Memoirous

Chasing Golden Raindrops   After work one evening, I rode my bike home, the long way. The sky, enhanced by Canadian wildfires, Was itself on fire, the color of flames Orange and red, blue blaze. Ashy clouds with singed edges, wafted above, adding to the wooly haze. Air quality alert, my skin tingled— I felt a tightness in my chest as I Hurried along the path, in and out Of the trees, bright patches, then suddenly Submerged in shadow. adding to the eeriness. By the bridge over the marsh, a burst of rain Unexpected, as if dousing the sunset, The filtered light casting each droplet in gold.   In “Light from Canada” James Schuyler muses On the symmetry, the realization that the world, This giant ball, upon which we are all bound together, Living and breathing under one sun, one moon, one sky, standing on the water’s edge, the Atlantic Washes the shores of both Canada and the US, So also the wildfires, the air and light are shared. ...

We’ve imbued our political parties with morals. For example, Republicans care about life. Thus, they will appoint pro life judges. Democrats care about human rights. Thus, they’ll be better at foreign policy—saying NO to Russia. Bviously this is simplified. Also obviously I have no right to write about Hannah Arendt . A brilliant thinker. This weekend I watched the movie Hannah Arendt . I knew about her peripherally like in the sense she was one of the people (émergie who fled Nazi Germany) who helped ferment The New School where my daughter went. Once I saw the movie I was able to sort her into—Oh you thought that up, that line of thinking, about the question of evil. The movie released in 2012, Hannah Arendt died in 1975. Some of her books are: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Revised ed.; New York: Schocken, 2004. The Human Condition (1958) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). (Rev. ed. New Y...

The year my daughter went off to college we received a card at Christmas asking how my husband and I were dealing with “empty nest.” I remember wondering, What does that mean? The four years Grace was away in college were some of the hardest I’ve ever gone through. We were extremely lucky she was accepted, beyond even what we could imagine, into an excellent school. And with all the scholarships and grants, there was a ridiculously small amount we had to pay. Yet I was stricken with terror: What if I failed!? Prior to this we’d taken a couple overseas trips (see European Schedule) where we did crazy things to get the money to travel. I remember once my husband and I submitted to an MRI for medical research. I took on cleaning jobs and made cinnamon rolls and sold them for a dollar. There had been a small smoke fire in a senior’s room and I got hired to clean the walls. I practically had to peel the goldenrod colored nicotine off the walls along with corners of black sm...

Because of a lack of foresight, or maybe an error in judgment, my husband and I ended up carrying our daughter’s trunk, sewing machine suitcase, and autoharp, the last of her possessions, objects of endearment, from south Brooklyn to the tip of Manhattan on Memorial Day   weekend changing trains numerous times. And because the trunk was heavy, full of her stuff, and because it had no handles, I wrapped it with clothesline cord, one of us on each end, going in and out of trains, up and down stairs, pausing to rest and then continue on. We waited on platforms and pushed onto packed trains, bumping and bonking, and excusing and pardoning, and begging for some kind of logical end to what could only be described as illogical. The schizophrenics stopped to consider us, interrupting their own internal conversations. Manhattanites dressed to the nines, going out on the town, pondered the tableaux before them: a middle-aged Dust-Bowl-looking couple, weary and worn out, sitt...

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