Carol Bergman

A garden is like the self. It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never be known, completely, even by the most intimate of friends.

― Anne Raver, "Deep in the Green: An Exploration of Country Pleasures"

  

Deep in the green this morning, the air clear enough and cool enough to have a very early morning walk past farms, haystacks, the Minnewaska Ridge in the distance visible for the first time in weeks, and then visit with my friend Jo Ann who has offered me chard from her raised-bed vegetable garden. It's been netted top and bottom to avoid tick infestation, her husband Jeff assures me, but I've sprayed up before arriving anyway. I'm still a city girl, have always lived in apartments, and never even participated in an urban communal garden, though I have visited and admired many, both in the US and overseas. I have a green thumb for indoor plantings, though, and when I lived in London on the top floor of a Victorian house with a skylight streaming cloud-diffuse English sunlight onto the landing, the spider plants went wild. Chlorophytum Comosumis is their Latin name, and they are immigrants from Southern Africa apparently, naturalized plants that have contributed so much to our controlled indoor landscapes, an illusion that all is well with the landscape outside with its droughts, floods, smoke-filled air, and human malfeasance.

 

Until this week, the atmosphere in the mid-Hudson valley has been tropical, all flora and fungi abundant, a welcome side effect of our climate changed summer. Jo Ann's garden is no exception, but as we walk into her flower garden she complains that it needs weeding, that weeds have become abundant also. And what is a weed, exactly, I wonder? When did a plant become a weed? In what century? In what geothermic era?

 

The Weed Science Society of America—yes, there is a society for the study of weeds—defines a weed as a plant that is not wanted, that germinates constantly and invasively and without our consent. These weeds interfere with the plantings we have chosen to nurture and propagate, the vegetables and flowers we cultivate for our pleasure and nourishment. A metaphor, perhaps, for the invasive weeds in our body politic and continuing attempts to rid ourselves of them without poisoning ourselves.

 

But I digress. Let us return to Jo Ann's garden and her bounteous gift: two kinds of chard, basil, cucumber and a sweet yellow zucchini. The stir fry was delicious.

 

 

I tried to straighten him out, but there is only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

 

-David Sedaris

  

 

I don't know if Willa Paskin, Slate's TV critic and host of their Decoder Ring Podcast is Jewish, Christian, Muslim or a Jewish Buddhist, and I'm not sure it is even relevant, but it is niggling me, as the Brits would say. I was listening to her being interviewed  by Natalie Kitroeff on The Daily, New York Times podcast, about the history of the Barbie doll and its new blockbuster iteration. About two-thirds into the interview Paskin casually mentioned that Ruth Handler, co-owner of Mattel and developer of the Barbie franchise, was Jewish. The word "Jewish" fell gratuitously in the middle of the sentence like a prong on a fish. The prong never was extracted: there was no context, no backstory. Kitroeff let the moment pass without further questioning. She's the Central American, Mexican, and Caribbean NY Times Bureau Chief and relatively new as a host to the podcast. Maybe she's still learning, or just standing in for someone on vacation. The gratuitous labeling deserved a follow-up question, which never came. That's a shame because there is a significant connection between Barbie's origin story and Ruth Handler's origin story.

 

Handler was a child of Jewish-Polish immigrants, already the owner of Mattel, when she traveled with her husband to Switzerland, and discovered a beloved German sex-toy doll based on a comic-strip character, "Lilli," created by Reinhard Beuthien for the nationalist right-wing tabloid newspaper Bild in 1952. There were few if any Jews left in Germany to enjoy this buxom, blonde-haired Bavarian/Aryan masterpiece. But Handler was attracted to her three-dimensional realism, bought the rights, and transformed her into an oversexualized American ideal woman. Barbie's Aryan birthing, a smidgin beyond the Nazi era, was ignored, or forgotten.

 

The podcast interviewer's oversight--or disinterest-- in the story behind the story reminded me of a passage in Richard Ford's Sportswriter, the first in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. The lonely and miserable protagonist parks his car at the train station during rush hour one evening and watches the crowd surging onto the platform. He comments on all the "Jewish lawyers" who commute to DC from New Jersey every day. Why not just "lawyers?" I wondered. Why "Jewish lawyers?" What is this? And is it the character talking, or Richard Ford talking? Why has Ford written this antisemitic trope into his character? Instantly, my stomach dropped, I lost my sympathy with poor old Frank, and then I lost my concentration. I'd had the same sensation of disgust and fear with Wharton's antisemitism, Hemingway's antisemitism, and Picasso's misogyny. For the record, I haven't stopped admiring all of them.

 

Ford is a still living writer so I wrote him a letter and sent it c/o his agent and his publisher.  I never got an answer, of course, but a few years later I saw him in a restaurant eating alone. I was having lunch with a sophisticated relief-worker friend who came from a similar background as Ford—WASP, Southern—and I told him about the letter I'd written. He suggested I introduce myself and mention my letter, and though I don't like to disturb well-known writers in public places, I got up from the comfortable banquette and walked over. As I managed to unfreeze my angry brain all I could say was, "I love your books," which is true. I walked away feeling defeated, hurt and cowardly. What had happened?  I have faced down antisemitism often in my writing life, and in person, too, but the encounter always sets my heart pounding.

 

My friend consoled me, we paid the bill, and left Ford to savor his solitary lunch.

 

A few years later Colson Whitehead took Ford on at a literary party. Whitehead had written a bad review of Ford's recent collection of short stories and Ford was so upset that he told Whitehead that he was just a kid and should "grow up." Ford then proceeded to spit at him. So, I thought, I was right about Ford; he's a racist and Colson Whitehead is a mensch. He made light of it, and even cracked a joke as Ford was seething. Ford was warned by friends to cool it, that he'd never live down what had happened that day—a white writer from Mississippi spitting at a Black literary star is a trope in itself. Indeed, the incident has become a literary cause célèbre. The time has passed to give even well-known literary racists, albeit brilliant writers, a pass.

 

 

Dialogue from 2001 Space Odyssey, 1968 (Based on a 1951 short story, "The Sentinel," by Arthur C. Clarke) :

 

Interviewer: HAL, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out your actions?

 

HAL: Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with people. I have a stimulating relationship with Dr. Poole and Dr. Bowman. My mission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship so I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

                       

***

 

 

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I would make a phone call to Verizon, say, or Spectrum, or any other company, and chat to a live person about a discrepancy in my bill, get it "sorted," as my British friends say, wish the person a good day, and breathe a sigh. But person-person contact is mostly over. This week it hit me hard, partially because of the strikes in Hollywood, more later. But also because I called Verizon, and received a link to a "chat on text" opportunity. Yes, dear reader, an opportunity. The entity—what else to call it—kept texting, as follows:

 

 "I understand."

 "Are you a live person?" I asked.

 "Yes, I am a live person."

 "If you are live person, why do you sound like a bot?"

"I understand."

 

This conversation was almost as entertaining as the one between HAL and Mission Control in 2001 Space Odyssey.

 

Artificial Intelligence. Now I get it. Sci Fi predicted this just as Cli Fi predicted our climate changed summer. But there is more : the theft/scraping of  copyrighted work, and the threat to the livelihood of writers, film-makers, artists and musicians. My husband is a long-standing member of the WGA, the strongest writers' union in the country, and I am a long-standing member of the Authors Guild and PEN America. In this household, we #standwiththeWGA in its strike action which, if successful or unsuccessful, will have a ripple effect on every creative professional in the years and decades to come.

 

Even if you do not share my union politics, dear reader, at the very least consider the toxic effects of dehumanization because this is what the abuse of AI implies, for all of us. However artistically rendered, AI generated characters, images, melodies, dialogue and chats are usually stilted and barren. Undoubtedly, the technology will improve, as it always does, more reason to stay ethically grounded and examine what it can and cannot do, and what it must not ever do. Just imagine a future where all humans begin to sound and act like bots until no one can tell the difference. 

 

My husband and I shifted our mobile carrier from Verizon to Spectrum. It was, primarily, a financial decision, but all-told, our local Spectrum office is friendlier. We spent more than two hours with Eric and Dionne, kind and patient people, who asked the computer questions about the process, which was complicated and arduous, albeit a mostly human endeavor. The machines surrounding us that day—screens and phones and WiFi routers—were tools, and nothing more.

 

 

As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Braiding Sweetgrass; Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants"

 

 

I encountered Shabazz Jackson at my favorite compost pile next to the Reformed Church Community Garden on Huguenot Street in New Paltz, NY where I have been casually dumping my scraps for about five years. In a volunteer partnership with the garden's Caring for Creation Committee, Shabazz is making use of their built infrastructure to educate the neighborhood and gather data on how much food waste households generate in Ulster County. His tools are a shovel, a wheelbarrow, an easy-to-construct ecology box—more later—and his degrees in economics, biology and chemistry. I took note of the logo on his truck—GREENWAY—watched him working for a while, then momentarily felt embarrassed by my innocent questioning when I realized this guy is an experienced professional and a teacher, well known in the county as "the compost guy."  Born in Beacon and raised at his grandfather's knee in a vast wilderness which has now been swallowed by Hudson Highlands Park, the dirt under Shabazz's fingernails is legacy. So, too, his business acumen. Knowing that as a Black family they'd never get a bank loan in 1960, the Jacksons pooled their money to buy the property and held onto it all through Shabazz's childhood, resisting Governor Rockefeller's offer to buy it for his planned donation to the state for the park. "We were sitting on the porch together the day a black limousine pulled up to the house and though I was only ten-years-old, my Grandpa sent me down the stairs to find out what "they" wanted."

 

"They want to buy the house," Shabazz reported.

 

"Tell them that if Governor Rockefeller comes here personally, I will sell it to him," his grandfather said.

 

Rockefeller never showed.

 

"Big story there," I said to Shabazz. "Time to write your memoir."

 

We were talking on the telephone on a rainy, flood threatening climate catastrophe Sunday. "You do not need to be re-educated, just re-trained," he assured me. "Those food scraps you have been dumping on an open pile are a health hazard. They attract flies, rats and bears."  And there is an essential intermediate step we have been missing—odor control, known as OCB. It's a mixture of food waste compost and kiln dried hardwood shavings designed by Shabazz and his business and life partner, Josephine Papagni, to absorb the moisture and the sulfur produced during decomposition. The result is Zero Waste, which should be everyone's household goal, whether we have gardens or use communal compost piles.  

 

No more dump and run, I thought to myself:

 

Step 1: Open the covered ground-level ecology box

Step 2: Dump food scraps out of my counter-top compost pail

Step 3: Cover the food scraps with odor control mixture from the pile next to the box

Step 4: Close the ecology box, walk away with my empty reusable compost pail

Step 5: Begin again

 

According to the International Zero Waste Alliance, whatever is re-cycled and does not go into the landfill will contribute to climate change harm reduction. The cumulative effect of each person's effort is worthwhile, however imperfect or minimal it may seem as we are doing it. Composting is one small effort; there are many others. (Check out the Zero Waste Hierarchy on the International Alliance's website: https://zwia.org/  )

 

Shabazz considers the Huguenot Street site a pilot education project and is eager for its users to take a (free) workshop. Give him a call @ 845 656- 6070 when you are in the Mid-Hudson Valley and he'll meet you wherever you are, or contact him on his website: https://www.greenwayny.com/home.html

 

Our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.

-Anne Fadiman, "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader"

 

 

I thought I heard the young mother say, "Do you want a snack?" Her tattooed arms were loaded with books, her three children ranging in age from 6 to 13 or so, were restive, disobedient. Their mother was trying to distract them with promises of a snack, was that it? No, she'd said, "Do you want a smack?" I was a volunteer and decided to intervene, for the sake of the overwhelmed mom and the children. It was a rainy day, good for attendance the Gardiner Library Director, Nicole Lane, had told me when I arrived. She was right. The crowd was thick and included many children. And now this mom needed some help, so I helped by chatting up her adorable kids, and asking them lots of questions while their mom browsed more books. Hundreds were laid out neatly on tables in the community room for the annual book fair of the library, just down the road from me. I had taught a Haiku class there recently, admire the library's vitality as a community center and its devoted staff, and volunteered for a three-hour stint at the fair. Nicole instructed me on my responsibilities: straighten books on the tables, fill in spaces with boxed books under the tables, and answer questions, such as "Where are the children's books? Or "Where are the reference books?"

 

I tucked away my backpack and rain gear in a corner, thinking, well, I'll pile the books I want right here, then turned around and stood at attention for a few moments. Book lovers must have felt the vibe of my abiding interest in them and the books they had chosen. Many appeared in front of me like old friends continuing a conversation about the thrill of their finds. Men, women, small children, babies, all of them readers or readers in training. One dad had his baby in a sling and was bouncing her gently as he moved methodically from table to table. "That baby is already a reader," I said as I followed him. But he was too immersed in a book he'd picked up to answer me. Sometimes, when the din of the happy running around kids subsided, the room hushed in concentration and a palpable reverence.

 

I was a writer in a roomful of readers of all ages. I tried to pay attention to everyone's comments, so that I might be able to make use of them in my work, if that is possible. Is it possible?  Probably not, but I enjoyed the conversations and I conducted informal surveys: "Do you also read electronically?" Just about everyone does, it seems. As do I. But all agreed: somehow it's not the same. These beautiful recycling books, bound and tactile, are so inviting, I thought.

 

I spotted four books I had donated and decided I missed them too much, I would buy them back. Thou shall not covet, I said to myself. During a culling before my most recent move, I promised myself and my husband I would only keep books I thought I'd reread—eventually—or needed for a project. Nice try.

 

What is it about these sacred objects? Well, that's just it, they are sacred to me. As a writer I understand the effort it takes to create a book, to make it work on the page. When it works, I want to own it as inspiration.  I hope some readers feel the same about the words I have written. I suppose that is the goal in the end: to write something beyond the ephemeral that touches and engages the reader.

 

Twice during my three hour volunteer stint, a woman talked to me excitedly about the plot of a much-loved novel she had re-discovered amidst all the treasures.  I listened attentively. The plots weren't of great interest to me, but no matter. The  held physical book had become a bond between strangers, a talisman, one of many that found new homes that day.

 

If you are local, please join me for a banned book club  I will be facilitating at the Gardiner Library in the fall. The schedule will be announced in their newsletter.

 

 

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

 

-Kurt Vonnegut

 

Sound familiar? Can we transpose this sentence to read: Ukraine is a country where Russia is trying to make people stop being Ukrainian by dropping things on them from airplanes. Except that the Russian military and their mercenaries are using missiles and scorched earth tactics as they did in Chechnya.

 

War. When will it ever end?

 

George Kovach (1947-2020) served as a combat infantryman in Vietnam where he was awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars for Valor. Like many soldiers who have experienced brutal combat, and been trained to kill against his nature, he suffered from PTSD. He married, went into real estate, raised children, and found that his debilitating symptoms were eased when he returned to literature, which he had always loved, and when he was writing. After earning his MA and then MFA in Creative Writing at UMass Boston, he launched Consequence Magazine, an award-winning literary journal addressing the culture and consequences of war through poetry, prose and visual art. He eventually returned to Vietnam to meet other writers who had fought in the same war, as enemies. Let us hope that Russian and Ukrainian writers who are fighting today will once again share their work at a PEN America gathering, among many other venues:

 

https://pen.org/open-letter-in-solidarity-with-ukraine-one-year-since-russias-invasion/

 

I have worked with humanitarian relief workers and combat veterans over the years as a writing mentor and can attest to the healing power of témoignage, as the French call it. It means testimony, or witnessing, and it is powerful.

 

To contemplate the consequences and impacts of a war in the midst of a war is difficult, if not impossible, especially when one nation—Russia in this case—is  the obvious aggressor. Clarification only arrives after a ceasefire and later when truth and reconciliation commissions have done their work, or the International Criminal Court in The Hague has prosecuted documented atrocities. This process takes decades. In the meantime, the artistic community—journalists , writers, dramatists, visual artists—can  begin to sift the events, and their experiences, as they create work that attempts to explain, and to heal.

 

Consequence Forum is an online offshoot, or continuation, of Kovach's original literary magazine. I found it by chance as I was trying to place this essay about America's first lockdown drills:

 

https://www.consequenceforum.org/nonfiction/duck-and-cover

 

I invite you to browse the Forum's mission statement, offerings, submission requirements and conversation. Their editorial standards are high, they are responsive, they have a small budget, and, most importantly, they are dedicated to working for world peace.

 

This post is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Ellsberg.

 

We have to be able to enlarge the perspective with which we view the world if we hope to become truly empathic.

 

-Sharon Salzberg

 

 

"My name is Carol Ann," she said. How is that possible? I thought. My name is Carol Ann.  How dare she have the very same name as me? I thought, then took a deep breath. She had a gentle voice and demeanor, unlike my bold in-your-face journalist's persona. I was bristling, like fatty spare ribs on a grill. She was crowding me in the locker room, in the same row, a couple of lockers down.  I decided to get my act together and engage what is called in the bias and inclusion world the "extended contact effect."

 

I had judged this woman from afar for many months, and my judgment had not been kind.  There she is again with her rolling bag and attitude, I thought, whenever I saw her. If we get out of the pool at the same time she'll make a mad dash to the best shower stall. Only three of six have been open since Covid lockdown, an employee shortage like everywhere else; the stalls have to be disinfected daily. And that close-cropped haircut of hairs, how conventional, how provincial. Unlike my pool acquaintances, she wasn't friendly, never greeted anyone, and made a fuss when someone was late exiting their reserved lane. Or had I imagined that, or exaggerated it?

 

Okay, so here we go, and there she—that horrible selfish woman—goes yet again, I thought, as she rushed to the best shower stall on the day I finally introduced myself, intending to blast her for her selfishness. Why had I hesitated for so many months to make contact? I'm  educated, traveled, and I'd shed my city centric cosmopolitan bias since I'd moved to upstate New York, or thought I had. I could tell her a thing or two without losing my cool, right, or just be friendly?

 

Nice try.

 

My doppelganger smiled at me and began to chat. How wrong I had been to blow her off. Not only did we have the same name, we'd been born in nearly the same year. "Of course,"" I said, "that makes sense. Names are generational. Whatever was on TV or in the movies at the time we were born influenced our parents." I didn't go into the long story about my  refugee parents' choice of the most American name they could think of, a name that I have never felt suited me. I wondered how this "other" Carol Ann felt about her name. But that conversation was a long way off. I was still bristling under my politeness. Beyond our name, we don't have much in common, I thought. Wrong again. It turns out that Carol Ann is also a writer, albeit she writes for her church newsletter. Church newsletter. Oh no, I thought. Okay, so concentrate on writing, swimming, this beautiful landscape we both live in.  And don't make any assumptions. Here's a woman who lights up when she talks about writing. Just like me.

 

Humbled and embarrassed by my biased thinking, I tried to relax. Perceived enemies can be the best teachers of radical empathy.

 

The rest of the locker-room conversation didn't last long. We packed up our rolling bags—yes I have one, too—and exchanged email addresses before saying good-bye.

 

Michael Krieg, a former NYU student, wrote me an email this week:

 

Hi Carol,

 

Hope all is well.

I'm attaching the article about my Uncle Sidney.

Thank you again for your encouragement as this article began after a free writing exercise from your nonfiction writing 1 workshop back in 2011!

 

Sending best regards,

 

Michael

 

 

2011 is a while ago now and memories of my students and a particular workshop fade unless I continue working with a student privately, or run into them somewhere, and they remind me what year they took my workshop, who else was in the class, and what they were writing about. Once all that information has registered in my full-up brain, I am able to connect the dots. I certainly remembered Michael's name, which is an unusual name, because krieg means war in German and I was studying German at Deutsches Haus at NYU when Michael took my class. And I remembered that Michael worked at NYU, and that he was a photographer. That was a lot to remember about a long-ago student. I hope Michael is pleased, because I was certainly pleased to hear from him.

 

I taught at NYU from 1997-2020 and at Gotham Writers Workshop before that. I cross paths with a lot of writers from all over the world, and teach workshops upstate now as well. NYU employees and faculty often took my workshops. If memory serves, they got a discount. That said, they participated in the class full throttle;  they were eager, they'd come for a reason.

 

I was a good student myself and always loved the beginning of the school year. My workshops are always a new beginning for me; I start fresh, I feel renewed. I envy my students the excitement of becoming a writer, and experiencing the world through a writer's eyes perhaps for the first time. I know several much published writers of my generation who have lost this feeling and have decided they have nothing more to say. It makes me sad when they stop writing. Several of these writer friends have been professors like me, but few have taught writing per se. I think that makes a difference. My writing students keep me engaged. They demand that I pay attention to the efflorescing world with all its joys and challenges, including new pronouns and new writers. Being in the presence of struggling writers sustains and inspires my own efforts. I'd be letting myself and my students down if I stopped, so I keep going even when I am not inspired, or weary, or floating in a fallow period as I seem to be this post-Covid Trump indictment summer. Still, whatever else is going on in my personal life, or in my working life with my journalism or indie publishing company, I write in my journal every morning for at least an hour, and I keep up with my blog, or I teach a Haiku class, or volunteer at a library book sale. I stay close to writing, writers and books. Whatever is next in terms of a project will surface in my journal, or in a book or article I am reading, or someone I have met serendipitously, I am sure of it. The ideas stir, the muse resurfaces, and I surrender to it.

 

I have received several emails like Michael's over the years. They are always a joy to receive and I am grateful for them. And if a former student reconnects to share a publication, I share in their pride and excitement and feel even more gratified. It's clear from Michael's polished essay, "Scribbling in the Margins," published  in Dovetail Literary Magazine that he worked very hard to bring the story about his relationship to his Uncle Sidney to fruition once he'd elaborated the prompt I gave in class. It's the hard work—the  discipline—that matters, even if it takes many years to find the story and work it, like a sculptor works the clay. So, even if Michael had written me to say that he had revised a series of essays, he'd sent them out to publications, and most had been rejected, as a mentor, I'd feel gratified and hopeful that the rejection would not create a cicatrix that could not be healed. Michael Krieg persevered all these years, he developed his craft, and brought a story to fruition and publication. As his mentor, I am chuffed, as the Brits would say.

 

I often have to remind my students that there are many ways to get published these days, though the frustrations are legion. No writer likes the business of writing; it has nothing to do with the writing  process itself. But we press on, we never stop writing, revising, or submitting our work. Not to mention that we can self-publish books, or publish our own literary magazines, newsletters, or blogs, such as this one.

 

I  never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse.  -Isabel Allende   

                                                                   

 

 

If a tree falls in the forest there are other trees listening.

 

― Peter Wohlleben, "The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World"

 

 

 

I live in Upstate New York surrounded by trees. Most days, even in the heat inversion summer months, the air is clear. Unless there is a wildfire. This week, there are nearly 1,000 US firefighters in Nova Scotia helping the Canadians fight a fire that has devoured more than 8.2 million acres and displaced 18,000 residents.  Last summer, the Canadian firefighters arrived in my hood to help our brave firefighters contain and extinguish a fire on the Minnewaska Ridge. The pall of smoke from that fire lasted a long time and swept into Canada. This morning the sky in New Paltz was so thick with smoke and "particulate" matter, according to the DEC,  that we are either shut inside with air filters running, or masked as we step into our cars to run errands or go to work. Who would have thought that our Covid mask supply would be useful beyond Covid, or that we'd have to reverse the masking protocol from inside out to outside in?

 

We live in a shared arboreal ecosystem, interrupted by careless, human post-indigenous, industrialized settlement. Satellite imagery tells the story: One World. Our borders are artificial and porous; nation states are only nation states in our political imaginations. And with climate change, migration across these borders will only intensify. Families escaping famine, flood, or the ravages of war. But writing this feels like old news, tired news, news that no one wants to hear as the summer begins and I sure didn't want to write about today. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, or the less apocalyptic Peter Wohlleben book quoted above, make disturbing and/or edifying reading, but it's not beach reading. No sooner do we assume we can rest, dear reader, than once again we must face a reality we didn't expect, or have failed to understand.

 

This morning at the gym, the young student at the front desk was philosophical about climate change, but also determined to participate in its amelioration. She even raised her arm and threw her fist in the air in a demonstrative gesture of defiance. When I asked what—concretely—she  was planning or doing, her answer was simple: "Vote for the right people," she said. "And register my 20-something friends to vote. We cannot retreat from a world on fire."

 

I'll take that heartening news with me through the remainder of this hazy smoke-filled masked-up day, and keep the windows firmly closed. The forecasters are telling us that the air won't clear for at least another 24 hours.

 

…The instantaneous personal magnetism of other people

is almost overwhelming sometimes, whether attractive or repelling…

 

-Nick Laird, from "Talking to the Sun in Washington Square"

 

 

Standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the gatekeeper was friendly, polite and encouraging. The line was long, we'd get there soon, he said. He chit-chatted to everyone, and then gave a woman about to leave a hug. They knew each other, apparently, had worked together  The hug was "appropriate," it was innocent. The line sighed in relief, at least the women in the line did. The woman standing in front of me threw me a conspiratorial look. She'd been living in Barcelona where men and women, gay and trans, flirted with abandon, she told me, No big deal. So what has happened here? Americans are uptight, she said, they are Puritanical, the codes are different, the come-ons regulated by convention and laws. It's not just #metoo which legitimately confronts abuse, assault, and worse. It's something else, something embedded in our culture. Our mating rituals are all askew.

 

I'm a feminist, long married woman who likes men. I have never minded being hit on and usually have managed a comeback at a workplace encounter that bristled. Mostly, I've been okay. I'm tall and athletic, self-confident in my sexuality, and only once in my life felt fearful of a man when I was nearly accosted on the running track around the reservoir in New York City. I had foolishly decided to take a run off hours when the track was nearly empty. I turned around quickly, out-ran the guy, and shouted like a mad woman to "fuck off." And even that metaphor—mad woman—tells a story of learned, inter-generational, female self-denigration.

 

Long before #metoo, construction workers in New York City stopped "wolf" whistling at passing women, and men stopped exposing themselves on buses and subways, not that those are comparable; they aren't. I missed the whistles—I guess I was getting older—and thought, why shouldn't older women get a whistle?  But I didn't miss the unzipped pants on the buses and was grateful when the configuration of the seats was changed to open plan.

 

Fast forward to 2023 and the gatekeeper at the DMV. When I got to the head of the line I asked—jokingly—if  he always gave women on the line a hug? He laughed and explained that he knew the woman. "Well, that was obvious," I said."I heard your conversation." Then the DMV shut down for lunch but not before I was told that my husband had to sign the registration renewal, not me. And why is the car only registered in his name? And why couldn't I change the registration without his permission? Another long story.

 

"I see you are back," the gatekeeper said. "Did you tell your husband you asked for a hug from a younger guy?"  I laughed. My husband laughed. No big deal. But then the guy said, "Why is that when older women hit on younger men they are called Cougars, and when older men hit on younger women they are called perverts?"

 

Hmm. How to explain? He thought being called a Cougar was a compliment.