A lot. My injured foot is still a problem. No publisher for my novel. We’ve canceled an anniversary vacation. A neighbor is not doing well. And I am assured by a former student that, “There is hope in this world, ya know. And it’s okay to get depressed; it just means you’re paying attention. And while anyone is still paying attention, there is still hope for everyone who is not.” Walking, submission, altruism, A Christmas Carol, righteousness, and hope. The ocean of my business.
“Sit still,” the trainee told him several times with increasing frustration. “Sit still!” When he finally did sit in his chair, the little boy completed the test. He scored so very badly. The trainer took her student aside. “Try again but let him move around this time.” Do I need to tell how much better he did the second time—on a different version of the same test? He was doing Algebra at age seven. He should have been accelerated in math in middle school. So should his older brother. As a teacher and his mother, I should have insisted.
I have been thinking a lot about housing during the past twenty-five years. My husband and I moved to the family home in Oregon in 1979 and started a family. It was what my grandfather’s third wife and her second husband hoped we would do when they left the home to us. It was a two bedroom, one and a half bath retirement home when we got here. We removed the half bath and added a bedroom and second bath. Two sons and six hundred square feet. My husband worked long hours and I stayed home with our children while they were small, which was financially challenging but also temporary. [We lived below the poverty line for some of those years, and I will never recover the lost income from remaining out of the workforce for those years. That’s another issue—instead of “affordable daycare” how about making it possible for parents to parent their own children without taking a crippling and permanent financial hit?]
Then my mother began a downward decline, a process that went on for years. Her driving was dangerous, she couldn’t see to read, never did like cooking, and my husband stopped by every day on his way to work to make her coffee. [If she’d taken better care of herself with a healthy diet and exercise… well, she lived to be 82, and most young people would see that as a ripe old age.] She was in pain and unsteady on her feet, would not take the suggestions of various helpers, and was in and out of assisted living for those last five years. It was crushing for her to live with the assistance of cooks and nurses and others, but she could not live without it.
There should be no shame in accepting what we need. There is no honor in taking more than we need. Yet we judge others by their living situation. I admit I do it myself.
Decades ago now, a friend visiting with us became impatient with talk of high tide and low tide. “What does that even mean?” She was genuinely irritated, as if I’d made it up talk of tides to annoy her.
So I took her to a window and pointed at the Cape: “See where the waves are hitting the headland? Remember that.” And then I literally waited six hours before taking her back to the same window and pointing again at the Cape. “See how the surf is barely breaking on the seastack second out from the headland? What you saw before was high tide; this is low.”
Most of the people I know are hanging on by the skin of their teeth, as my mother would say. We watch protective positions and entire systems being dismantled, people losing their jobs in a sluggish employment market, lies and more lies. And it’s probably just as well my mom is gone; this current situation would surely have killed her.
We have a few family members who supported the maniac destroying our country. One of them is a longtime supporter of Palestine, and he has gone quiet about his political views recently. Well. He would, wouldn’t he?
There is trouble brewing all over the world; I regret that my country is become a cause rather than a late-comer solution, as we were in two World Wars. Since then, we have gone to war in tiny countries where others had already withdrawn in defeat. I’m thinking of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Others have been trying to take over Afghanistan for a thousand years. Most recently Russia and the United States. We might ask what we thought we were doing and why.
We might ask what happens when we encourage people to fight a totalitarian regime, as we did with the Kurdish people in northern Iraq, and then failed to provide backup.
The more recent betrayal is Ukraine.
Why would anyone trust us?
Three creative works illustrate what is happening in the middle east.
2008 Israeli-Palestinian drama film describes the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop the Israeli Defense Minister, her next door neighbor, from destroying the lemon trees in her family farm. At the same time, she develops a human bond with the minister’s wife.
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In his new memoir, Omar El Akkad weaves his life experiences with the failure of Western liberalism to keep its promise.
“On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. [Despite his publisher’s promotion, that tweet was not the impetus for this book.]
“As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.”
“Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.”
Lemon Tree touched my heart long ago and Omar’s books—the best-selling novels American War and What Strange Paradise and this new work of nonfiction—are beautiful revelations. An Oscar-winner “Best Documentary” No Other Land is playing right around the corner, which is where my husband and I went to see it.
Zora Neale Hurston shaved ten years off her age early in her life, at least partly because circumstances made her entry into college late and she was embarrassed to be a decade older than her freshman peers. But she was also a woman who lived in a society used to women denying their age. She got away with her lie until long after she died.
When we’d been together a few years, people frequently asked us how we’d managed to stick together. It seemed odd at the time. Three or four years is not long enough to prove permanence, it seemed to me. It feels odder now that no one asks us how we managed to stay together—we were only asked that back in the early 1970s.
This morning, I read a column, “Dividing assets in your will can split siblings. Here’s how.” at The Washington Post, about the damage that can result when a parent favors some child or children over others or cuts a child from their will, especially without explanation. Aside from permanent rifts that can result between siblings, there is also the lingering unresolved hurt. A comment from an attorney reports that his experience is that giving more to dysfunctional [addicted, mentally ill] children is common. However unrealistic, many parents hope to equalize situations that are out of their control by gifting one child more than the other in life or in their wills. Some felt permanently injured by fathers who seemed to have abandoned them in favor of a second family. Some inheritors in control have corrected an imbalance as best they could. There were a lot of issues.
I could relate.
Continue readingFor years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.
“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”
—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)
I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.
All sympathy with their youngest daughter.
I am reading poetry by Danusha Laméris. The first volume chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Moons of August and her second Bonfire Opera. I ordered these chapbooks after reading one of Lameris’s poems, “Incha’Allah.”
&PRIDE Press 