review
i never go to modern dance, and i have long since decided that rock is the devil's answer to music and that with the death of irving berlin the last hope of bearable pop music was gone.
and so there i was, in an orchestra seat close to the stage, watching modern dancers dancing modernly to music that, for the most part, ranged from early-ugly to hip hop hideous. [there was a wonderful interlude of sorts when a bunch of them tap-danced to 'singin' in the rain,' but halfway through, that morphed into some sort of rap piece, though the dancers tapped gamely on.]
in spite of this, i enjoyed myself immensely. i was there because some of the members of the 90-person dance club were former students of mine, of whom i am immensely fond [yes, that's right; they were castle kids] who needed a 'supervisor' from emerson's faculty or staff, because it was held at an off-campus site. since there were three time slots that they needed filled, they were approaching all the credentialed folk they knew. and i, as always, was putty in the hands of a castle dweller.
actually, they were a pleasure to watch. they were all clearly talented, and all hard working. and they included a nice range of dance skills, though it was heavy on the rock-rap modern side. still there were the terrific tap dancers and, in one piece, three ballet dancers, on toe---to me the most beautiful single position the human body can achieve. then, creating variation within variation, there was a routine from a guest company, the newly formed cheerleaders club. i have my political issues with the whole idea of cheerleading, but how could i possibly fault the skill and bravery of these very athletic young women?
it was also fun seeing kids i was used to seeing sporting torn jeans and t- shirts and stumbling through questions about the Odyssey, now fluidly and confidently moving their bodies into and out of positions that made my own flaccid muscles ache at the sight:, it was what we like to call these days a humbling experience. i fear that being a 'supervisor' was the closest i'll ever come, or ever could have come, to that suppleness.
i wondered why they were doing their show so far from the campus, and decided it must be because this 800-seat main stage at Roxbury Community College was such a good theatre for a large dance troup. but when i asked one of the dancers about it later, she said they'd wanted to do it at emerson, but that all the emerson venues had been booked up, even with the three new sites in the old paramount theatre that the college had bought. it seemed a pity; i thought an emerson performance space would attract a bigger audience. but i had no need to worry; they had sold out quickly, and were having to turn down reservations.
still it seemed strange. last night i had been to a performance at the college's largest theatre, in which another educational institution, the new england conservatory of music, put on a delightful 'magic flute.' this is an old arrangement; i've been going to the NECE's major student performance there every year. but i find it peculiar to see another college's performance at an emerson theatre when an emerson group wasn't able to find space at any of the college's performance areas. ah well, i'm in neither marketing nor the performing arts, and their processes are mysterious to me. clearly the somewhat out-of-the-way venue didn't put off dancers or audience members, and there's no question that it's a great theatre for such a performance. and for myself, i got to sit back and enjoy the show---and to get brownie points for my generosity in doing so!
i do hope that emerson knows how good these kids are, and what a credit they are to the college. wherever they perform, these are 'emerson kids,' poster-people for what students can do in the extra-curricular vocations they pursue. what a credit they are to the image of college students! i left feeling honored to have been part of their club for those three hours.
and so there i was, in an orchestra seat close to the stage, watching modern dancers dancing modernly to music that, for the most part, ranged from early-ugly to hip hop hideous. [there was a wonderful interlude of sorts when a bunch of them tap-danced to 'singin' in the rain,' but halfway through, that morphed into some sort of rap piece, though the dancers tapped gamely on.]
in spite of this, i enjoyed myself immensely. i was there because some of the members of the 90-person dance club were former students of mine, of whom i am immensely fond [yes, that's right; they were castle kids] who needed a 'supervisor' from emerson's faculty or staff, because it was held at an off-campus site. since there were three time slots that they needed filled, they were approaching all the credentialed folk they knew. and i, as always, was putty in the hands of a castle dweller.
actually, they were a pleasure to watch. they were all clearly talented, and all hard working. and they included a nice range of dance skills, though it was heavy on the rock-rap modern side. still there were the terrific tap dancers and, in one piece, three ballet dancers, on toe---to me the most beautiful single position the human body can achieve. then, creating variation within variation, there was a routine from a guest company, the newly formed cheerleaders club. i have my political issues with the whole idea of cheerleading, but how could i possibly fault the skill and bravery of these very athletic young women?
it was also fun seeing kids i was used to seeing sporting torn jeans and t- shirts and stumbling through questions about the Odyssey, now fluidly and confidently moving their bodies into and out of positions that made my own flaccid muscles ache at the sight:, it was what we like to call these days a humbling experience. i fear that being a 'supervisor' was the closest i'll ever come, or ever could have come, to that suppleness.
i wondered why they were doing their show so far from the campus, and decided it must be because this 800-seat main stage at Roxbury Community College was such a good theatre for a large dance troup. but when i asked one of the dancers about it later, she said they'd wanted to do it at emerson, but that all the emerson venues had been booked up, even with the three new sites in the old paramount theatre that the college had bought. it seemed a pity; i thought an emerson performance space would attract a bigger audience. but i had no need to worry; they had sold out quickly, and were having to turn down reservations.
still it seemed strange. last night i had been to a performance at the college's largest theatre, in which another educational institution, the new england conservatory of music, put on a delightful 'magic flute.' this is an old arrangement; i've been going to the NECE's major student performance there every year. but i find it peculiar to see another college's performance at an emerson theatre when an emerson group wasn't able to find space at any of the college's performance areas. ah well, i'm in neither marketing nor the performing arts, and their processes are mysterious to me. clearly the somewhat out-of-the-way venue didn't put off dancers or audience members, and there's no question that it's a great theatre for such a performance. and for myself, i got to sit back and enjoy the show---and to get brownie points for my generosity in doing so!
i do hope that emerson knows how good these kids are, and what a credit they are to the college. wherever they perform, these are 'emerson kids,' poster-people for what students can do in the extra-curricular vocations they pursue. what a credit they are to the image of college students! i left feeling honored to have been part of their club for those three hours.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Autumn
i never used to watch weather--the seasons within each season, the daily differences in apparent sameness. now i watch it all the time. autumn is the most amazing season to me, both for weather and for its memories. september is the beginning of the real new year. summer has been quiet, moody, sometimes cruel in its insistence on feeling like vacation when, once you're past grade school, life rarely goes along with the feeling. you want to be outdoors in the summer, or you want to want to be outdoors. you feel you should be on the beach, or at least your backyard sipping lemonade from a package that pretends to be real lemonade like grandma used to make, whether grandma ever made lemonade or not. i have an almost religious attachment to having iced coffee in the afternoon: summer begins with putting coffee cups away and ends with digging them out again.
autumn is a season of renewal as much as of dying, and that commonplace paradox always hits me anew. the leaves are so astoundingly alive in their dying. add to that the fact that schools begin again and, far more important to a kid raised right outside manhattan, the theatre season begins. plays, ballets, operas--all start up again. even television starts up again. by the official new year, january, we're jaded and cold and tired. but autumn is always full of promise.
in my childhood, the thought of school wasn't upsetting, and the thought of theatre was exhilarating. and there was the smell! long before we thought about pollution, everyone in a neighborhood of houses burned leaves in the fall. for the adults it was doubtless annoying. not for the kids though. first there was the business of raking the leaves into huge piles which, when you had formed, you jumped or ran into. twigs scratched and bugs got into your nose, but lord playing in the leaves was fun! and then you reraked and rejumped and reslapped the dirt and broken leaves off yourself and then started the whole thing over again, until parents lost patience and brought out the matches. and no one minded that we'd lost our game; we knew there were plenty of leaves and lots more piling before the winter began. besides, watching the leaves burn was gorgeous, the color of the leaves and the color of the flames and the smell that was like no other smell in the world, the smell of clean, contained burning. better even than chimney smoke because it was right there beside you.
we lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in queens, a linoleum rug sort of neighborhood which we believed--i did, anyway--was a 'suburb.' well, it certainly wasn't the city, that golden dream of a city you could get to in half an hour from the subway, the city that inspired our dreams as much as they did the dreams of kids from the midwest or the rest of the east coast, for that matter. but in the real city, so vastly superior in my young mind to our cozy-houses home, they didn't burn leaves in the fall, and so i was happy enough to live outside the dreamworld in that time. i was lucky too, though i didn't realize it, that large maple trees lined the streets, forming a block-long canopy even in winter, and turned our ordinary street into something spectacularly beautiful.
i missed those maples when i moved away from home, and at first i was disappointed in the less flashy trees in my boston-area homes. it took a few years living in brookline to start seeing that the quieter leaves have their own changing beauty. now it amazes me to look at the yellow leaves falling outside my window and recall how i had never noticed them. they go from green to light green to dark yellow to light yellow, a little sparser with each iteration. one tree is a different sort than the others and it's now totally bare, but its neighbor retains its changing leaves, only very slowly letting go of them.
and then there's the magic forest. i see the magic forest only from the trolley that goes a dozen stops or so above ground before it grinds into the dreary if convenient underworld of the subway. i always read on subways, partly just for the chance to read, partly because it helps me forget i'm underground. now i almost never read until we start going under.....there's too much to see in every season. in the fall, this ride comprises a daily mini-foliage viewing for me. so many different trees and bushes, so many different gradations of autumn! who needs to drive into the country to experience the leaves' colors? the bush across the street from the elders home is extraordinary, green that begins turning red from the top down, so it looks first like a fringe of red hair, then snakes its way toward the bottom, streaking the green with odd, living patterns. the other trees turn mostly shades of yellow and green, highlighted the peculiar reddening bush. across the street, the vines climbing up the small white house with the travel agency on the first floor are thick, thicker than the window they cover, and are fire yellow this time of year until they get sparser and sparser and you see the window again, and then they're gone.
but back to the magic forest. my street is blessedly flat, and thus good for an aging asthmatic who needs to take walks, but right behind it are steep-hilled streets, whose tops you can see nicely from the trolley windows. right at washington street (across from the white house with the vines and the travel agent) the hilltops are covered with multiple trees. for three seasons, they get so full and so large you can see only the partial facade of one building in their midst, and it is pretty and big enough to be a castle. i don't know when i decided to people that area with fairies and goblins and bambi-deer and mysterious unnamed beasties, but it grew into my consciousness fully formed, and now each day i find the seat on the train from which i can best see the magic forest. it is at its most magic in the autumn, with even a few apparent maples in its midst. 20 seconds of bliss a day....
the season is turning toward winter now, the leaves thinner and thinner on the branches, thicker and thicker on the ground. still lovely, but with the death-essence of autumn visible. more buildings show through the magic forests, and though they are pleasant looking homes, they are not castles or palaces, and no fairy beings inhabit them. the magic will return for a day or two in winter, and of course there is a regal, stem beauty in bare branches that is its own enchantment. but the fairies have retreated and the humans have returned to the hill. the magic of the forest lies fallow, but it waits for spring. me, i have no time for waiting. the autumn is leaving, there's a new season to be lived and watched, and cherished.
autumn is a season of renewal as much as of dying, and that commonplace paradox always hits me anew. the leaves are so astoundingly alive in their dying. add to that the fact that schools begin again and, far more important to a kid raised right outside manhattan, the theatre season begins. plays, ballets, operas--all start up again. even television starts up again. by the official new year, january, we're jaded and cold and tired. but autumn is always full of promise.
in my childhood, the thought of school wasn't upsetting, and the thought of theatre was exhilarating. and there was the smell! long before we thought about pollution, everyone in a neighborhood of houses burned leaves in the fall. for the adults it was doubtless annoying. not for the kids though. first there was the business of raking the leaves into huge piles which, when you had formed, you jumped or ran into. twigs scratched and bugs got into your nose, but lord playing in the leaves was fun! and then you reraked and rejumped and reslapped the dirt and broken leaves off yourself and then started the whole thing over again, until parents lost patience and brought out the matches. and no one minded that we'd lost our game; we knew there were plenty of leaves and lots more piling before the winter began. besides, watching the leaves burn was gorgeous, the color of the leaves and the color of the flames and the smell that was like no other smell in the world, the smell of clean, contained burning. better even than chimney smoke because it was right there beside you.
we lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in queens, a linoleum rug sort of neighborhood which we believed--i did, anyway--was a 'suburb.' well, it certainly wasn't the city, that golden dream of a city you could get to in half an hour from the subway, the city that inspired our dreams as much as they did the dreams of kids from the midwest or the rest of the east coast, for that matter. but in the real city, so vastly superior in my young mind to our cozy-houses home, they didn't burn leaves in the fall, and so i was happy enough to live outside the dreamworld in that time. i was lucky too, though i didn't realize it, that large maple trees lined the streets, forming a block-long canopy even in winter, and turned our ordinary street into something spectacularly beautiful.
i missed those maples when i moved away from home, and at first i was disappointed in the less flashy trees in my boston-area homes. it took a few years living in brookline to start seeing that the quieter leaves have their own changing beauty. now it amazes me to look at the yellow leaves falling outside my window and recall how i had never noticed them. they go from green to light green to dark yellow to light yellow, a little sparser with each iteration. one tree is a different sort than the others and it's now totally bare, but its neighbor retains its changing leaves, only very slowly letting go of them.
and then there's the magic forest. i see the magic forest only from the trolley that goes a dozen stops or so above ground before it grinds into the dreary if convenient underworld of the subway. i always read on subways, partly just for the chance to read, partly because it helps me forget i'm underground. now i almost never read until we start going under.....there's too much to see in every season. in the fall, this ride comprises a daily mini-foliage viewing for me. so many different trees and bushes, so many different gradations of autumn! who needs to drive into the country to experience the leaves' colors? the bush across the street from the elders home is extraordinary, green that begins turning red from the top down, so it looks first like a fringe of red hair, then snakes its way toward the bottom, streaking the green with odd, living patterns. the other trees turn mostly shades of yellow and green, highlighted the peculiar reddening bush. across the street, the vines climbing up the small white house with the travel agency on the first floor are thick, thicker than the window they cover, and are fire yellow this time of year until they get sparser and sparser and you see the window again, and then they're gone.
but back to the magic forest. my street is blessedly flat, and thus good for an aging asthmatic who needs to take walks, but right behind it are steep-hilled streets, whose tops you can see nicely from the trolley windows. right at washington street (across from the white house with the vines and the travel agent) the hilltops are covered with multiple trees. for three seasons, they get so full and so large you can see only the partial facade of one building in their midst, and it is pretty and big enough to be a castle. i don't know when i decided to people that area with fairies and goblins and bambi-deer and mysterious unnamed beasties, but it grew into my consciousness fully formed, and now each day i find the seat on the train from which i can best see the magic forest. it is at its most magic in the autumn, with even a few apparent maples in its midst. 20 seconds of bliss a day....
the season is turning toward winter now, the leaves thinner and thinner on the branches, thicker and thicker on the ground. still lovely, but with the death-essence of autumn visible. more buildings show through the magic forests, and though they are pleasant looking homes, they are not castles or palaces, and no fairy beings inhabit them. the magic will return for a day or two in winter, and of course there is a regal, stem beauty in bare branches that is its own enchantment. but the fairies have retreated and the humans have returned to the hill. the magic of the forest lies fallow, but it waits for spring. me, i have no time for waiting. the autumn is leaving, there's a new season to be lived and watched, and cherished.
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