Memoirous

           Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!

“Isn’t that the guy who tried to pee in our closet?” My husband and I were sitting outside Wrigley Field waiting for Bruce Springsteen to take the stage. “Who?” I asked. Herbie had been dead for a decade—or at least I thought. We had been married maybe a month and were living in an old house divided up into six apartments—some with shared bath. It was the early 80s in Chicago in a neighborhood coming back from blight. The remnants were everywhere. In the vacant lots, in the abandoned cars littering the vacant lots, in the boarded-up buildings bordering the vacant lots. It was nothing to see punks walking the sidewalks with tally-rags up to their mouths. At night the gangs came out with baseball bats to beat the tar out of each other, the sky lit up with fires set by landlords burning down those old buildings, the buildings subdivided, with bathrooms down the hall. Every morning I awoke to some new crisis, the ashes of the night before. And the occasional body left i...

Walking Past the Graveyard for Jhan Moskowitz, dear brother Walking through the graveyard (I have just missed eternity) And viewing the dates on the stones (all these were once alive) My own grandfather was born in 1879 (so long ago!) He was not so unlike the lucky stiffs around me (except he is a direct link to my past) Slipstream, a shift in time (there by the grace of God go I) Incidentally they have one thing in common (if not more, but one obvious) No matter when born, we are destined to die. And in this regard I am you Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Our Little Lamb. *** I am beyond words, here, sorrowing upon the news coming out of Brooklyn regarding Jhan.  MY HEART IS HEAVY.

Young and Homeless Craig Blankenhorn for The New York Times Missy Race, 22, and her 10-month-old son, David Martinez, are living in transitional housing. Because she is unable to afford daycare, it’s difficult for her to go on job interviews: “If I bring David with me, I know I won’t get the job because it’s unprofessional.”  By CRAIG BLANKENHORN Published: August 31, 2012 SADLY for the children across America who are homeless today, neither presidential campaign is expected to pay much attention to them, with big policy speeches or new ideas about improving their situation. Multimedia Young and Homeless There are 1.6 million homeless children in the United States. I want to be the witness to this, to provide evidence of their bleak condition. I want to speak for the victimized children of our country who aren’t even fully cognizant of their own poverty. Infants, young children and teenagers are living on the...

I’ve wanted to write about Pussy Riot for a long time. Actually I’ve just wanted to write the words Pussy Riot. And maybe a long time just means lately. Outside loving the name of this feminista-punk-activist band, I know very little about them or the controversy they caused when they stormed an orthodox church in Moscow. Anti-Putin feminist punks on trial in Moscow Which caused me to think about how our society ingests, devours its female artist. Think Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston just lately. Which led me to thinking about artists in Weimar Germany. The fourteen years of the Weimar era were marked by crazy explosive intellectual and creative productivity. Found this at Wiki: Kirkus Reviews remarked upon how much Weimar art was political: fiercely experimental, iconoclastic and left-leaning, spiritually hostile to big business and bourgeois society and at daggers drawn with Prussian militarism and authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the old autocratic Germa...