(Yes, this is a lengthy post, but I believe we need to remember and draw courage from the moments of our greatest strength, our finest ambitions. I promise you a much shorter post for May. )

When I was three years old, my mom sent me to a nursery school run by a former teacher in her home. As I had no siblings (yet) and all the kids in my neighborhood were teens and pre-teens, my mom thought the preschool would help me to overcome my shyness. The problem was, the other 7-8 kids were a year older, which doesn’t sound like much, but that one year difference feels mighty big when you’re a measly three. They mostly ignored me, but I was used to playing on my own, so not unduly stressed about the situation.

One of my favorite toys was a miniature wooden train set. I had one like it at home, but this set had twice the track. And I loved the accessories that went with it—the little painted wooden houses, the bridges, the cars of red, blue and green. I could make a whole story in a world of my choosing inside my head. Just like I did at home. If I could get my hands on it. A highly popular toy, it was usually monopolized by the boys.

But one morning, I saw my chance. The train set was wide open! I knelt on the floor and quietly went about the business of linking cars together from engine to caboose. I was almost there when a hand swooped down and snatched the blue car from my grasp.

“You can’t play with this!”

Startled, I looked up to see John R. towering above me, a menacing, satisfied sneer on his face as he placed a firm foot on a section of track.

The shock of that moment. I have never forgotten it. Outwardly, I ventured no response. I didn’t punch or slap him, didn’t yell or try to wrestle the stolen car from his grip. I didn’t even call for the teacher. But in the moments after he grabbed that train car, I burned with indignation. Who was he to take that car from me! I had every right to play with the train set and he had no right to stop me!  

I never told the teacher, or my parents, but for the remainder of that year, I sat behind an armchair in the living room and watched the other kids play. Then I went home and copied the games/activities I had seen them enjoying. My mother discovered this from talking to the teacher, but neither of them knew why. Only I did, and I never revealed the reason. 

Of course, many other injustices would happen to me over the years, perhaps the most egregious being the failing grade I received in a graduate seminar because I strenuously ignored the professor’s blatant attempts to seduce me during our requisite weekly one-on-one sessions. As payback, he “rescheduled” my final project presentation on the day it was due, leaving only a note in my department mailbox that same morning to say our meeting had been moved up from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., knowing I would not get the note until I was on my way to see him. When I found the message at 8:45, I rushed to his office, project in hand, to find him standing in the doorway, ready for the scene he’d set up. “You’re late!” He shouted. “I’m failing you!”

Seeking redress for this outrage, I went to see the ombudswoman. While admitting it was a not an uncommon complaint about this instructor, she let me know that “many just go along with it, until the semester ends,” then added, “He does publish more than anyone else on the faculty.” My faculty advisor ruled that he couldn’t fail me while refusing to accept my project, and got the course expunged from my record (the money was not refunded). But it tagged me in the department as someone who “doesn’t go along to get along.” The kiss of death.

And yet, the seizing of the little wooden train car remains the most vivid of all these affronts. It was my first real, solid end-to-end memory, and it both shaped who I would become and revealed to me who I was. Those who were bigger, those with more power, more money, more cruelty in their so-called hearts—bullying others they believed weaker, inferior; grabbing what wasn’t theirs; cutting a trail of misery everywhere they went—I would take them on in whatever way I could. Justice, not only for myself but for all others who suffered unfair treatment. It was my first solid core value. It has guided me through my life.

The year following the train-set incident, a friend from my new preschool at the local YWCA slept over. As we lay in the dark that night, we talked briefly about racial prejudice. I have no memory of what touched off the topic, maybe stories about the “color bar” in the South—Whites Only signs everywhere—I’d seen on the nightly news, a program that always accompanied our family dinners. I said it was terrible how mean white people were to colored people (we were still a few years shy of Stokely Carmichael and his term black power). Maureen considered this. “I don’t really care for the Negro much,” she said, “but I do love the Indians. It makes me sad that they are treated so badly.”

Honest to god, those were her exact words. I can’t recall what came after that, but I do know that I was: 1) startled and unhappy that my friend didn’t “care for” Black people, and 2) surprised to learn that Native Americans (a term we did not have at the time) were also the victims of prejudice. I had only seen the “happy” portrayals of these indigenous folks sharing that wonderful first Thanksgiving with the “kindly” pilgrims.     

This not-fairness thing was almost bigger and wider than it was possible to grasp. Almost. But I would come, bit by bit, to understand the enormity of injustice out there.

The Only Child in School That Day: The Courage of Ruby Bridges

In kindergarten, I witnessed a rarity on the nightly news—a story about a little girl just a year older than me. Her name was Ruby Bridges and she lived in a city familiar to me only through a postcard my parents had of the place they’d honeymooned—New Orleans.

Though the Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954—shortly before Ruby Bridges was born—the backlash, especially in the South, was fierce. Fierce enough that six-and-a-half years later, Ruby was the first Black child in New Orleans to attempt to integrate a “white school.” She was accompanied by a cadre of U.S. Marshals to protect her from the white crowds who heckled and threatened her every step of the way, right up to the schoolhouse door, many of them parents! People with children of their own, who would never for one minute tolerate their kids being treated that way.

As children, we rely on adults to keep some kind of order. To be fair or, if failing that, at least not malicious. But that day, I learned how brutal injustice could be. Later, I would discover that all the teachers at William Frantz Elementary School had stayed home that day—to register their hostility to desegregation. All but one—Barbara Henry, a white teacher who had recently moved to New Orleans from Boston. She alone volunteered to teach Ruby. In fact, Ruby would be Henry’s only student that year. The school literally kept all the white students hidden from Ruby’s view. She was not allowed to go to the cafeteria or the playground at recess, and U.S. Marshals accompanied her to the restroom. They also continued to walk Ruby to school as the angry crowds remained for months, hurling racial epithets and death threats at the six-year-old.

But Ruby Bridges, with Barbara Henry’s support, did not give up. Eventually the protests stopped and many of the white parents let their kids return to the school. In her second year, Ruby was taught in a classroom with other students, she ate in the cafeteria, went out to the playground, and—surprise!—life went on.

Four Little Girls on A Sunday Morning: The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

I had just started third grade when a white man planted a box of explosives under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—a Black church and a hub of civil rights activities—in Birmingham, Alabama on a Sunday morning. The explosives went off during the morning services, killing four young girls who were attending Sunday school and injuring many others. In the violence that erupted afterwards between police and furious members of the Black community, two more Black children were killed. Outrageously, it would be fourteen years before Ku Klux Klan leader, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of murder for the church bombing. His partners-in-crime, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton would not be convicted for another twenty-four years!

In third grade, too, I would encounter the word empathy and immediately grasp its meaning: The ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine oneself in their place. Thirty-two years later, I would buy my children Christopher Paul Curtis’s wonderful book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, the story of a Black family who travels south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama and arrives there just in time for the church bombing. It was Curtis’s first novel and it catapulted him to national prominence, winning both the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award. Today, sadly, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 ranks high on many banned books lists.

Bloody Sunday: All They Wanted Was Their Civil Rights

I would be just shy of my 10^th birthday when the world witnessed another horrifying injustice. What would come to be called “Bloody Sunday” took place on March 7, 1965, as some 600 civil rights activists began the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand of Governor Wallace that their full rights as American citizens, enumerated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, be recognized and respected. As with Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier, large swaths of the South had simply chosen to ignore the new law.

Led by Hosea Williams from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Amelia Boynton Robinson, a local civil rights activist, and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the marchers passed through Selma without incident, but as they crested the Edmund Pettis Bridge (named for a Confederate general), they got a good look at what awaited them. A throng of Alabama state troopers, billy clubs in hand, blocked the road at the bottom of the bridge, backed by county sheriff deputies, and a crowd of locals waving Confederate flags, rooting for a bloodbath.

The marchers continued cautiously, but as they neared the troopers, they were ordered to disperse or there would be serious consequences. Williams offered to talk. No dice. When the marchers did not move, the troopers rushed in, beating them mercilessly and choking them with tear gas. Lewis was knocked down repeatedly (he suffered a skull fracture that day) and Robinson was severely battered. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 50 more required treatment for injuries. 

Film of the brutal attack was rushed to the networks. An outraged nation reacted swiftly, organizing sit-ins and demonstrations. Their cries for justice did not go unheeded. A federal court intervened and, at last, protected by National Guard troops, the marchers made it to Montgomery, with Martin Luther King at the helm (he had been in Washington, DC, conferring with President Johnson on Bloody Sunday, intending to join the march the next day).  

In August, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by Congress and signed into law, 94 years after the Fifteenth Amendment had granted Black people the right to vote. The arc of the moral universe is, indeed, long, but Bloody Sunday made me understand that it is up to us to see that it bends toward justice.

They Were Dancing and Laughing, and the State Said You Can’t Do That: Stonewall 1969         

I was about to enter high school when the Stonewall Uprising occurred. The Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar in an era when same-sex relations were outlawed in every state but Illinois, was a target of frequent police raids. Part of New York’s campaign to rid the city of “sexual deviants.” But on June 28, 1969, the police got more than they bargained for. As they entered the bar in the early morning hours, their attempts to harass and arrest patrons met with unflagging resistance. That resistance spilled into the streets. As word spread, hundreds, then thousands joined the protest. Over the next six days, the clash between riot police and LGBTQ+ people and their allies would rage unabated. But when the tear gas finally cleared, what would become known as the Gay Pride movement had come into being.

It had been a long road. Before the Stonewall Uprising, the possibility of justice for LGBTQ+ folks looked pretty grim. It wasn’t enough that they weren’t bothering anyone, that they had their own clubs to dance and mingle in. If the attitude toward Black people had been that they could exist as long as they knew their place and kept to it, the official take on gays was they had no right to exist. A Chicago group, The Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 to advocate for gay rights, enjoyed a brief moment of attention before political pressure shut it down.  

A quarter century later, another gay rights activist, Harry Hay, founded a more enduring organization—the Mattachine Society—to make Americans rethink their bias against and fear of homosexuals (especially gay men). The Los Angeles-based org sprouted chapters across the country, but the times were still less than hospitable. A 1950 Senate report, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” equated homosexuality with mental illness, concluding that LGBTQ+ people were “security risks” to the country. President Eisenhower later banned them from working for the government or any of its contractors. A 1952 publication of the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”

The Stonewall Uprising radically altered the landscape. A year later, what would come to be called America’s first Gay Pride parades took place in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York where thousands of LGBTQ+ folks and their allies marched, chanting: Say it loud, gay is proud! Today, Gay Pride Parades are annual events in many countries.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association finally deleted homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and the next year the first openly gay candidate won a seat on the Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council.

I was a sophomore at Michigan State when the university hosted a “Wear Jeans if You’re Gay Day.” Since this was 1975 and all anyone wore was jeans, it meant that only people who were terrified of being thought gay would make the effort to choose some other garment. I’m happy to report that on a campus of over 50,000 people, I saw no one that day wearing other than denim. It was the era of solidarity. And though it would take another forty years for Obergefell v. Hodges to make same-sex marriage legal across the U.S., the tide had turned.

The Shocking Notion That Women Are People, Too: Roe v. Wade and the Women’s Movement

I would be a senior in high school when Roe v. Wade at last made abortion legal for women. Before that ruling, women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Though the advent of “the pill” in 1960 had radically changed women’s lives, back-alley abortions still posed significant risks. And women were still expected to be subservient to men. The happy housewife. The docile helpmate. The all-sacrificing mommy. A woman’s sexuality also remained an unseemly and potentially dangerous thing. Women were still the ones on the hot seat when it came to convictions for rape: Had she “asked for it” in her style of dress (male judges could decide her clothing was too provocative), or by her manner (too flirtatious)? I will say right here, no woman asks to be raped, but the prevailing attitude of the male-dominated judicial system kept many rape victims, already severely traumatized, from reporting the crime.   

The women’s movement that arose in the late 1960s imagined a new destiny for their half of the population. Took to the streets to say we demand control over our bodies, our options, our lives. Women would no longer go to college to get their “Mrs. degree”—the term used for women enrolled in higher education where it was assumed they were “husband shopping” for a man with a bright, monied future. Instead, they began running for political office in numbers, increased their presence in the legal system. They worked outside the home, not because economic necessity demanded it but because they wanted to use their talents and intelligence to create a fulfilling life as an independent adult. Roe v. Wade made so much of that possible. It was a momentous victory.

In This Dark Era of Reaction, John Lewis Still Guides Us

And now, so many of our gains for freedom and justice in the past 65 years have been or are being rescinded. In 2013, the Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling that waived the need for preclearance of new voting or redistricting laws in states and jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination (as identified in the VRA). Some two dozen states didn’t waste a moment in passing legislation that has restricted Black voters from exercising their rights—changes in voter ID laws and registration  mail-in voting, limited polling places and voting hours in Black neighborhoods.

SCOTUS struck again when it overturned the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in its June 2022 Dobbs decision. Instantly, a raft of reactionary laws were enacted in states across the nation, severely limiting or banning abortion, in some instances even in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment to the mother’s life. To enforce these draconian measures, some states have raised the possibility of legally preventing women from traveling to another state where abortion is legal. So far, thankfully, this proposal has met with a resounding “hands off” from the DOJ who filed a “Statement of Interest” in the matter, proclaiming that: The Constitution protects the right to travel across state lines and engage in conduct that is lawful where it is performed and that states cannot prevent third parties from assisting others in exercising that right. 

Book bans, laws against providing transgender healthcare or teaching Black history, threats to overturn gay marriage—we are living in a dark era of reaction, bordering on fascism. High on injustice and white male supremacy, low on freedom and civil rights.

It’s been 65 years since John R. grabbed that blue car from my hand and told me I couldn’t play with the train set. Sixty-five years of witnessing the wounding injustice to others, of suffering it myself on several occasions, of fighting for a world of true equality, freedom, and justice. Sixty-five years of hope, celebration and, now, deep concern as attacks on our rights mount once again.

In Barbados this past January, talking with our Bajan friend Tyrone, the subject of justice came up and I mentioned the powerful, lifelong effect that moment at age three has had on me. Thinking it was a stressor—emotional baggage that was weighing me down—Tyrone encouraged me to let it go. But as I explained to him, I don’t want to let it go. Far from being a recollection of defeat, it remains a moment of clarification—what I stand for—of identity. It is precious to me. It is me. As the fabulously courageous John Lewis said: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something. You have to DO something.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the subject of Time—what it is, how we perceive it, how to manage it. From Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory to Kevin Kruse’s 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, time—that elusive thing that keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking—continues to baffle us.

But for my money, no one has captured the truth of the matter better than James Baldwin, American writer and civil rights activist, who said: There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.  As much as we duck and dodge, delay and defer—time for that later, once everything is settled, when I feel less harried—there’s no denying Baldwin nailed it. Tomorrow never comes. It is always now. Now is the time.

Say It Now                                           

One of the most tragic figures to ever grace the literary world is the poet Sylvia Plath. Plath’s Ariel, a collection of poetry written in the last months of her life, would rock the world and catch fire with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1960s. Her novel, The Bell Jar—after initially being rejected by numerous American publishers—would become a fixture on required reading lists in high schools and colleges. For Plath, however, the recognition would come too late. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself. She was 30 years old. She had two children. And her husband had recently dumped her for another woman. On the night Plath left plates of food by her children’s bedside, then sealed off the kitchen with wet towels before turning on the gas oven and inhaling its poisonous fumes, she already knew Hughes’ lover was pregnant.

It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that Plath and Hughes’ marriage (achieved within scant months of their meeting) broke down solely over his infidelity. That was more the result than the cause. In many ways, their marital troubles can be ascribed to a simple truth—as two fiercely ambitious aspiring poets, they were in love and they were in competition. But as a man, in a time when men “knew best,” Hughes was in a position to assert his authority. It was he who insisted they return to England in 1958, a year after they’d moved to America where Plath had accepted the teaching position Smith College had offered their talented alumna. Hughes had managed to get a gig lecturing at nearby UMass Amherst, but he didn’t like teaching. He told Plath he was determined to earn a living as an author and poet.

One wonders at this distance why Hughes didn’t simply do that from America? At least for a few years, to let Plath fully engage with the post she’d been given. He’d already won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of poetry, Hawk in the Rain, which Plath had faithfully typed up for him. He could have written from anywhere.

Plath decided she, too, would focus solely on her poetry, but the birth of their first child in 1960 vied for her time and attention. Her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published that same year. Though well-received by critics, it did not win a prestigious award. If Plath was disappointed, her response was to write more poetry, better poetry. She wrote at a feverish pace, excited about where her new verses were taking her. Then Hughes walked out just months after their second child was born in 1962. The emotional strain was intense but Plath completed the collection of poetry for what would become the crowning literary achievement of her short life, Ariel. At her death, she left detailed instructions as to how the poems should be ordered in the book. Hughes was familiar with the verses, for Plath had shared many of them with her estranged husband on those occasions when he visited the children after he moved out.   

Hughes did see Ariel through to publication, spending two years on the project, but he changed Plath’s arrangement of the poems. He also omitted some poems, while adding others. These changes would earn him decades of rebuke from the new wave of feminist writers and academics who assumed Hughes had deleted Plath’s most damning verses against him. To compound the perceived offense, it was discovered that Hughes had burned Plath’s final journals.

Hughes’ “interference” in Plath’s manuscript would remain a point of contention and speculation until the publication in 2004 of The Restored Edition: Ariel, the collection of Plath’s poems as she had intended at her death. Meghan O’Rourke, writing for Slate, argued a “good case could be made that Hughes’ version of Ariel is actually superior to Plath’s,” for it included poems written in the final weeks of her life, poems she herself predicted would Make my name.

Eighteen years after Plath’s death, Hughes would edit and publish Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, the works Plath had published in her teens and 20s in such esteemed publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor. To this, Hughes added some of Plath’s poetry he had omitted from Ariel almost two decades earlier. It would seem the ghost of his late first wife continued to haunt him. But the world would not realize just how fierce this haunting was for Hughes until the 1998 publication of Birthday Letters in the final months of his life. This collection of poetry from the man who was then England’s esteemed poet laureate—a man frequently cited as one of the twentieth century’s great writers—would reveal just how shattering Plath’s suicide had been for Hughes, how it had haunted him every day of his life for 35 years. Professor of English at Williams College, Lynda K. Bundtzen, noted that many of these new poems were direct responses to Plath’s own poetry. “They address her as if she’s still alive, as if he can talk to her,” Bundtzen said.

For me, the most poignant—and revealing—poem in Birthday Letters is “The Machine,” with its closing lines: …Blackly yawned me Into its otherworld interior Where I would find my home. My children. And my life Forever trying to climb the steps now stone Towards the door now red Which you, in your own likeness, would open With still time to talk.

What if Hughes had opened up his true self, his real feelings to his wife in those final months? What if he had said, “I’m sorry. What I’ve done is less than honest. Your talent feels threatening sometimes. It both amazes and scares me.” Words left unsaid are never heard. Our best intentions, our deepest feelings are never known unless we make them known. If you love someone, tell them now. Apologize for those harsh words now. Admit the mistake you made now. Express your gratitude now.  

Do It Now    

Time has a way of creeping up on us. We mean to do something, but in the hurly-burly of day-to-day life, we often put off making a decision or taking action until—poof!—the moment is gone when we can do so. Perhaps nowhere in modern history has this played out so tragically as it did in Germany when Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

Hitler—and this is essential in understanding people’s response—did not simply waltz into Berlin and “seize” power, as is often supposed. In fact, the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) had been rather small potatoes in the wake of the German Empire’s collapse after WWI. The new government, known as the Weimar Republic, considered itself a democratic institution. It held elections. It had a constitution. Under this government, Hitler spent some nine months in prison for treason when his attempted coup failed in 1924. The Weimer Republic believed the growing popularity of the German Communist Party to be a much greater threat.

But as I said, time has a way of creeping up on us. In Germany, the economic devastation caused by the post-war Treaty of Versailles, with the huge reparations it demanded for France and Great Britain, became unbearable as the world economy collapsed in the Great Depression. The Nazi Party was only too happy to lay the blame for Germany’s economic woes on the Jews and the Communists. With their message that true-blooded Germans were the real “chosen people”, the Nazis began to unite a sizeable chunk of the country. By 1932, they were winning a third of the votes in parliamentary elections—an achievement no other party could claim. German President Paul von Hindenburg at first refused to grant Hitler’s demand that he be appointed chancellor, but after various backroom deals with conservative politicians who assured him they could control the Nazi’s leader, von Hindenburg ceded to his wishes. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. When Hindenburg died nineteen months later, Hitler had already engineered a bill—with a little intimidation and much suspected fraud—that merged the offices of President and Chancellor into one, making him the sole leader (Führer) of Germany. The Nazis then seized control of the government and booted democracy into the gutter.

But it was a gradual coup, and the passage of time lulls people, prepares them in many ways to accept circumstances they would have once found intolerable. Acts like a narcotic— anesthetizing its victims with the thought If things get worse, then I’ll act, I’ll leave then… Because, let’s face it, leaving your homeland—your family, your house, all you’ve ever known—is the hardest thing anyone can do. And the Nazis manipulated this gradual dance with cruel brilliance.

Even before President von Hindenburg’s death, the strength of the Nazi Party in parliament had made it possible to pass laws banning Jews and other political opponents of the Reich from holding civil service positions or practicing law, with a few exemptions. But the pace of persecution kicked up a notch once Hitler took full control. The infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935—the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor—proclaimed Judaism not a religion but a race, distinct from and inferior to the German race. Therefore, Jews could no longer vote or hold public office. As non-Germans, they had no legal rights. In 1936, Jewish doctors were banned from practicing medicine. In 1938, all Jews were required to register any property held within the Reich and Jewish students were barred from German schools.

And then Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) happened and everything exploded. This wholesale attack on all things Jewish saw synagogues, hospitals, and schools destroyed. Jewish shops and homes were burned and looted. At the end of that fiery, violent pogrom on November 9/10, ninety-one Jews had been murdered and some 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

Dachau, built in 1933, was the first concentration camp, a forced labor camp originally built to imprison Hitler’s political opponents—Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. In the ensuing years, Jehovah’s witnesses, Gypsies, and gay men swelled the ranks, as well. Few Jews, though, were to be found at Dachau unless they belonged to one of these groups or had violated the Nuremberg Laws. Until Kristallnacht. After that, German Jews could no longer hope or believe that the Nazis were just an annoying but not mortally dangerous blip on the timeline of history—that things would surely return to normal soon, democracy would be restored. Now, every Jew in Germany understood they must leave ASAP.

Though emigration for Jews was still encouraged in 1938 by the Nazis—the fewer Jews in Germany, the better—that didn’t mean the process was smooth or, for many, even possible. To emigrate, you needed paperwork, mountains of it, much of it difficult to obtain. You needed a destination country willing to take you in. If you managed both those things, you still faced having to find some way of setting up once you arrived. Before 1938, the financial struggles of the Great Depression made many countries reluctant to take on more residents. By 1939, when emigration became easier and quotas rose in both the U.K and the U.S., the Nazis had placed a heavy emigration tax on Jews and severely restricted the amount of money they could transfer abroad from German banks. Though many would make it out, one-third of the original Jewish population would still be in Germany in 1941 when emigration was banned by the Nazis and Hitler’s “Final Solution” took effect, with its forced internment of Jews in the rapidly sprouting number of death camps. Now, it was too late.

Although genocide remains an active evil in our world—just turn on the news—most of us will not face such a dire threat, where every moment lost to hesitation, to inaction may spell the difference between life and death. But we still struggle with the human tendency to “kick the can down the road.” We put off leaving a job that bores us. We remain in a relationship that’s making us unhappy. Or we postpone getting those medical tests the doctor urged us to have.

Why do we hesitate? Perhaps a task seems difficult—too laborious (I can’t imagine undertaking all this). Or we’re not sure how to proceed (What if I make a mistake?).  Maybe we’re fearful (What if the tests come back positive?). So, we put off taking the first step and thus this thing that matters—it never happens.

Revel in the Now     

It would seem that no one would need to be exhorted to enjoy the moment, to revel in the now, and yet, many of us tend to come up with a lengthy list of reasons to put off pleasure when confronted with the opportunity to relax or take up some project we’ve been longing to launch into. Even something as simple as scheduling a definite date to meet up with old friends—those ones we keep messaging on Facebook: Let’s get together for drinks on our deck this summer and catch up. But June slips by, then July, then August, and “this summer” too often becomes never.  

Recently I was reminded how precious—and fleeting—the “now” is. Every Sunday evening during our annual jaunt to Barbados, Ed and I go to Surfside, an open-air club on the ocean sands that features live steel pan bands on that day. For three hours, we revel in the songs of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Neil Diamond, the Village People, Jimmy Buffett and a jillion other steel-pan classics. We—and when I say “we”, I mean everyone in the place—sing along with “Sweet Caroline” and do the hand motions to “Y.M.C.A.” People flock to the “dance floor”—a narrow sandy strip between the bandstand and the tables—to boogie in whatever style moves them, or no particular style at all. It is People. Feeling great. About being ALIVE.

The last Sunday of our stay, as we were munching on shrimp and drinking Rum Punch, the band struck up ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Ed and I looked at each other and headed for the dance floor. It’s a great song to dance to, but as I started whirling and twirling around, the lyrics played in my head: You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen…Having the time of your life. For a moment, my heart clutched. So much time gone by never to return. How did it slip by so fast? But then I looked at Ed, at the night, the people, the stars above. Felt how much I loved it all. How much I loved this moment.     

James Baldwin was spot-on. The time is always now. Say it Now. Act Now. Above all, Revel in the Now.

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.'” (Eduardo Galeano)

[NOTE: Though I wrote this post more than five years ago, it could not be more timely, or urgent, than now.  I’m on the road this month, but I’ll be back with a brand new post in March. Meanwhile, keep hollering and harbor hope. We still have a democracy, however flawed–and we must keep it.]

My husband and I are having dinner at a local farm-sourced, regional-brewers kind of place when I notice the TV set over the bar is playing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that 1962 cult classic, mental/emotional slugfest between a manipulative Joan Crawford and a deranged Bette Davis. Both of them on the far side of their ingénue years.

When the server—a young woman in her mid-20s—comes to take our order, I ask if she knows the film. She scrutinizes the action on the TV screen and shakes her head. Never heard of it. I give it a strong recommendation. It may be camp, but it’s first-rate camp and it was nominated for five Academy Awards.

This exchange got me thinking about the increasing transcience of culture and knowledge. How what’s happening in the ever-changing nanosecond fills and floods our attention to the exclusion of everything that came before.

The Seduction of Now

It’s very seductive to think of the past as something finished. Over. That it has no connection or relevance to who we are now or where we’re headed. That we can re-invent ourselves at will, without a backward glance, and no price to pay.

Our high-tech world, with its rapid flow of new, disposable “product” and seemingly endless streams of “content” not only encourages this attitude, but practically demands it. When something “brand new” happens every 15 minutes, our attention is sorely taxed just scrambling to keep up. Who has time to reflect? To make connections?

Though each of us has a personal life that begins with our birth and ends with our death, we’re also part of a much larger world with a long and complicated past that affects our little blip on the timeline.

Okay, no one is going to argue that Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is a force to deepen ones understanding of the world. But an existence composed solely of what’s-happening-now leaves us with no compass to steer by, no yardstick for comparison on serious, larger-than-our-lifetime issues—say, global warming or the worldwide resurgence of nationalist movements. Without an understanding of what “went before,” we might not even realize it is a resurgence. That the current global trend toward nationalism has roots in the European fascist movements of the 1930s and the Jim Crow laws of the American South—the latter going back to the Civil War and that defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun. That nationalism is not without links to the European conquerors of Columbus’s “new world.” All of it a shorthand for the belief that some people are created more equal than others. That some people don’t even have the right to exist.

Without a sense of how today’s headlines fit in along the timeline of human history, we’re left vulnerable to all who would prey on that ignorance. And they are out there.

In a State of Disconnect: Clueless about History

A quick survey of polls targeting common misconceptions (and just plain ignorance) about history makes for fascinating—if frightening—reading.

A 2006 poll by the now defunct McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that one in five Americans could name all five Simpson cartoon family members, but only one in a thousand people could identify all five First Amendment freedoms.

A 2012 ACTA survey revealed that fewer than 20% of college graduates could correctly identify the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation.

A 2010 survey, cited by The Atlantic, reported more Americans knew that Michael Jackson composed “Beat It” than knew that the Bill of Rights is a body of amendments to the Constitution. And one in three did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to a trial by jury.

Fifty percent of Americans surveyed also suffer severe timeline confusion. They identified the American Revolution as happening after either the Civil War or the War of 1812. And more than a third had no clue at all in which century the American Revolution occurred. One can only hope continued sell-out performances of Hamilton will provide some hints.

In light of the video that went viral this summer—a man harassing a woman for wearing a shirt with the flag of Puerto Rico (“You should not be wearing that in the United States of America!” he shouted repeatedly.)—it’s worth noting that a 2017 poll revealed almost half of Americans don’t know that the people of Puerto Rico are United States citizens.

Perhaps the most shocking—and saddening—statistic I came across was cited on NPR’s All Things Considered: Forty percent of Americans cannot identify what Auschwitz was.

In fact, fewer than half of Americans know that Hitler did not take control of Germany by force, but was democratically elected. We’ll return to this later.

Why Does This Matter? Why Should We Care?

Not knowing what came before, as I said, renders us prey to spin doctors, Russian hackers, unscrupulous politicians, and hucksters of every stripe.

It leaves us vulnerable to the lies of others, told for their own nefarious purposes. 

“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” said then-presidential candidate Trump at a 2015 Birmingham rally. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of [Muslims] were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

Trump stirred up a lot of anti-immigrant feeling with these words, sowing the seeds of support for his notorious Muslim Ban, but politifact.com gave him a “Pants on Fire” rating for that speech. That’s code for one big fat whopper.

PolitiFact cites a September 17, 2001 Associated Press report that debunked “rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attack by Muslims” in Jersey City. And wildfire rumors of Muslim-Americans cheering the fall of the World Trade Center in Paterson, N.J., turned out to be a nasty lie spawned by chain e-mails and fanned by shock jock Howard Stern.

The historical truth? Muslim residents of Paterson mounted a banner in that city saying “The Muslim Community Does Not Support Terrorism.”

We fall for solutions that have failed us before.

Trump sold his tax cuts for the rich by promising American workers that with more money in their boss’s pocket, they would benefit from increased wages and bonuses. It was gonna be “beeeeautiful.”

If there’s one thing we should be wise to by this point, it’s the bald-faced lie of trickle-down economics—that when you let the rich keep all their money, out of gratitude they will pass pots of it along to the peons who made them rich in the first place. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, exposed the nonsense of trickle-down more than a hundred years ago in his Cross of Gold speech:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through to those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

The term “trickle-down economics” was coined by American humorist and commentator Will Rogers to ridicule President Hoover’s dismal stimulus efforts to cure a Great Depression many economists feel he played a large hand in creating. Hoover, a cheerleader for “rugged individualism,” believed that only the voluntary action of “socially responsible capitalist leaders” (know any?), not government intervention, would restore economic order.

Trickle-down economics failed in the close of the 19^th century. It failed in the Great Depression. It failed in the massive tax cuts to the rich known as “Reaganomics” that started an almost 30-year slide into the financial crash of 2008. And it is failing under Trump. A 2018 analysis of Fortune 500 companies reveals that fewer than five percent of workers will get a one-time bonus or wage increase from the Trump tax cuts. If they still have a job. AT&T and General Motors both cut 1,500 jobs. Kimberly-Clark dumped 5,000 workers. It seems that most companies poured virtually all of their tax-break money into stock buybacks, making the richest folks even richer.

Trickle-down economics does one thing and one thing only: It robs from the poor and middle classes, and gives to the rich.

Blinds us from seeing how attacks on others are attacks on all of us.

Recently, I read a piece (sorry, I didn’t copy the link) where psychologists discussed how people tend to mentally catalog only those things they perceive as affecting them directly. For example, if you’re not a union member—a teacher, a nurse, an auto worker—you might think that current efforts to cripple or destroy unions have little to do with you. “Right to work” laws, attacks on overtime pay. But you’d be wrong.

History shows that the advantages labor unions have fought for and won (starting with the right to unionize) have generally benefited all American workers.

Before there were unions, many people worked six, even seven days a week for an average workweek of 61 hours. It was the unions, waging massive (and sometimes bloody) strikes in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries that brought us the 8-hour day and the weekend. A half-century of struggle culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 

When unions are strong, the middle class tends to flourish. When they are weakened, as is happening now, income inequality increases for all workers and the purchasing power of the middle and poor classes shrinks. A lot. Benefits disappear, too.

Speaking of benefits, it was the rise of unions in the 1930s and 1940s that we have to thank for employer-sponsored health insurance. When unions used their numerical clout to negotiate health care for their members, many other employers scrambled to stay competitive by offering the same.  By 1950, a majority of employers offered some type of health insurance to their workers. With the current two-pronged effort of the GOP to weaken unions and sabotage the ACA, the future of employer-sponsored healthcare is something to keep on your radar.

In its first national convention (1881), the American Federation of Labor started the ball rolling to end child labor. State after state responded to this call until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act abolished child labor nationwide.

Allows those in power to cheat us of our rights.

If you don’t know the Bill of Rights guarantees you a trial by jury for criminal cases and serious civil cases—and inhibits the court from overturning a jury’s finding—you might be bulldozed into waiving your right to a jury trial in exchange for one heard (and ruled on) solely by a judge. This is increasingly a power tactic of corporations who feel juries tend to be sympathetic to individuals claiming damage or loss rather than to the big companies alleged to have screwed them.

It’s easy to take from people what they don’t know is theirs. Remember those 999 people out of 1,000 who could not name the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment? They are at risk for believing the current propaganda that a press who criticizes the president is un-American. They may fear to speak out because some politician with an agenda says protesting government actions is “illegal.”

Well, here they are, the five freedoms guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment to the Constitution (at the very top of the Bill of Rights):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We are allowed to holler with all our might against those who would violate or destroy our democracy. And we should.

We fail to recognize the signposts of eminent danger when they’re right before us.

Recently, a guest on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes said of the current fight against widespread attacks on voting rights, “The Civil Rights Movement continues. It is eternal.”

Ditto the fight against fascism. Fascism did not end with the surrender of the Nazis any more than white supremacy died with Abraham Lincoln’s signature on the Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13^th Amendment.  

I mentioned up-top a poll that found fewer than half of Americans know that Hitler did not take control of Germany by force, but was democratically elected. As Emory University history professor, Deborah Lipstadt, explains, “The Nazis didn’t come into office on January 30, 1933, and decide on a genocide the next day. They slowly broke down a democracy. They destroyed it.”

She goes on to cite the “steady drumbeat of attacks” that began under Hitler. “First on the press, then on the courts, then on institutions, [the] slow takeover of institutions.”

Sound familiar?

Connecting the Dots  

To have a solid grasp of what came before is to have a richer understanding of what we’re seeing now. A guide to sift truth from lies. A way to answer the always-pertinent question: From whose viewpoint is this coming and what do they stand to gain by pushing this particular agenda? Instead of bouncing from tweet to tweet, history gives us a telescopic lens to pinpoint the connections. And it cannot be said enough: Everything is connected.

The films and books, the music and paintings and theatre of the past have messages for us, too. Not perhaps the kitschy romp of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but there is much worth our attention in the dusty archives of film, the overflowing shelves of the library, in Shakespeare’s plays and John Donne’s poetry.

One book that Americans are rediscovering is a little dystopian novel, 1984.

Written 68 years ago by English author George Orwell, it’s been flying off the shelves, as they say, topping the best-seller list at Amazon in January 2017—after Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts” to justify Trump’s complete fabrication about the size of his inaugural crowd.

That tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why it matters. To do that, I will close with a paragraph from an article written by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker in 2017, “Orwell’s 1984 and Trump’s America”:

“And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”

To know what came before us is a great gift–enriching, fascinating. It is also a warning.

Ah, January. The month of resolutions. Exercise more. Eat healthier. Get more sleep. Get organized (How? When? Add 10 hours to every day and the problem will solve itself). Nearly 40% of Americans make some kind of New Year’s resolution. Most say they are “very or somewhat likely” to keep those vows. Someone should do a follow-up in February.

Regular readers of this blog might recall that I, too, succumbed to resolution mania last January.  Sick of the stress overload many of us are suffering, I bravely, if naively, declared that 2023 would see me “…Saying NO to counting minutes. NO to stressing over the mind-numbing roster of repetitive daily chores. NO to replaying ad nauseum the cock-ups of life or the rude slights of others (who are doubtless stressed themselves). And YES to life. YES to time without a stopwatch, time as process—to be enjoyed, relaxed with, contented in. To bask in the great good fortune of being ALIVE.”

Well, you can’t fault me for being a pessimist.

Okay, confession: While I no longer hyperventilate over a lost ten minutes or resist having to unload the dishwasher for the 1,978,244^th time, I’m still having some—okay, more than some—issues regarding life’s stressful cock-ups. I want to solve problems as soon as they arise. As for the rude slights of others, like a needle stuck in the groove of an LP, my brain replays their angry words—what inspired them?  

Case in point: A few weeks back, at the end of a lovely day of holiday shopping, Ed and I waited in line to check out our basket of purchases. When our turn came at the register, the saleswoman was hostile from the moment I laid the first item on the counter, even telling me to be silent as I was talking to Ed. Afterward, at lunch, I was still feeling the sting of her sharp words and combative manner. Ed encouraged me to put it out of my mind, to not let it warp the happiness of the day, which had extended to the meal we were now enjoying—a sunny table in a relaxed atmosphere, pleasant exchanges with our server and the bartender. I knew he was right. F*** it, I thought. Let it go. And thus, this post was born.

So, going forward into the new year, whenever the insanities and inanities of life sling their arrows of “outrageous fortune” my way, I’m not going to waste time and energy on things gone awry or people behaving badly. I am turning off the “replay ad nauseum” switch in my head and dismissing all annoyances, great and small, with these two little words: F*** it.

Not even an exclamation mark to punctuate. Just a calm, determined choice.

The Waiting Game

I actually had an opportunity to apply my new resolution immediately after that post-shop lunch. Six days before, I had emailed twelves invites to our annual Winter Solstice Party—a high-spirited gathering where the brandy and eggnog flow freely, the table is heaped with savories and sweets, and the conversation is lively until the last guests depart 4-5 hours later.    

So, what was I angst-ing about? I had only heard from three people. How was I to shop for a party when I had no idea how many people might show? I sent “hope you can make it” reminder emails and texts a week before the party. I tried contacting several old friends through Facebook in the event their email addy had changed. Then, Ed and I had our holiday shopping outing. Afterward, I decided I would just send my customary cheery date and time reminder to everyone on the list a day before and F*** it, we’d celebrate with whoever showed up.   

Two days before I emailed the reminder, I got three more yesses, one no, and a maybe, pending recovery from a recent surgery. In the end, most everyone showed up and it was one of our best parties ever. I could have saved my head and heart the numerous replays of “what if” and “why aren’t they?” The outcome would have been exactly the same.

As is the case for the following:

Stuff That Doesn’t Work the Way It’s Supposed To

Ed and I take several trips a year—travel is our passion. Until this past September, though, we’d never experienced a cock-up in getting from one place to another. Long lines at security, yes. Annoying passengers in front of us who launch their seats so far back, we can’t use our meal trays—yes. But that’s part and parcel of life on the road (or in the air). Well, this fall when we flew to Copenhagen, there were no direct flights, so we booked a Boston to Munich/Munich to Copenhagen flight going over, and a Copenhagen to Frankfurt/Frankfurt to Boston flight coming back. All on an airline whose name rhymes with Woof-bonza.  

After the customary knee-breaking backward-thrust-of-seat by a decidedly unfriendly man in the row ahead, we queued up our movies, ordered a drink and away we flew. Our flight had departed 30 minutes late, but we still had almost an hour to make our connection. No sweat. In Munich, however, we had to sit on the ground for another 30 minutes, waiting for a gate to open. By the time we made it inside the airport, we had a scant twenty minutes.to make our flight. I ran daily for more than 25 years and never were those leg muscles put to better service than my sprint to the next gate where the attendant waved us on, calling out encouragement as if we were in some World Cup race. We made it, but… our luggage did not. We arrived in Copenhagen with nothing more than our passports and a package of cookies we got on the plane. Apparently, this happens so often with Woof-bonza that they had cartons of packets containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. We each took one and caught the metro to our Airbnb in the clothes we had now been wearing some 30 some hours—and would don the next morning until an airport van delivered our luggage around noon. But world travelers are not easily daunted. We greeted our suitcases with unbridled joy, changed clothes and had a marvelous month in Copenhagen. Then…

Our return flight from Copenhagen to Frankfurt was a full hour late in taking off. Leaving us just 15 minutes to make the Boston flight. Well, you can guess the story. Arriving late in Frankfurt, we again had to wait for a gate. It turned out to be Gate A. The Boston flight left from—and I am not making this up—Gate ZZ80. Not even Jesse Owens, greatest Olympic runner of all time, could have made that transfer, but I gave it my all. On and on I ran, only to find they were packing up the gate and turning off the lights at ZZ80. This time, it was our luggage that made it onto the plane, while we stood in a near-deserted airport, stranded.

Woof-bonza’s claims office booked a flight to Boston for the next morning, gave us a meal voucher for one of the airport eateries, and a train ticket to a hotel thirty miles away. Once again, we would have to wait another 24 hours to lay our hands on clean clothes. Having been victims of luggage-separation once, though, we’d smartly included clean underwear, deodorant, and toothbrushes in our carry-on bag.

I should have said F*** it, gone down to the hotel bar and enjoyed a drink, but instead I bogged down in my exhaustion, greatly annoyed at having to go through the whole flight thing again the next day and losing the money for the room we’d booked in Boston that night.     

Best Laid Plans…    

Our small in-town front yard is a terraced garden, roughly 30 feet long and 15 feet from sidewalk to house. It took me two years to dig through the bindweed left by the previous owners and another two years to terrace the beds and plant them. The task of refining—getting the right mix of colors, heights, greenery—never really ends, but by 2022 I was satisfied with the whole. Hoping to deter the joyous children and manic doggies who romp through and trample the lower garden abutting the sidewalk, I invested in some attractive, heavy-duty garden edging. It arrived just days before our house was to be re-roofed in preparation for solar panels.

The morning the roofers arrived, I came down to breakfast in time to see one of the crew trundling a wheelbarrow through the upper tier of my garden. The entire tier. A third of my garden, flattened. In apoplectic shock, I could only point to Ed and make distress noises. All I can say is it was a good thing I hadn’t yet noticed the roofers’ trucks, parked well over the curb, their tires settled in the garden’s lowest level. All my purple sage, my bee balm—gone.  

When I was capable of rational thought again, I told myself: I’ll wait until the roof project is done and then I’ll set up the edging. Next spring, I can replace the plants.  But the roof project finished just ten days before Ed and I were scheduled to leave for France for a month. By that time, I had a zillion trip-prep tasks. I’ll install the edging when we return in October. Upon our return, however, Ed came down with a cellular infection that landed him in the hospital for a week and kept him off his feet for over a month. The upshot? Hospital visits, taking on all the household tasks and autumn leaf-raking brought me right into early December and the first snows—no garden edging. Next spring, I told myself. Next spring, definitely. The box containing the edging—a sizable mother, 27” x 17” x 17”—sat through the winter, just off the laundry room, at the entrance to the kitchen.

The next spring, I received an unexpected (but very welcome!) one-off bonus from my annuity account, so we decided to use the windfall to re-side the house, something we’d wanted to do since we purchased the place. You can probably guess the rest—a crew of construction workers with sawhorses, scaffolding and ladders everywhere. What plants had escaped devastation during the re-roofing took a hit this time around. And my hopes of installing the edging…

As I write, that mammoth box of edging still stands near the entrance to the kitchen. It’s become a sort of table, a home to a variety of flotsam and jetsam, including a hefty carton of cookbooks we winnowed out some years ago to donate—where???

Someday. Sometime. But for now, heading into winter, I just gotta say F*** it.       

Annoying Circumstances   

My town has just four days—alternate Saturdays—in October and November when you can take your leaves to the landfill. We usually rake about 30 bags each year, but this year, we filled 52 bags. So, getting leaves to the landfill at every opportunity was a priority. We ran multiple trips on each of the appointed days.

On Saturday, November 11, I stuffed eight bags of leaves into every possible nook and cranny of my Subaru and drove off on what was supposed to be the first of two dump-runs. The day was beautiful, sunny, with sweeping vistas of hillsides dotted with the last color of the season. It was all going splendidly until…I arrived at the dump to find the gate closed and locked. A sign advised me to go to a second gate down the road—the one where large brush can be dumped. So off I drove only to find that gate also closed. The ride home was not so sunny. I unloaded the bags. Twenty-two bags on the porch. And more to rake in the coming week. I managed to clear a narrow pathway for the mail carrier.

When I told Ed the news, he said, “Oh, it’s Veterans Day.” “But don’t government ops like the Post Office always observe those holidays on Monday?” I asked. Turns out that when it comes to Veterans Day, they don’t. MLK Day, yes. Presidents’ Day, yes, but not Veterans Day. Doing a quick calendar check online, I found that Veterans Day had only fallen once on a Saturday in the fourteen years we’ve lived here, and I hadn’t noticed because pre-pandemic, the town offered two days every week for leaf disposal.  

Petty, ridiculously so in hindsight, as is so much of what we stew over, and definitely deserving of a F*** it.

Anticipation: Why Worry Later When You Can Worry Now?

Just before we left for Copenhagen this past fall, I received a summons for jury duty for October 31. Happy Halloween! I decided not to ask to postpone because I didn’t want to risk getting rescheduled for a time when we were traveling—you can’t ask for a postponement twice on the same summons—and face forfeiting all the $$$ we’d laid out for plane fare and lodging.

The problem with jury duty is that you have no idea how big a chunk of your life it could lay claim to. You could show up to find they don’t need you and you’re excused. You could serve one, two, three days and be done. Or you could land a trial that lasts for weeks. Not only might my life be thrown into chaos for a lengthy time, but right at the start of the holiday season when family would be gathering. Anticipation, as Carly Simon might have sung, was making me…crazy. Every day after we returned from Copenhagen was a mental back and forth: What’ll I do if…Don’t worry about it until it happens…What’ll I do if… 

On the day-before phone check-in, I was supremely relieved to hear: There are no cases scheduled for tomorrow. Your presence is not required. I should have just said F*** it from the start and let the dice fall as they would. As noted up-top about the holiday party invites, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but it would have saved wasted energy for something happier and more productive in the meantime. And that’s true for all things beyond our control.

Into the New Year—Bring It On!

As I write, family has started arriving for the holidays. This time is super-precious as both my kids live some distance away and we’re seldom able to get together more than two or three times a year. I’m sitting here now, thinking I really should give this post one more good edit. Cut it back here. Spark it up there. Revise that one section.

But with just three days to go until Christmas, I’m going to listen to myself. Take my own advice. Sail into 2024 with a lighter heart. This post is good enough, finished. F*** it.

Lugging the stand mixer downstairs from the guestroom where it hibernates from the end of one holiday season to the start of the next, I always think of my cat, Tibby. Each year, when the stand mixer took its place of prominence on the kitchen counter, Tibby would go apoplectic, dancing in circles on the floor beneath it, meowing, salivating, waiting for that first stick of butter to appear. For him, the holidays were about an endless stream of butter wrappers as I baked pies and vast quantities of cookies to be tinned and sent to friends. The butter, softened in preparation for all this holiday hoopla, always left a thin creamy film he would lick and lick in ecstasy until the waxed surface of the wrapper itself had vanished. Tibby is no longer with us. He died in July 2021 after a long and happy life, but this memory always makes me smile.

It’s good—healing, rejuvenating—to reflect on that which we love and have loved. The people and things that sustain us. That give our life purpose and joy. We live in difficult times. High on the stress count. Low on the tranquility scale. Amidst the mayhem and brutality, the pressures of a society—a world—crumbling in on itself, we need to step back periodically and remember what is beautiful, what is worth saving, worth fighting for, so that we may renew our energy to do so.

The holidays—whatever one celebrates—seem like the right moment for a rejuvenation of spirit. Yes, they’re a mindbending whirlwind of coordinating menus and finding extra chairs at the table for Uncle Dave and your stepdaughter’s new heartthrob, of picking up relatives from the airport or train station and trying to remember what size sweater your brother-in-law wears while navigating the Black Friday crowds at the mall or online. But if we can find some quiet moment, carve out some small space for reflection on that which we love, I think it will lighten our hearts. Send us into the New Year restored.

When my kids were little, I’d stay up late on Christmas eve to play Santa, bringing down the presents from their attic hiding place and arranging them under the tree. Then I’d take a post-midnight stroll around our block, the streets so still, so calm, everyone tucked up in their beds, the stars high above. Peace on earth. My little corner of it anyway. Back home, I lit the tree and turned off all the other lights. And sat. And soaked in the serenity, the goodness of being alive. Even writing about it now feels healing. Hopeful. And we need to be hopeful, we who want to save the world from its own worse tendencies.

So, as we wind down one year and await the next, I’m making a list of all the things that sustain me, that give me joy, enrich my mind, nurture my heart and soul. “Those lovely intangibles,” as Fred tells the cynical Doris in the holiday classic Miracle On 34^th Street. If this idea appeals to you, I hope you’ll reply to this post and share something from your own list of spirit boosters.

The List:

Music. I don’t know about you, but for me, music is like the soundtrack of my life. Slip in a CD or put on a vinyl disc and music transports me over the years to cherished moments. A song brings back the faces of long-ago beloved friends, dancing and drinking and gabbing the night away in our favorite café bar. A tune recalls the heady freedom of a cross-country drive as I made my way east to a new home in the land of my dreams. A dance tape I made for the occasion brings back the joyous August day I married the love of my life.

Music is also therapy. Every evening, as midnight rolls around, I take a half hour to “decompress.” My favorite songs for this include Joshua Bell’s incredibly beautiful recordings of Dvorak’s Song to the Moon and Schubert’s Ave Maria, which I first heard sung acapella by a man with a breathtaking tenor in the streets of Florence, Italy, twenty years ago.

From the Beatles to the Byrds, from Motown to Mozart, while driving or cooking or relaxing on the lawn at Tanglewood—where I can enjoy Josh Bell live—in music, I feel the strength, the continuity, the joy of my life. And the determination to fight on for my vision of a more loving, generous, peaceful world. 

Books. My greatest joy when I was three years old was the little Golden Book (19 cents!) I would get each week at the grocery store—if I was good, my mom cautioned. I was always good. I couldn’t wait to get home and open that book and discover the story. After my mom had read it to me several times, I had it memorized. By age four, I could read them myself. In college—surprise!—I majored in literature. Shakespeare, Flaubert, Faulkner, George Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez. And so many, many more. Reading, reflecting, discussing and writing about what I’d read. That was my “work.”  

And what did books offer me—then and in all the years since?  A multiplicity of mirrors from which to view this complex world. New ways of seeing and thinking about things and people. The ability to dig deep and make connections. And above all, the sheer pleasure of reading itself. My to-be-read pile far, far exceeds not only the limited shelf space of my house, but all reasonable life-expectancy figures. Unless I make it to 140. Hey, I’m up for the game. Bring it on.      

Theatre. When Covid struck, I feared it would be the end of live theatre. I was so relieved to discover that, indeed, the show must go on. Shakespeare at The Globe. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the National Theatre. Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the West End. Toss in a great musical—Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Story—and like the line from the song “Take Me Out to the Ballpark,” I don’t care if I never get back.

If you haven’t done much theatre—and a sizable portion of America is a long Uber ride from a professional theatre—you may well ask: What can you get from a play that you can’t get from a film and at a fraction of the price? I would say, in great theatre there is a synergy between actors and audience that leaves you electrified. You come out of a show changed and charged by the emotions, the ideas you’ve witnessed in community with others.

Theatre was the naturally evolving bridge between the ancient storytellers who brought crowds of people together, hungry to hear tales of the human experience, and the later writing down of such tales—the Iliad and the Odyssey, credited to the Greek poet Homer, being two famous examples. But it remains a potent force in storytelling for the same reason the phonograph and the radio did not replace concerts: a live performance cannot be duplicated. The dynamics between a particular audience and the players belong to that moment. Ed and I don’t buy a lot of “stuff” (books being one exception!), but when we go to London, we go to the theatre.

The Natural World. In the great scrapbook of memories, one I often find myself returning to is a sleep-out on the shores of Lake Michigan when I was at Girl Scout camp. A warm summer’s night, the gentle slap of waves upon the sand, one of the counselors singing as she strummed her guitar—a song about becoming a woman—while we drifted off to dreamland, a zillion stars overhead.

Nothing is probably as soothing a balm to the soul as losing oneself in nature. The trees arching high above you. The vast blue dome of the sky. A world of green and calm, rivers and lakes. Nature dwarfs our human dramas, gives us respite from our struggles. I love big cities—New York, London, Paris. Love their energy, their art galleries, museums, theatres and cafes, but even there, I always seek out their green spaces. Central Park stretching from 59^th Street to 110^th.  The Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Regents Park and Kew Gardens in London. I relish them all, these urban oases. Closer to home, the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts is a revitalizing 39 square miles of nature preserve with 181 miles of shoreline.

If you haven’t let yourself get lost in the immensity of the natural world lately, I can recommend no better antidote for life’s stressors. Cleansing, rejuvenating, free to all. 

The Faces of Those We Love. Whoever said love is the greatest healer spoke a timeless truth that many physicians today acknowledge. Recall the moments you’ve waited in an airport or train station, searching the faces of the arrivals for the one you love. Suddenly they’re there and your heart leaps with happiness. Everything’s good. In times of trouble, it’s those faces we turn to for comfort. In times of joy, we look to those same faces to share the elation. Nothing can ever match the beauty, the comfort of those we love and are loved by.

Over a lifetime, we connect with many people. Some become good friends. A few become very dear friends. And, if we are lucky, we may find one very special person to share our life with. We may also have children to love and nurture. For me, those beacons of light and emotional sustenance are my husband Ed, my two adult children, Ethan and Lauren, and my dear friends of more than four decades, Pete and Maribeth. Also, my grandmother, Edna. Though all I have of her is a hand-tinted photograph from her childhood, she was the first person who taught me I was worth loving. A lifelong gift of immeasurable value.      

Into The New Year

Books and music. Theatre and the arts. The serenity of nature. The people we love. There is so much worth preserving in the world, including the world itself. And we who care about a more humane, more just, greener planet will have to do the saving. But first we must revive our own exhausted spirits. As 2023 winds down and we look toward the New Year, I wish you an oasis of love and calm this holiday season. The sustaining joy of happy memories with your nearest and dearest, and the creation of new moments to treasure. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. And yes, it is good to be alive.