Bid(en)ing His Time

Kamala gives good theatre. There's a reason nobody makes movies about lawyers like me, who sit by themselves writing briefs all day. 

With a carefully rehearsed and impeccably delivered surgical strike, Kamala pretty much broke the applause meter with her take down of Joe. Her voice was quivering but strong, and her eyes, though on the verge of tears, were laser focused on her target, and if the pundits are to be believed, she won the battle. But can she win the war, where the only thing Joe Biden has in common with the real enemy is his old, white, maleness? 

I thought the debate format was stupid, pitting so many relatively smart and qualified people against each other with little time available to any of them do to much to advance anybody's cause but their own? Kamala -- and many of the others -- were representing a constituency of one. And Kamala, the masterful prosecutor, was damn good. Damn good. 

Does anybody really think that Joe Biden would not be a champion of civil rights? Does anybody really think that his vote, 45 years ago, on bussing, is indicative of how he would represent us? Does anybody really think that working across the aisle with segregationists, long ago, means that Joe Biden endorsed their positions? Did anybody notice that Joe got a little shot in, drowned out by the food fight, reminding Kamala that he had been a defense attorney, not a prosecutor? I would imagine Joe is biding his time, as much as it killed him not to get drawn into the food fight. 

Bussing is complicated, by the way. I remember watching the buses arrive in my Brooklyn school yard in the sixties. I remember playing with the white kids on one end, struggling to master a single jump rope while we watched the black girls do double-dutch on the other end. Hardly an across the board cure for segregation, from my perspective. 

Experience and long records are certainly double-edged swords. But I have no reason to believe, going forward, that theatrical prosecuting and flashy stagecraft and taking full advantage of identity politics will help us to win the war. 

In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, I turned on the television to see Donald Trump "making history," crossing the demarcation line into North Korea. I suppose that is making history, in the sense that we have never had a president ring up a murderous dictator to tell him hey I'm in the neighborhood, let's take a short walk and grab a spot of tea. And pose for a few pics. Maybe just a quick hello, maybe even a hug? Talk about stagecraft. We've already lost our collective soul; have we now lost our minds? 

I hope the next debates will really be debates. Not just pronouncements about all that is obviously bad and promises that cannot be kept and strategic take downs that have nothing to do with where we are headed. 

The Hole in the Book Fair

It felt right, finally, navigating through the crowds with my dog, thumbing through books, accepting treats (for him, not me), wandering among the tents. The city life I had envisioned -- a convergence of all sorts of folks from all sorts of places, with all manner of stories to tell. The Printer's Row Book Fair. A magnet for the enlightened. 

I was drawn, at first, to the women who sat, smiling, behind modest displays of the books they had written. The woman who, in the ten years since she retired, has published a slew of crime novels, weaving in the biography of a fictional female detective with the history of places, local and far-flung. I asked her which book was her favorite; her publisher, standing next to her, told me that was like asking somebody to pick a favorite child. Touché. I lingered awhile, thinking the fact of having written a book would somehow osmote to me. I bought the one that takes place in Paris; not only would I become a great writer, but I would be doing it in a cafe, on the Rive Gauche. 

Then there was the memoir lady. Forget crime novels, forget Paris, I would be writing my memoir. Unbecoming, I'd call it, since Becoming has been taken. I lingered again. If I was going to buy this lady's book, I was going to extract as much advice out of her as I could. She worked hard at it, she told me. Read lots of memoirs. Took lots of classes. And worked even harder. Oh, and yes, she appeared to even have a story to tell. Damn. I bought her book, still banking on the osmosis idea. 

I returned in the afternoon. Though the crowd had by then doubled, I arrived, quite suddenly, at a clearing, a parting in the sea of humanity. I glanced over at the large tent in the midst of this gaping hole. There was a handful of young men within the circle of tables, which were lined with beautifully bound books. I looked up at the sign: Muslim. It didn't just say "Muslim" of course, but I can't remember the rest -- booksellers, publishers, literary group, maybe. From the looks of things, it said "terrorists." Some irrepressible force of nature had repelled the crowd, parted the sea of humanity, of the enlightened. I even hesitated before I approached the table, thinking if biblical forces were at play, a lightning bolt could be next. 

As I flipped through the pages of a Quran, a thick hardcover volume, purple, in Arabic with English translations, I caught familiar names on every page: Moses, Adam, David. One of the young men approached, explained to me what the differences were among all the editions -- the languages, the translations, the commentary. I told him I was Jewish, and he asked me if I had been "there." There. I am not an Israeli, but I knew what he meant, and I said yes, a long time ago. We talked about the Old Testament and the New Testament and where the Quran fit in, or where it was supposed to fit in. Well, mostly he talked and I listened. Still, nobody else came near the table. 

I asked him, Fawaad, from New Jersey, if it had been like this all day, this pronounced clearing. He told me they had gotten some traffic, but, when he thought more about it, he told me that yes, it's been pretty empty, but that's just how it is. There is a stigma, he told me, and he has always lived with it, and he accepts that he has to until, well, he doesn't. Just as Jews once did. I told him I had never experienced discrimination as a Jew, but why would I, having grown up in Brooklyn in the sixties. In a Jewish bubble, where nobody could have imagined the kind of hatred that would continue to bubble up from beneath the surface, well into the twenty-first century. Here, among the enlightened, my optimistic new friend had grown so accustomed to being a "them" in a sea of "us" he appeared unfazed by the knee jerk suspicion and hatred that had somehow overtaken even the jerkiest of knee jerkers who populate book fairs. 

As I finish this post, I am gathering together some cash and returning to Fawaad's table, as I had promised, to buy my Quran, with the indecipherable Arabic on one side and the English on the other and the footnoted commentary below. I will read it, the way I sometimes used to read the Bible while sitting through endless Bar and Bat Mitzvot, so many years ago. And I will understand, even less, why nobody had visited this table. 

I

Extraordinary Ordinary Women

Somebody had kicked off her shoes, leaving a small clump of dried dirt on the carpet. Not my shoes, not my house, not my dirt, but I panicked, momentarily. Ann would have died, but she had already done that. Even so, I did my best to clean it up.

When a friend's mother passes away, it stirs up all sorts of unexpected emotions -- like an irrepressible urge to clean a microscopic section of carpet. An empathic fear of losing the person who knew you before you were knowable, who taught you when you didn't realize you were being taught, who continued to shape you even when you thought -- insisted, really -- you could do just fine shaping yourself. The person who could, with a glance, make you feel safe, sure that you could do anything. The same person who could, with a glance, make you quiver with fear, certain you could never do anything right.

As friends, we see each others mothers through different lenses. Yes, we are far more familiar with the tales of well-intentioned emotional abuse than we are with the mundane daily touch, or the thousands of times she peeked into our room while we were sleeping, adjusted covers that didn't need adjusting,  or the hours of silent worry because she wanted our lives to be free of all that is not perfect. But from the outside, we are often more able to see the unseeable good stuff, see the humor in their oft repeated incomparable wisdom. My personal favorite from my own mom: The best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table. I didn't always find it as funny as my friends do, but I've certainly retained it far longer than anything I learned in school.

My friend's mother died last weekend, long after the doctors thought she would after her diagnosis. I had gotten to the point of believing she was truly superhuman, that she would never go. When I saw her recently, she was as smart and funny and deliciously sarcastic as she had always been. And meticulously turned out, though she had become painfully thin. She had made her daughters promise to not let the hairs on her chin go un-plucked, even at the end.

At the cemetery, I half expected her to start barking out instructions to the guys who were taking too long to get her settled. I'm sure she was hoping we'd all take our shoes off once we got back to her house; the ground was so muddy. To my friend, Ann, mom, has always been larger than life, a force to be reckoned with. I get it.

Back at Ann's house, I was struck by her ordinariness. The unfinished crossword puzzle on her toilet tank. The lotions and potions she had not put away before she left, thinking she'd be back. The piles of papers on her nightstand, the assorted items in her cabinets that had long expired. I zeroed in on one of the cookbooks on her shelf full of cookbooks. The Pillsbury baking cookbook. Even from across the room, there was something about it that took me back, way back -- even though my own mom never baked. I pulled it out, flipped through the yellowed pages, looked at the copyright date -- 1959. The year I was born, right around the time my friend's mother became a mother. I am claiming that book as my own, an ordinary reminder of the extraordinary Ann.

Mother's Day, from a Daughter's Eyes

When I was eight years old, I went to a little store across the street from my school (at least I think that's where it was) and I bought my mother the most beautiful house dress. It cost eight dollars. Mother's Day was a few days away.

In Brooklyn, in the sixties, moms wore house dresses when they came home. At least my mom did. Some, as I recall, also wore nylon knee highs rolled down to their ankles (why, I could not say) and hairnets. My mom was a cut above; no rolled knee highs, no hairnets, just a clip to hold the wispy front flips of her hair in place. My guess is there was enough spray to take care of that, but you can never be too careful.

Only my close friends knew the house dress version of my mom. To this day, that side of her remains a closely held secret. A half century since I bought her that Mother's Day present, the stylish woman everybody knows slips into a house dress the moment she comes home. A house dress and the clip. Mom.

The clip, I'm fairly certain, is the same one, but no house dress has ever come close to the beautiful, hot pink, wrap-around, above the knee little number with the colorful appliqué of something on the pocket and the black and white trim along the edges. I loved that house dress. So did my mom; she wore it until it was so threadbare it practically disappeared.

When I was eight, I still had no idea that mother-daughter relationships were complicated. What I did know was that even if I had purchased the ugliest house dress in the store, my mom would have worn it to death. And, as stylish and picky as she was, she would have thought it was beautiful. It was something I tended to forget over the years, when we fought, when I was sure she was my arch enemy, when I forgot she was the president of my fan club, much less even a member.

I celebrated my first Mother's Day just a few weeks after my first child was born -- I have the picture of me holding her in front of the Small Mammals House at the Lincoln Park Zoo to prove it. I remember thinking, back then, that Mother's Day was an earned holiday, eclipsing even my birthday in importance, though all I had done to earn it, so far, was endure a relatively pleasant pregnancy, an excruciating birth (immediately forgotten), and a few sleepless nights. I would never have imagined, that day, that the small girl mammal in my arms would one day snarl at me, maybe even question my devotion.

It has taken me a long time to realize that my mother, my true mother, is the one who wore that house dress until it pretty much disappeared. And, three grown kids into my stint, I realize I am always, above all else, the young woman holding on tight to the small miracle who gave me the first inkling of who I was meant to be.

The Power of Voice

Adversity, for me this year, is a winter that just won't let go. Last night's snow and slush were gone this morning, and the sun beckoned, but the chill remained and the new yellow flowers out front lay on their sides, resigned. 

Our waitress last night in the little bistro down the street was named Ursula. No older than any of my children, she vaguely remembered her namesake, the evil octopus, from The Little Mermaid. I always loved Ursula -- ambitious, vindictive, ironic (I'm wasting away!), convinced of her entitlement. A flamboyant plus-size beauty, wise enough to know that the best thing she could take from a woman was her voice. 

As any little girl would have been at the time, our waitress had been fascinated more by Ursula's shellfish lipstick than her villainous feminism, a belligerence that had long shrouded any hint of kindness or humanity. Adversity can do that do a person (or a sea creature), but we know, deep down, she wasn't always this way. Just ask Flotsam and Jetsam. 

Disney movies always fascinate me, with their multiple layers and their hidden and not so hidden messages, depending on who's watching. It's brilliant, what Disney does, providing as much entertainment for adults as it does for the children, in its parks and on the screen. I've always wondered, though, why the beautiful heroine's mother is, well, not there.

I feel fairly certain that Ursula would never have gotten her tentacles on Ariel's voice had Ariel not been motherless. I like to think that if I have given my daughters anything other than a random contribution of chromosomes beyond my control it is their voice. A voice that, to this day, I forget to use on my own behalf, but that I've never lost when I need to spur them on from the sidelines, remind them to be kind but to never relinquish what is rightfully theirs. Ursula understood this, the power of voice, although she learned a bit too late that you cannot borrow one, you have to find your own. 

When I came of age in the seventies, I thought it was a given that women could be loud and be heard, toss their bras, be in charge of their own bodies, do anything men could do. Back then, it often meant putting on a pin stripe suit with a skirt and heels and a floppy tie. Maybe that's why we're still confused -- we never figured out how to use our voices without losing ourselves in the process. 

And here we are. I still know people -- men, mostly -- who claim they couldn't even hold their noses tightly enough to vote for Hillary. They don't seem to find this troubling, even after two years of the worst stench our country has ever suffered. And then there's me. With countless women vying for the top spot, I'm drawn to the old white guy, because he's calming and he doesn't shriek, and he has the resume. I feel like a traitor to my gender; I feel less guilty about my affinity for Mayor Pete, for obvious reasons. 

I hope we get a woman in the White House one day, but I'm not sure this is the time.  We've been knocked around a little, by a dark winter that just won't seem to let go. "Me Too" and the rehashing of ancient indignities and, yes, unequal playing fields, may help us in the long run, but right now we're confused, and we need to find our voices again.

Fire and Fury

Just a few days ago, I heard that someones recent visit to Paris was not so good. "Yellow vest" protesters had overrun the city, bringing it to a virtual standstill. But still, I thought, it's Paris. It's tough to imagine the city of light losing its sparkle. 

I flipped on the television yesterday as I entered my apartment, and vaguely heard something about a fire at Notre Dame. I took note, but went about my business, assuming there was not much to see -- a small flare, maybe, and a handful of hunky French firemen. When I finally glanced over, I felt certain I was watching a movie. 

Having been to Europe more than a few times, I've become a bit blasé about cathedrals. Seen one, seen 'em all. I'm embarrassed to say I've uttered those words, or something similar. Churches, basilicas, chapels, cathedrals -- I admit I don't really know the difference. 

But there are certainly standouts, and many of them are in Paris. They are unforgettable, those marvels of the middle ages, no matter what they're called. The light sifting through the soaring stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle; the long slow climb to the dome of Sacré Coeur, with its incomparable view; the sheer massiveness of Notre Dame, with its flying buttresses and its somewhat disarming gargoyles, seeming to mock the crowds below. 

I gasped, as did the world, at the inferno. It conjured up images of the blazing twin towers, of my double take as the first one suddenly disappeared, bright orange flames giving way to an avalanche of ash. I cringe at the comparison, knowing that those ashes, on 9/11, were a mix of concrete and wood and steel and the irreplaceable remains of thousands of humans. The only casualty yesterday, on Île de la Cité, was a thing, a thing that can be rebuilt. Sort of. 

But what of the thousands of humans, almost a millennium ago, who put this cathedral together. The sweat and toil and ingenuity without the benefit of modern science, the kind of handiwork that can never be replicated by 21st century engineering. 

I was last in Paris about two years ago, even more in awe of its beauty than I had been the time before that, or the time before that. I still gazed in awe at each monument, including Notre Dame, though I didn't bother to go in. In awe not only of its intricacies and its architectural perfection, but of the capacity of human beings to build such a thing, a larger than life tribute to their faith. As I watched the horrific dance of the bright orange flames, the plume of smoke spiraling toward the heavens, I thought there must be a lesson in all this, although I'm not sure what it is. 

Paris may have lost a bit of its sparkle yesterday, but still, the blazing cathedral leant an almost supernatural beauty to the night sky. It is heart-wrenching, the loss of such magnificence, but with a little faith, a dose of ingenuity, and, yes, a huge handful of euros, Notre Dame, and Paris, will survive.  

Sweet home (again), Chicago

It seems just a little bit arrogant to reclaim something that never belonged to you in the first place, but it's one of the perks of getting older, tweaking history a bit. When I moved to Chicago 34 years ago, I never thought of it as my city. My adopted city maybe, but not really mine. You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can never take the Brooklyn out of the girl. 

I moved here for a whole host of questionable reasons, but the Chicago lakefront in the summer certainly helped tipped the scale. Though I grew up just a stone's thrown from the beach at Coney Island, I had never experienced the magic of sand abutting concrete thoroughfares, of venturing into a bustling urban landscape clad in flip flops and carrying a towel. Not north of the Mason-Dixon line, anyway. Summertime in Chicago -- that most odd sensation of being on vacation without going anywhere. 

Today was the day I had envisioned when I decided to move back to the city, a quarter century after fleeing to suburbia. Sunshine, blue sky, and a lake so crystalline you're almost tempted to dive in even though you know you'd freeze your toes off, for starters. It's taken my skittish boxer, Eli, a good ten days to be willing to venture more than a block or two from our new digs, but today he was up for a walk to Grant Park, and the lake. Sunshine after a long winter is infectious, and it had gotten to him, just as it had gotten to me. He marched on without complaint, nonchalant as he accepted the occasional compliment, sure he was headed somewhere good. 

I narrated the city I used to know as we walked. The grassy expanse over there -- where the guys used to play 16 inch softball. The ferris wheel at Navy Pier in the distance, a place that always looks so much better from afar. My favorite skyline view (it only just occurred to me we had settled on the wrong side of it); the stepladder of buildings south of the Loop, looking like a two-dimensional painting if you're lucky enough to gaze at it from a sailboat on the lake. It's taken on a few additions these days, modern glass towers in odd geometric shapes, but still, the steadfast rectangles take my breath away. 

I used to walk these same paths when I worked nearby, but somehow it feels different now. I'm not rushing to get back somewhere, and I can come back if I want, first thing in the morning. It feels, in some weird way, as if it belongs to me now, as if this piece of the city by the lake is finally mine. 

Sue is back. So announced the banner strung across the pillars of the venerable old Field Museum. Sue, the T-rex who has called Chicago home since the turn of the millennium, even though I'd venture to say she was not born here either. Sue has undergone a few nips and tucks, and is back, just better and in a new hall. 

I may be a little worse for the wear than Sue, but let's face it, she has a team and I don't. No matter though. It's good to see us both back home.