THE 2024 SEASON? A BUNCH OF CHALLENGES, A SPRIG OF HOPE
Cherry blossoms framing the Washington Monument (Author photo)
Springtime. Season of rebirth and renewal. Season of hope.
This year, in addition to the cherry blossoms and sunlit fountains and melting ice cream cones, Spring brought us a rare new gift.
(Author photo, taken just before dipping the toes)
(Author photo, taken hastily)
We got to watch the sun and moon do their planetary dance. It brought a reminder of one more possibility: reunity.
For a few minutes or a few hours on April 8, millions of Americans didn’t care what the politics, peculiarities or skin color of their neighbors happened to be. We all simply turned into specks inhabiting the same little planet in one vast universe.
Partial eclipse as seen from a San Francisco balcony (Author Photo)
Perhaps, some day, there will be a season of peace.
Since the next one will be in 2045, and — at 90 — I have no plans to be around then, I guess I’ll finish life on this planet without having witnessed this extraordinary phenomenon. Which is OK. I’ll watch it on TV, in real time, and that’ll be special.
But being there would be spectacular. It’s the business of how to separate the special from the spectacular, and make rational choices between the two, that gets harder as we humanoids get older.
This is my recent lesson in making such a choice.
It started with an invitation to join a trip arranged by a favorite San Francisco-based organization, the Commonwealth Club , for which I’ve long been (and still am) a volunteer. Small group, brief time, expensive but not break-the-bank expensive, and this would be a once-in-a lifetime event. Another Club member was even looking for a roommate so I’d avoid the single-supplement cost.
The trip was to a south Texas ranch directly in the path of the solar eclipse, pick-up in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, return to DFW Tuesday morning. As just about anyone in the country knows by now, the eclipse will cross the U.S. — its ‘path of totality’ extending from south Texas to Maine — on Monday. I paid the fee and called my travel agent.
Lesson one: Find out travel costs in advance.
SFO to Dallas, how hard could that be? Well, as it turned out the airlines thought about this eclipse, and its path of totality, long before the rest of us did, and adjusted their prices accordingly. Nonstop from SFO to DFW would be roughly an arm and a leg. I gave up flying on anything that stopped between home and destination about the time I turned 70. But after my fearless travel agent ran through the nonstop options and their prices we went quickly, nonstop, to Plan B: find something connecting through weird travel patterns and invoke the Little Old Lady privilege of being met by a wheelchair to make changes in unfamiliar airports.
The LOL wheelchair option is onerous to me. I mean. I walk three or four miles a day, San Francisco hills included, and despite the wrinkled and rumpled appearance validated by my ID I detest being treated as Old Person. But we do what we need to do. Fearless travel agent found flights to DFW through Chicago (Chicago? Yes) returning through Denver, on the same airline for which I had mileage to cover the costs.
This, of course, now made it ridiculous to try going from home to Texas ranch in one day, so I opted to book a hotel at DFW for Saturday night. More added cost, but at least the excursion is less stressful.
Photo by fellow Cloud Appreciation Society Member Bob Osborn
Lesson two: Look at the bigger picture. Seriously. Not just the trip but the peripheral costs, the time involved, other commitments, everything else.
I’d known all along that I had a long-planned trip to the east coast in March. But the eclipse is in April! I’ve traveled for ages to different sites in consecutive months. I’ve been known to take back-to-back trips, often a weekend visit with friends followed by a longer trip just a few days later for a board meeting downstate.
But I’ve also never been 90 before. At some point, the body would like a little time to readjust from timezone changes, crowded airports, strange cities and the stress of it all no matter how much fun it was. The bottom line here was that I got home from the (nonstop) flight, DC to SFO, late Sunday night and the flight out was scheduled for early morning on Saturday. The same week.
By Tuesday, dragging a little, I was scrambling to meet deadlines that had piled up during the east coast trip, and I was beginning to have second thoughts about the eclipse.
Lesson three: Remember that the world doesn’t stop while you’re on vacation.
There was a time — say, back in my 70s or 80s — when I could catch up with the commitments of daily life within a day or two. Something seems to have shifted with that. The brain moves quickly into story deadlines, but the body is still on east coast time and wants a nap. It’s possible to avoid major calamity — postpone stuff that’s not on hard deadline, cancel lunches with friends to gain a little time — but Vacation Recovery is simply not as instantaneous as it was in younger years.
By Wednesday, exhausted, I was having so many second thoughts they were adding up too fast to follow. I began looking at weather reports. Storms and thunderstorms in the south and southwest. A CNN reporter, doing a segment on the eclipse Wednesday night, mentioned weather effects and (I promise, you can’t make this stuff up) ended his piece with a throw-away comment, “Just don’t go to South Texas.”
That did it. Thursday at 3 AM I am wide awake, doing the debate thing in my head: Should I do this thing, or should I not? All that money. But maybe it won’t even be visible. What about stuff I’ve not yet done: cancel the newspapers (yes, I’m a print edition person;) water the plants, buy some bug spray, find the sun hat, confirm the flights, pack another suitcase forheavenssakes.
Lesson four: When you’ve lived this long you’re entitled to change your mind.
Thursday morning I began to think it through. Having no trip insurance — actually, as far as I know there’s no insurance that covers ‘changing your mind’ — I would lose a large chunk of dollars. But travel agent friend assured me she could get back all those United miles, and I still had time to cancel the Saturday night airport hotel.
And the tipping point: If I canceled out I would have four Secret Days. A Secret Day, something that increases in value with every birthday, is one in which everyone thinks you’re gone so you can leave the phone on answering machine and do whatever the heck you want.
I wimped out. Left the carry-on on the shelf where I’d stashed it on Monday, emailed the trip people, apologized to my erstwhile roommate, called the hotel, thanked the travel agent, began to fiddle around with some stories, like this one.
Maybe what this country needs is a boarding house revival.
In the very olden days, specifically the century or more ending with the housing boom that followed World War II, the boarding house was everybody’s answer: a home, for a while or a generation, for maiden ladies and traveling salesmen, families on the move but not quite sure where, immigrants and itinerants, students of all ages and inclinations.
Boarding houses were run by couples whose children had grown and left home, by young families in need of extra income, and often by women in the days when few other options existed. Or older people of all types who enjoyed company and had a few spare rooms.
Granted, there was no oversight for health and safety etc; but it was in the boarding house that the citizenry learned manners, handiwork, new trades and how to love — or at least get along with — one’s neighbor. Violations of civility could lead to cold eggs for breakfast.
Memories of these establishments came to me recently at 3 AM, in the form of a song I have certainly not sung for at least 60 or 70 years. There is, I’m sure, some scientific explanation for why I can’t remember what I was talking about at breakfast, but a tune from my college guitar quartet days in 1951 pops into my head, unbidden and utterly precise, words & music complete, at 3 AM. In a continuous loop that is still playing.
In case you don’t want to Google it (several versions appear but mine is the right one) the ‘Boarding House Song’ is below. It is sung to the tune of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ — which is also embedded in my brain but that can wait.
In the boarding house where I lived, everything is growing old; Long gray hairs are in the butter, and the cheese is full of mold.
When the dog died we had sausage; when the cat died, catnip tea. When the landlord died I left there; spareribs were too much for me.
I take the return-of-the-boarding-house-song as an omen.
Problems of housing and homelessness are everywhere today, not to mention the struggle to accomodate immigrants and asylum seekers. Folks in the low-income bracket are often inadequately or improperly housed, and there are all manner of economic pressures on the middle class. Loneliness and depression are on the increase everywhere.
For the obvious solution to all of these issues I refer you to paragraphs three and four above. Civility would be an add-on bonus.
MY HOMETOWN WELCOMES SECRETARIAT BACK HOME TO STAY
Secretariat Monument #2/2, ‘Racing into History’ (Author photo)
I got back to Ashland just in time.
Secretariat was born after I left, but Hanover County is welcoming home its native son.
Born of a carefully arranged marriage (to put it politely) at nearby “The Meadow” in 1970, Secretariat won the Triple Crown when I was long grown and he was three. While at it he set speed records in the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes and the Preakness.
Secretariat has spawned movies, TV shows, countless stories and a few statues; the above is surely #1. A bronze sculpture by artist Jocelyn Russell it shows Secretariat with jockey Ron Turcotte astride winning the Kentucky Derby.
‘Racing into History’ has recently been on a 50th anniversary tour, but now the extraordinary horse is home again. In the center of Ashland VA, widely known (to its intimates at least) as the Center of the Universe. On the campus of Randolph-Macon College, in time for a rare visit of my own.
A REFLECTION ON BEING A WIDOW . . . WHO ONCE MARRIED A WIDOWER . . .
Google photo from several realtor sites
I had a tenuous relationship at best with the woman whose widower I happily married.
Judith Clancy was a hard act to follow. Before she died, of pancreatic cancer at just 56, she had been an artist’s model for Moses Soyer and other noted New York painters, briefly a ballet dancer, an illustrator for The New Yorker and for Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. A celebrated artist in her own right, with exhibitions in San Francisco and Paris.
She was tall and glamorous, a gourmet cook, widely admired teacher and raconteur. Fluent in several languages. Mensa, forheavenssakes. What can I say?
My beloved Bud had been her beloved for nearly two decades and her caregiver throughout an agonizing two years of relentless cancer. He was also her sole survivor and artistic executor, and the man redefined loyalty. Judith (whom I never met in real life) and I were born the same year. Had she not died young, I would never have reconnected with my long-ago romance and enjoyed an extraordinary, life-changing 26-year marriage. You’d think I could have been gracious about it all.
I was not. Moving to San Francisco where I knew exactly one person and he was in-house, I resisted, with a tight smile, the urge to punch out the lovely new friends who barely (though warmly!) greeted me before launching into a story about “our dear Judith.”
Despite the fact that I got exactly the same amount of loyalty Bud steadfastly gave her — plus daily assurances that I was the most wonderful gorgeous extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him — I gritted my teeth at every “Judith-and-I” that slipped into conversations with dinner guests and random daily discourse. In short, I did not love my predecessor. But we managed to cohabit: Bud & I & the ghost of Judith Clancy.
In my defense, I eventually grew supportive to some teeny tiny degree. I threw parties for posthumous exhibitions of her work at galleries and museums. I pitched in with the monumental task of cataloguing her work. I sought out (and came to love) the two nieces who had been her only, and distant kin. At one point I read through stacks of her sketchbook/diaries before they were exhibited at the Fine Arts Museums of SF and became part of their archives. It was both enlightening and therapeutic; I learned she had been human after all.
After more than a decade of tumultuous coexistence Judith and I reached a sort of peace. It followed several intense conversations at the oak-shaded gravesite where I would later spread half of our husband’s ashes. The book I wrote about it all remains unpublished, though I did have a story or two about the marrying-a-widower thing in national magazines.
The time arrived, some years ago, that we needed to sell the lovely old Victorian that Bud had bought before their marriage, and resettle in a senior-living condo. Whether all three of us would make the move was an open question.
Downszing was not easy: four floors of wall-to-wall art and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had to be condensed into 1600 square feet. You’ve heard those horror stories? They are true. I wound up with shingles.
But our new apartment, filled with the familiar art and books and Stuff, quickly felt like home. Interestingly, though a few of her drawings are on the new walls and copies of her books made the move, I didn’t feel Judith had followed me into this new home.
Then — a week or so after Bud and I had resettled — more or less — into the new place I had an early morning phone call from my former across-the-street neighbor.
“You need to call your realtor,” she said. “Last night we noticed that all the lights in the house were on. It looks like they still are.”
I called my realtor. She had not yet put a lockbox on the door. She hadn’t been to the house in over a week. The last of the ‘staging’ contractors had long since finished up and moved on. I drove back to the house.
Every light was blazing. Those early-20th-century homes featured single bulbs in closets, and a few stray lights in weird spots like basement corners. They were all on. Two ceiling fixtures I would’ve sworn had long since burned out were proudly aglow.
I made my way carefully from the basement to the top floor and back down the stairs, my fingers tracing the carved wooden banister railings one last time. Sunlight now was streaming through the stained-glass panels that framed the sturdy front door, lending a warm familiarity to the transitioning interior.
Slowly I flipped the last switch, and closed the door of the stately old Victorian. Behind me I thought I heard a whispered goodbye.
# # #
Thanks to Medium writer Double Rainbow for the inspiration for this remembrance
In a recent story on another platform on which I frequently blog, Medium writer Salsam spoke of having loved reading Molly Ivins as a teenager — and set me to reminiscing.
We could use Molly Ivins today. The unstoppable newspaper columnist, author, humorist and political commentator, who died in 2007 at 62, would be skewering our current politicians with gusto. She was one of the best. An Ivins story would always leave you wiser, and often leave you laughing.
My personal Molly Ivins story began one afternoon when I heard my husband Bud guffawing across the hall. We had, at the time, separate writing studios in the attic space of our San Francisco Victorian. I was working on some freelance projects; he’d been working on an anthology.
After he quit laughing and hung up the phone, Bud bounded over to my desk and swatted its corner with a gleeful, “That’s it! I just talked with Molly and the book is a go.”
He had been collecting permissions for a narrowly-defined anthology of stories told by famous writers about their own dogs after the dog had died. Bud was nothing if not focused. Inspired by the response he’d had to a story of his own beloved poodle, Scoop, published shortly after he’d had to put him down, Bud had spent several years searching for similar stories (or, as it turned out, poems) written and published by other grieving literary lights.
By this early afternoon in 1993 he had collected works by James Thurber, Eugene O’Neill, John Cheever, Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . an impressive list that would eventually run to more than forty stories and poems on 200+ pages. They are moving, sad, thoughtful, light-hearted, reflective.
But he really wanted one hilarious piece that Molly Ivins had published — I forget where, and can’t seem to find the original — titled “What’s in a Name?”
Ivins’ story begins with a line explaining that her dog “finally croaked on December 9 after fourteen-and-a-half years of marplotting through life.” (I’ll save you a Google. Marplot means “one who frustrates or ruins a plan or undertaking by meddling.”) An ‘official office dog of the Texas Observer’ in the 1970s, Ivins reported that her canine friend’s “great talent — (was) a genius for fouling things up.”
The name is integral to the story. “I was going to name her something lovely, like Athena,” Ivins writes, “but reality intervened. She was the only dog I ever saw that could trip on the pattern in the linoleum, so we called her S**tface (it’s spelled out in the story, but I don’t want to get in trouble here) for a while, and then it got to be S**t for short, and then it was too late.” It’s easy to see why “What’s in a Name” needed to be in an anthology with the likes of Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’
“When I took S**t to New York in 1976,” Ivins writes, “many people told me it was cruel to keep a ranch-raised dog in a big city. Of course she adored New York — so much garbage to get into, so many other dogs to meet, so little exercise. In a city full of Tsing-Luck poos and Shar-peis, people would look at S**t and say, ‘Oh, what breed is that one?’
“‘Purebred Texas blackhound,’ I always said, and they would nod knowingly and say they’d heard those Texas blackhounds were splendid dogs.”
But one day, having miraculously found a parking place right in front of her Upper West Side building, Ivins let S**t out of the car off-leash to go the several steps to their door. Unfortunately a bicyclist passed by at that precise moment, a man with a baby strapped into a small seat in back, and the Texas/New York dog took off barking.
“Clearly an emergency,” the story continues, “so I let loose, ‘S**T! S**T!’ This caused several neighborhood children to appear out of nowhere and to begin chanting in chorus while pointing at me, ‘She said a dirty word, she said a dirty word.’ The guy on the bike, justifiably upset about having been attacked by this beast, got off in the middle of the street and wheeled around yelling, ‘I’ll have the law on you, lady. Letting your dog run loose without a leash is illegal in this city. That animal is a menace. I’m calling the cops.’
“In the meantime, a woman with an unrelated grievance over the parking space I had just occupied came marching down the block, arms akimbo, saying ‘You have some nerve, you went right ahead and took that parking place, you saw us waiting there, but you went right ahead and took it, I can’t believe your nerve, we were there first but you took that place . . .’ The kids kept chanting, the biker kept screaming, the lady kept bitching, S**t started running around everybody in circles, traffic came to a halt, then backed up through the red light, then two red lights, people got out of their cars to see what was going on, other people farther back started honking. S**t was delirious with the excitement of it all, the cops came, she attacked the cops, by this time traffic was backed up all the way up Amsterdam and down Columbus.
“I loved S**t, but she was quite wearing.”
Eventually, the Texas blackhound came to an untimely, if predictable end.
“She went out with the style we had come to expect from her — hit by a car, but no mere dead dog by the side of the road. Nope. Biggest mess you ever saw and it had to be cleaned up by (Ivins’ friend Kaye) Northcott and myself. We got most of her remains into Kaye’s plastic laundry basket and took her to the pound, the two of us a pair of poorly matched pallbearers.
“The people at the pound were kind, but said they had to fill out a form. They needed my name. My address. And I waited one last time for the question I had answered a thousand times from bemused strangers, enraged neighbors, at kennels, veterinarians’ offices, dog pounds and police stations. ‘What is the dog’s name?’
“I had S**t for almost fifteen years. It seemed longer.”
The hands in question (Photo by friend, used with abandon)
I have sunk to a new low.
This report is in the hope of some sort of absolution, some tiny relief of guilt, or at least the promise that you won’t tell the ghost of my mother.
My mother, Helen Hardy Moreland, was a woman of her time. Which was 1897–1967. The last half-dozen of those years were eaten away with a series of small strokes, and may she rest in well-earned peace. I am living proof that a somewhat easier, if less righteous, life might have given her another three decades or so, but probably my real secret was being born in an easier century.
Despite a graduate degree and (usually) enough money to pay the bills, my mother was constitutionally unable to pay someone to do anything she could do herself. She tried really hard to instill this philosophy in her daughters. Being A Lady was of paramount importance, but if the toilet malfunctioned you went for the plunger yourself.
Helen Hardy Moreland, circa 1940 (Author photo)
When my mother was not cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, writing, teaching, gardening, canning, hostessing, ironing, baking or functioning as a personal enabler of her husband’s distinguished career in academia she was sewing. I mean, how else to clothe four daughters? Sewing included darning, mending, tatting, or crocheting when called for and in all circumstances fixing everything yourself.
It is this last that just did me in.
I needed to add a snap fastener to a newly purchased garment. (Which itself my mother would have stitched up between tea and dinner.)
In my defense, I actually own a sewing basket. I inherited it from my mother-in-law, another woman of the same time and disposition as my mother. She actually used all this stuff:
Isabel’s sewing basket (Author Photo)
Hidden deep within this nifty basket are some snap fasteners. I got one out. I went so far as to mark the spots where its two pieces needed to go.
Then my fingers mutinied. My opposable thumbs absolutely opposed any participation in holding the tiny snap in place, let alone getting the threaded needle (I deserve points, at least, for getting the #$^%+@# thing threaded) through its tiny hole. As if my hands were given voice to shout, with indignation, “Oh good grief! We type your stupid stories!! What more do you want?” It was a battle of frustration; the mutineers were unmoving.
Vanessa’s alterations corner at Lily’s Cleaners (Author Photo)
I caved. Took the damned thing to my friend Vanessa at Lily’s Cleaners on Pine Street. She said, with a gentle smile, that plenty of people bring in small jobs; she’ll have it ready tomorrow.
This is because I lose a LOT of eyeglasses. Reading glasses, valuable prescription glasses that magically darken with the sun (my latest and most tragic loss;) snazzy sunglasses from the Cocoons people that drew high fives from handsome passersby (alas, 60 or 70 years past the age at which I might have built upon these encounters;) outdated prescription glasses pressed into service when I lost the good ones; cheap sunglasses regularly bought for $6 at Goodwill . . . you get the picture.
If you are a loser of eyeglasses, this essay is for you. I have discovered where they go to die.
Earlier I had discovered where they don’t go — or at least, how not to find them. They don’t go into airport lost-&-found departments; we’ve all tried that. They don’t go into municipal trash bins near where you last saw them, so forget digging through those malodorous heaps. They will not come home via group emails to every meeting or friend group with whom you worked or partied in the week before you discovered them AWOL.
Shoot, they don’t even come home to collect rewards. At least a dozen of my lost former bafs (if your eyeglasses aren’t your BestAccessoryFriends you don’t seriously need them) have left home with my business card glued to the case or (in one desperate failed instance) my cellphone number etched onto the piece that goes over your ear.
A few of them get swept into gutters or trash bins and go thence into the landfill for future civilizations to puzzle over, assuming the planet survives for future civilizations. I hereby offer my abject apologies to the planet; I am profoundly sorrowful.
Today, however. I have discovered the secret final resting place of lost eyeglasses. It is in the bowels of a Subterraneous International Repository beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, accessible only through the Property Department of your local Police Department.
I know this because I recently learned of the New York Police Department’s Underground Storage facility and its current trove of approximately 1,752,012 items, among which are at least five pairs of my missing glasses (readers & sunglasses.) Extrapolating backwards to similar facilities in San Francisco, Paris, London and elsewhere I estimate that each of those must be home to an average of 1,324,500 items including at least a pair or two of my formerly beloveds. But since all of these facilities have a finite amount of space, it follows that they must relieve themselves at some point when income exceeds capacity and necessitates outgo.
Thus the central subterranean repository. There is no other possible answer.
The same article that informed me about the New York inventory revealed that each and every item is carefully bagged, tagged and numbered. (From one to infinity.) Therefore, we know our eyeglasses will be kept into eternity, because what governmental entity can you name that ever destroyed a numbered item in its care? (No politics, please.) After varying numbers of years, a few thousand are certified as eligible “for destruction;” this is code for shipment to a sub-subterraneous destination.
I think, although this is the one piece of the puzzle still under peer review, that between the bagging and the tagging someone enters details in a box below the “Eyeglasses” label. The time required to search the database for the precise item labeled “Fran’s ridiculously expensive prescription trifocals that darken with the sun” however is likely to exceed my anticipated lifetime.
So now that you understand, perhaps you will undertake a search of your own.
And just in case: They have lavender metallic frames. Just send them to my granddaughter.
