WHILE I WAS LOOKING FOR A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON EARTHLY NEWS . . .
NASA photograph, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
Winding up a week of not great news the leader of the free world sat down with the autocrat responsible for untold crimes against humanity and a devastating, ongoing war. Very little good news on Planet Earth.
Taken by Hubble, the photo shows “a small portion of the Rosette Nebula…5,200 light years away.” There are dark dust clouds and “just visible in the upper right of the dark cloud, a young star fires jets of plasma…”
WHEREUPON THE MYSTERY OF THE 7th FLOOR WINDOW IS, MEANWHILE, SOLVED
Shiny new view from balcony window – facing south(Author photo)
Once a year we get shiny-clean windows.
It used to be twice a year, as my original contract decreed — but this is a senior living building, and senior living is, unfortunately, Very Big Business in the U.S. Which means investors want steadily rising returns, and this only happens by increasing rents (constantly) or by cutting costs (regularly, as in less frequent window-washing.)
OK, now that’s off my chest.
I love shiny-clean windows. The south-facing ones (above) stay reasonably clean all year. But my apartment has one large west-facing window, a view of reflected sunrises and shimmering sunsets. I really love my west-facing window. Its view succumbs to the grime of Post Street traffic below, but that takes a while to accumulate and Mother Nature sometimes pitches in with winter gales to clean things up.
Sunset view from west window (Author photo, long ago)
So it was with great dismay that I discovered, after the window-washers had finished the western wall and moved around the corner, that half of my west window remained smudgy.
In the grand scheme of things, a smudgy window would seem to rank fairly low among what one needs to complain about. But this is my waking view of the world, my closing view of the starlit night. Must it be gloomy, even before the San Francisco fog and embers from Canadian wildfires turn the window into a metaphor for a darkening world? (Until rays of hope return with the window-washers next August, just before the mid-terms?)
The prospect was too terrible. I complained. I complained vociferously to management, to housekeeping, to the maintenance department; for good measure. I fired off an email to the Executive Director of this establishment. One should not have to suffer a grungy half-view of the world for an entire year, I argued. Send those window washers up here to witness my distress. (I knew better than to insist on a re-do; I know costs and investor returns. I wanted, at the very least, sympathy — and at best a wash from within. These windows can be popped out for such chores.)
The offending window, west view (Author photo)
The next day a charming window-washer appeared at my door. “I actually washed that window,” he smiled. “I take pride in my work, so I’m always careful that it’s well done. Do you mind if I take a look?”
I felt heard. I sensed recompense. I led the charming window-washer to the offending window. “Do you mind?” he asked again, as he leaned across the three-foot shelf that sets the window back from the room, between built-in bookcases.
That small smudge you see on the right window (between the edges of the two sliding panes?) That is where the exonerated window-washer rubbed his two fingers. I seemed to have a very dirty window — on the inside.
Next week maintenance is sending someone to perch on the three-foot shelf and wash the inside of my window — something I’m perfectly capable of doing myself, but then, all this never occurred to me before raising such a ruckus so they may not think I have enough sense to wash a window.
May your sunrises shimmer and your sunsets glow. And may your outlook never be grungy.
ON LIFE IN THE OLDEN DAYS, AND BEING RAISED BY ONE’S SISTERS
The Moreland girls c 1944 – r to l, Helen, Jane, Mimi & the author
Among the blessings I regularly count, my three older sisters rank close to the top. A favorite niece and I, in fact — she grew up in an identical family structure — maintain that if only everyone could be the youngest of four girls we would have world peace.
Guys would have be factored in somewhere, but the only brothers I’ve intimately known are the three gems my sisters found. This is a sister-sibling story, told by the one they raised.
I’ve now outlived them all, the sisters and their three good guys alike. Looking back over how they shaped my own story is something I do, gratefully, pretty much every day — but it’s a special event of August.
Why August? Well, by August the searing days of summer are slipping into the past, the energies of fall and all its possibilities visible ahead. Baseball season is working itself into pre-pre-playoff frenzy. Everybody has left Paris and New York except for the tourists. And really, what else are you going to do with August? Having missed National Siblings Day (April 10) and International Brothers and Sisters Day (maybe March 29, maybe May 2) I decided to declare August National Youngest of Four Daughters Month.
For openers, August 2nd is the birthday of my sister Mimi. If everybody could have a sister Mimi we would definitelyhave world peace, because she would already have fought everyone’s battles.
When I arrived on the scene my sisters were approximately 2 (Mimi,) 6 (Helen) and 8 (Jane.) The story goes that they so desperately wanted a baby brother that when our father called from the hospital with the happy news they said, “Oh. A girl.” And went back to bed. But by the time I was old enough to hear that story they had rallied around and decided to bring me up as happily as they could.
Our mother was part of it all, but she was pretty much on overwhelm. The demands of being unpaid 24-hour assistant to our father in those post-Depression/ WW II years would’ve wiped out any less-determined wife; but she was simultaneously running the house, hostessing receptions, sewing clothes, gardening, darning, teaching Sunday School, you name it. Some time after she died I stumbled across a further clue to my upbringing. It was a line in a story my mother wrote for a family magazine that read, “Of course, when our Frances was born we were just tired of raising children.” Oh.
Though nearly two years older, Mimi was just a year ahead of me in school, and until marriages pulled us in different directions we were essentially joined at the hip. Just about everything I needed to know about growing up I figured out by watching Mimi — knowing full well that if I got it wrong she would step in and clean up my mess.
Mimi was utterly fearless, and uniquely competent. Once when the French door wouldn’t open I banged a little too hard on the glass pane and managed to gash my arm. I remember standing there shrieking until Mimi edged me out of the way, reached through to turn the doorknob and sped off to grab some towels. This being the olden days of small-town life, she then put me on the back of her bike and pedaled us off to Dr. Vaughan’s office to get me sewed up; fortunately we got home in time to clean up the bloody trail before our mother returned. Dr. Vaughan was a fine GP but not a highly trained surgeon; I still have the scar as a souvenir of the day.
I learned glamour and propriety from my sister Jane, who was regularly class president, prom queen, those sorts of things. It was Jane who knew how to arrange flowers, serve a soufflé, get out of a bad blind date. Once I sent my six-year-old from Atlanta to Birmingham for a weekend at Aunt Jane’s, figuring I’d learn stuff about young motherhood after he got back. These were the very olden days of air travel, when you could entrust a small child to the stewardess and know he’d be watched over until delivery to the appropriate aunt. (That kid grew up to be a pilot.)
Trying not to seem overly snoopy, I asked my son, on his return, what was best about Aunt Jane’s house. “Oh boy, breakfast!” he said. “For breakfast we had peanut butter and bananas on toast!” And why not?
Having declared for years that she would be the first to die, Mimi did just that, though still in her mid-seventies. In our last conversation, the day before that event, she reported from the hospital where she’d just been taken that her cardiologist son-in-law had come by that morning.
“I asked him to tell me, truthfully, how’s my heart as compared with his heart,” she said. “And he said, ‘about 50%.’ So I said, OK, that’s good.” Mimi never did anything half-heartedly in her life.
Jane, thoroughly exhausted from lifelong role-modeling and COPD, followed Mimi into the hereafter that same year, leaving Helen in Ithaca, NY and me across the country in San Francisco to tie up the generational story. Helen had already demonstrated how to live the good life on one’s own terms — in her home everybody sang or played chamber music in lieu of the TV they never owned — and made sure I finally married Mr. Right, their extraordinary longtime close friend.
But after her husband died and her own health declined to a point where social and cultural activities were no longer possible, Helen spent a good while going to bed and hoping not to wake up. Ferociously agnostic, she couldn’t pray for such an outcome so she did the next best thing: make phone calls saying nice things to people she loved “in case I don’t wake up in the morning.” Thus I have a message left on my answering machine not long before the night she went to sleep, with her daughter rubbing her back, and subsequently didn’t wake up.
“Frannie . . .” she says, “. . . I just want you to know you’ve been the best little sister . . .”
There should be world peace.
+. +. +
(This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, where I post usually – if not always – on the political scene and activist thoughts. C’mon over any time; it’s free.)
A publication I write for featured a writing prompt recently asking what historical event is most significant in your memory and how it affected you. Interesting assignment. My life has gone on too long to choose, I think — and including recent years of the Women’s March (and other marches and tumults) quickly gets everything murky. But the prompt immediately prompted this response:
It was simply beyond belief. I think that’s why the Challenger tragedy stays so starkly in my mind. Surely there were plenty of notable others:
I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall with my sister Mimi when our father called us in to hear FDR on the Philco radio, telling the nation that we were at war. It was December 7, 1941.
I remember Harry Truman on the train platform making a whistlestop speech after that war ended.
There were the appalling shocks of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. There were assassinations and celebrations and tragedies. Men would walk on the moon.
When the plane struck the first World Trade Center tower, it was barely dawn in San Francisco. My CNN anchor son-in-law called from New York. My husband took the call in another room, came back to bed, and said to just go back to sleep. Later, as we made coffee and turned on the TV, he explained that decision. “I knew we’d be awake for a very long time,” he said, “and I figured you would need another hour or two.”
Each of the above events shifted the world a little on its axis for the creatures who live upon it. Any of them, and countless others we’ve lived through, have shifted our perspective to some degree. Or if not, we weren’t paying attention. Paying attention is never a bad idea.
On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was driving home along the main highway of Daytona Beach, FL, having dropped my step-daughter off at her high school. En route, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched into the brilliant blue skies directly ahead and above.
Living in Daytona, as I briefly did during the 1980s, included many memorable times at Cape Canaveral. Often when there was a night launch we’d take the fishing boat down the Halifax River, drop anchor, and watch the beauty of a flight roaring into the black sky. Daytime launches were possibly less dramatic but equally beautiful.
This one I was idly watching as I drove. Suddenly, the looping white contrails seemed to disintegrate into a large puff. Smaller contrails began to appear in the sky as they fell earthward on separate paths.
It was as if the world stopped.
Like almost every other car on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. We simply stared. I remember saying out loud, “No. Nooooo.”
I don’t remember how long I sat there. I remember tears beginning to pour down my face. I remember thinking I could not go home to an empty house, and driving instead to a coffee shop next door to the church I then attended. There was already a small group gathered around a portable TV someone had placed on the counter. There were more tears of disbelief and quiet questions without answers. The coffee was free.
Here’s what we were saying, and what I learned: Life is precious. Hug someone. Try to be kind.
Because no one knows when the contrail ends and splits, or where its spirals go.
SOME LIFESTYLE CHANGES ARE MORE DIFFICULT THAN OTHERS
Telephone of olden days (Author photo)
We go way back, the beloved landline and I. Maybe not really as far back as the above instrument, which was actually rescued from my friend Cynthia who wanted to toss it. But I have loved my landline and it loved me back.
For my part, I listed its number on my business cards, letterhead and with countless agencies which will now have to be alerted about its demise. In return it faithfully showed me who was calling, played a pleasant little message to friends if I were out or (most often) to foes who sought money — either legitimately, for causes I support, or (most often) illegitimately.
Good old landline would also tell me, if I happened to be nearby and paying attention, exactly who was calling — giving me the option of answering before the friendly machine did. And most delightfully, it took messages from friends while almost never recording anything from the scammers, who tend not to leave their evil messages on answering machines.
It was also boldly proactive. If you left a message while I was out, it would blink at me ferociously on return until I played things back. Unlike the cellphone, which disappears messages with abandon and is still mildly bewildering after all these years, the landline saved me untold embarrassment from friends who sought to connect.
“You left a message on my cellphone?” Oh dear. “Two weeks ago?”
In short, my trusty landline has been, over the twelve years since I moved and had to change from the old trusty landline number, far more than just a relic of bygone days. But time came to hang it up.
(Another Author photo, after hanging up the phone)
AT&T finally pushed me over the edge. They’ve been trying to push friends of landlines over the edge for years by any means they can think of. Resistance has been fierce. Generally not for fleeting affections such as listed above but for truly valid reasons.
For one: not everbody in the world owns a mobile phone. I know that’s hard for anyone under 70 to imagine, but once there was life before cellphone towers. Also, cellphones can cost big bucks.
The main argument pro-landline, though, comes from people in remote areas where cellphone coverage is spotty to nonexistent. The telephone is both a friendline and a lifeline. I have friends in this category, as well as friends in cities like my San Francisco hometown, who are concerned about safety when the power is out.
“My mama,” says my friend Brian, “will shoot me if I give up my landline. When the earthquake hit? She was a hot mess until I got to my landline to assure her we were all okay.”
But apparently landline profit margins are thinner than the AT&T people prefer. They came up with a solution.
Several months ago, without so much as a heads-up — let alone an apology — my landline bill quietly rose from $60/month to something over $100. Because I have it on auto-pay, along with the confusing bills for cellphone and internet service I have had with AT&T for lo these many years, I managed not to notice the first month of astronomical charges. But not even right-brained I can overlook, for long, a bill that almost doubles without warning.
For $60/month I could gulp, but in light of the blessings above which I have long enjoyed, just pay up. A hundred simoleons? Nahh.
So off I went to the Verizon place. Josh the store manager, who was quickly called in because some little old lady was asking ridiculous questions, came up with the answers. I may be in love with Josh.
My trusty landline number will now go to a new iPhone 16e — like I needed another iPhone 16e — which the Verizon people threw in for free. It’s blue. Unlike my white phone, which I generally keep nearby and on which I actually take calls from the few who have its number, the blue phone will sit in the corner formerly occupied by the landline phone. Eventually I’ll come up with an explanatory message for it to offer. Then I’ll try to train myself to check for messages left by friends and the occasional scammer.
Meanwhile, because I may not be techonologically smart enough to unplug the old router and plug in the new without messing up my internet service, the Verizon people will send a technician over to do it. And rather than the three confusing bills AT&T somehow never let me combine into one, the Verizon people are combining all three services into one fathomable bill for me to auto-pay. Take that, AT&T.
All of the above might seem like much ado about nothing to you, but that’s because I’m older than you are.
Your messages will be welcome on the blue phone. Just please remember that it doesn’t blink at me.
TERROR. DISTRESS. EXUBERANCE. STRENGTH. HOPE. HOW TO DEAL WITH THE RELENTLESS EMOTIONAL TURMOIL OF THESE DAYS
Scene at edge of Lafayette Park (Author photo)
Anxiety? Through the roof.
For anyone who’s been paying attention, recent days and weeks have been more discouraging, and borderline frightening, than the days and weeks preceding. Those of us who hoisted protest signs got a little temporary relief.
I was out with my KAKISTOCRACY sign (It’s in the dictionary: Government by the worst. The least efficient. The most corrupt.) But I feel almost as strongly about the message on its flip side:
With my second-favorite marching-sign message (Author photo)
Because sometimes kindness seems the only response to the firehose of brutally bad news: political violence, discouraging court decisions, indiscriminate ICE raids, the cruelty and inhumanity a majority of the country wants to see end. The pressure is already beginning to build again. That may be a good thing for the country, since it seems nothing but public outcry will save our democracy. But what about us cogs in the juddering wheel of justice? We, the little people who need to gather strength?
Many recover with the help of music and art, visits with friends, immersion in a good book. I use all of the above. But I find solace, plus instantaneous comfort and joy, in the urban landscape. Mother Nature busies herself in the midst of the busiest built environments, the American city.
Most U.S. cities, with the help of local conservation groups or non-profits like the excellent Trust for Public Land, have pockets of open space where Mother Nature does her tranquilizing thing. In San Francisco, our cup of wonder overflows, including hilltops for viewing the world:
View of the Bay on a foggy day, seen from a hilltop porch garden. (Author photo)
Whether it’s outdoor walks in the country, where green fields or sparkling lakes serve as gateways to the calmer soul, small-town gardens or city parks, Mother Nature has a way of saying, “Breathe. Look around. Look up.”
DO GOOD. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR. MANTRAS FOR YESTERDAY AND TODAY
His four daughters at Earl Moreland statue (on R-MC campus) dedication, 2002. (L to r, Oldest sister Jane, yours truly, closest sister & bff Mimi, second oldest Helen.
“Do good, and love thy neighbor,” my father would say. “That just about sums it up.”
Not that he didn’t have plenty of other lessons and admonitions. My father, J. Earl Moreland 1897–1987, was a fierce believer in books & education (the more the better,) in interfaith relations, music and the arts, justice and equality, God and country. But when pressed for something like the secret to long life or prosperity he was prone to rely on that two-pronged moral motto: Do good and love thy neighbor.
My father didn’t set out to raise four daughters. The second of five sons himself, he grew up poor but proud — at least, that was how he told it — in a sturdy, God-fearing home. Left in charge at age 10 when his mother died, his tale was all about rough and rugged Texas, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that sort of thing.
But stuff, and daughters, happened.
My dad left Texas, but kept his Texas soul. After SMU, Class of 1917, he set out for Brazil where, as an educational missionary for the Methodist Church he helped start a college that’s still there and happily met my mother. Then came the daughters. Not long after we came back to the U.S. for good in 1935 he wound up heading another college this one in Virginia.
Aboard ship to Brazil, c 1925 (He was back & forth a half-dozen times in twelve years)
For the record, keeping a family & a college afloat through the Great Depression and World War II was a full time job — (twice that for my mother) — so my father worked 18-hour days and spent a lot of them on the road. But there were always hand-written daily cards and letters, and paternal wisdom wasm freely dispensed.
The only moment of deep disappointment I recall creating was the night my date and I won a jitterbugging contest at a dance chaperoned by my parents. Their love of music and dance did not extend to be-bop and jitterbugging. But episodes of that sort magically disappeared by morning, as if they’d never happened.
My father was, by design and necessity, a feminist ahead of his time. He firmly believed and regularly proclaimed (sometimes to our extreme embarrassment) that his daughters could do anything, be anything, accomplish or inspire anything — as long as it was within the parameters of doing good and loving neighbors. The same applied to his flawless granddaughters — he had 10 of those, though he did finally acquire two flawless grandsons.
In the haphazard one-room schools of his upbringing my father memorized countless speeches and parables — I think the way those 19th century teachers kept order was by setting their charges to memorize entire books of wisdom. One poem that stuck with him forever, and was forever repeated, bore the wisdom of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose.
Wasting time was not an option, though creative daydreaming, especially if you had a book in your hand, was respected and that was my usual excuse.
Because he loved the country chosen by his immigrant grandparents, loved justice and democracy and his fellow humans, my father would be appalled at the U.S. today. I am sincerely grateful that he and my genteel mother never had to hear the words, especially the lies (Thou shalt not) and vulgarities that spew from our narcissist in chief. But while his three-piece-suit persona didn’t lend itself to protest marches I am absolutely certain he’d be cheering on this daughter, along with her pro-democracy rantings and KAKISTOCRACY sign. He’d also be writing letters and making speeches and admonishing ordinary citizens and government leaders alike:
No offense to Mrs. Trump and Mrs. Musk, but some things just didn’t get through to your little boys.
Having raised three children who survived into adulthood without causing bodily harm to one another, or humankind in general, I know what’s possible. One of mine is actually retired now, and he still hasn’t shouted obscenities at former friends (or caused the deaths of thousands of poor children for that matter.)
In the interest of world peace, I’d like to remind Little Donnie and Little Elon about a few things that surely their mamas tried to teach them.
Such as: You never look good trying to make someone else look bad. We grown-ups are getting really tired of you trying to out-badmouth each other. Most of us had second grade teachers — didn’t you? — who taught us that insults are only used by small people.
My second grade teacher Miss Fretwell (I’m not making this up, that was her name) had a list of adages always at the ready. One offense and you’d be copying the appropriate sentence fifty times. So, Donald and Elon, if you didn’t get these messages from your moms, I would like to pass along a few lines from Miss Fretwell:
People with dirty hands point fingers.
A narrow mind usually goes along with a wide mouth.
None are so empty as those full of themselves.
And emphatically:
It’s okay to be angry; it’s never okay to be cruel.
Finally, to get back to that name-calling and finger-pointing, National No-Name-Calling Week was celebrated the third week of January; maybe you weren’t paying attention. Miss Fretwell would have loved No-Name-Calling Week.
Miss Fretwell would have had Donald and Elon at the blackboard, writing a few of the above. Or perhaps, Be Kind. Or even yet,
If you can’t be kind, be quiet.
On a personal note, as if this entire ramble weren’t personal notes, my birthday is June 8, which a friend just texted is National Loving Day this year. Actually, he was a few days off, but I’ll take it. (Bob Liner says he has moved the celebration four days over from the 12th.) It’s also Pentecost, the day we Christians celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit, which has seemed in short supply lately. Let’s take love and the spirit of peace wherever they can be found.
Be kind
This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, where I regularly post observations on the political scene (which I try to limit here on dear old WordPress. C’mon over any time; it’s free.
