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America Collection/General interest
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When the Ghost Came to Sacramento Street

by Fran Johns

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

America Collection/General interest
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Remembering Molly Ivins

by Fran Johns

ONE MORE LAUGH FROM THE IRREPRESSIBLE ESSAYIST

Cover of a great book (Author photo)

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.”

General interest/Optimism Collection
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A Confession: Abject Failure of Domesticity

by Fran Johns

ARTHRITIC HANDS, 1 — SEWING TASK, 0

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.

It will remain our secret.

General interest/Optimism Collection
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Solving the Rose-Colored Mystery

by Fran Johns

WHERE EYEGLASSES GO TO DIE

I have long wondered where my lost eyeglasses go.

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.

Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

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.

America Collection/General interest
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We’ve Seen This War Movie Before

by Fran Johns

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DESPOTS DO WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT

Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash

I was six years old when Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. I don’t want to see another one.

If a big country is given permission to invade its smaller neighbor and “do whatever the hell it wants . . .” that’s the way World War III will begin. I’m sorry we have a popular politician — a man who never knew war, never served his country in the military, never knew hardship or had to work for a living and cannot understand the concept of loving one’s neighbor — now cheering for autocrats around the world and wanting them to do whatever the hell they want to the powerless.

The powerless are seldom all bad, weak or soulless; tomorrow we could be them.

Power corrupts, as wise folks have long said; absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m sorry we have a popular politician who wants — and whose followers want him to have — absolute power. Given the power to do whatever the hell he wants, I don’t expect him to love his neighbor — or to care one iota for anyone but himself — which seems to be his pattern.

I remember Germany’s invasion of Poland not because I was a precocious six-year-old but because my parents drummed the evils of autocracy into my sisters and me almost daily over those years. Democracy, we believed and I still do, requires doing whatever seems best rather than whatever the hell some nut case wants.

Among my earliest memories is that of being gently carried downstairs in the middle of the night because my father wanted my sisters and me to hear what a destructive madman sounded like. It was Hitler on the short-wave radio. The message of those childhood days was that we were safe, we were fortunate to live in a democratic free society, and our country would not let any autocrat do whatever the hell he wanted. My father, a compassionate man with language skills the politician in question lacks, would have used different phraseology. The politician in question is, IMHO, another destructive madman.

It is heartbreaking to watch my country, which throughout my long lifetime has welcomed the tired, the poor and the immigrant masses, now tilt towards becoming a country willing to turn its back on them all. And as for our allies — well, this popular politician is encouraging his followers to let our allies’ bigger neighbors do whatever the hell they want to them too — as long as his strongman heroes stay in power.

I remember Pearl Harbor, when my country entered that last World War, and the kamikaze pilots who knowingly turned themselves into suicide bombs because their autocratic emperor led them to believe this was the brave and honorable thing to do. And I remember D-Day and V-J Day and V-E Day and the eventual end to a terrible war that cost untold loss and suffering to brave and honorable military men and women along with millions of innocents.

I remember dark times for my country’s democracy in the years that followed, when it was threatened by extremists driven by fear or a thirst for power or both. Democracy always survived, and nobody was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted without suffering consequences. The politician in question knows nothing of all that. Having no interest in history, he also knows nothing of its mistakes, or of the lessons history could teach him.

Such as: war is hell. Democracy is fragile but worth preserving. And if humankind is to realize its humanity, no one should consider it his right to do whatever the hell he wants.

Humankind wants, instead, kindness.

# # #

In grateful memory of Aleksei Navalny

Feminist Collection/General interest
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Abortion Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

by Fran Johns

I CAN TELL YOU WHAT TOMORROW WILL LOOK LIKE

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

Sepsis. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe not.

An email from a nurse friend recently sent me back down the rabbit hole of abortion memories. She wrote of another nurse who, after minor surgery in her own hospital, got sepsis that took, first, both of her hands, then her feet, then her life. Sepsis is not for the faint-hearted.

Yet it’s how millions of women died in this country alone before Roe v Wade made sterile abortion care widely available.

I am a survivor of one of those pre-Roe abortions. Performed on a kitchen table in 1956 by a sleazy guy who probably hand’t bothered to wash his hands. Did I care? Well, yes — but the issue was to end an unwanted pregnancy resulting from a workplace rape and this was the only option.

The most common method of back-alley abortions involved insertion of a straw (or worse) into the vagina, which would precipitate bleeding and eventual discharge of fetal tissue. It seems barbaric today, but few people today understand the desperation of a woman who needs to end a pregnancy — often compounded by rape, incest, abuse, you name it. You cannot name it, though, unless you are that woman.

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

Unsanitary conditions lead to sepsis. The advent of medication abortion (along with general improvements in reproductive care overall) virtually eliminated the risk of sepsis when a woman needs to end an unwanted pregnancy. The last half century saw a world of progress.

But today? The crazies who would dictate what a woman may or may not do with her own body are also dictating to physicians who, in many states, now have to consider losing their license or going to jail while they’re considering how best to treat a patient.

Not even pharmacists are exempt. The super-safe and simple dispensation of pills for medication abortion it also in the crosshairs of the crazies.

Images of all those women who died of sepsis — because desperation abortions cause sepsis — might seem dim to you. Not to me.

I am a survivor. An incredibly lucky survivor who lived to marry and have healthy, much-wanted children. But I have not forgotten the unlucky ones. If we do not fight hard, daily, everywhere for restoration of reproductive freedom, I know what the future will look like.

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

America Collection/General interest
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Rainy Days & Times of Wonder

by Fran Johns

GOING OUT IN JOY — IN A SHOWER

Thirsty? Have you ever been several miles into a summer hike only to find your water bottle has leaked and there’s not a drop remaining?

Some of us get that way in between rainy days.

Rainy days – and rainy nights – are, for me, like having a frosty new bottle of water appear along the the dusty trail as if by magic. Not to get all biblical or anything, but it’s hard not to think of the Isaiah lines about rains coming down from the heavens so we can go out in joy and come back in peace. . . I particularly like the words that follow, about bursting into song and clapping hands.

OK, rain is not always an unmitigated blessing. Floods, mudslides, downed trees, sinkholes, erosion . . . and now we have to worry about atmospheric rivers. Atmospheric rivers?? Think ribbons of water vapor about the size of the mouth of the Mississippi River (NOAA gave me that image) that float around in the skies en route to swashing across the countryside. California’s old happenstance, new reality.

But what I love is just regular rain. For city dwellers, and committed city walkers like yours truly, it’s an invitation to come out.

There are, for instance, photo ops everywhere, especially the reflection kind. Somehow the allure of cozy wine bars and coffee shops grows exponentially with every raindrop, which tempts us passers-by to stop and admire the festivity within and the lights bouncing back at us.

I also love the Umbrella Dance thing. With every other walker coming your way under another umbrella, there is a reflexive silent negotiation in passing. You go high, I go low? You tilt Left, I tilt right? Smiling helps. It may be just my hometown bias, but somehow I feel umbrella dancers are gentler in San Francisco than some other locales. New Yorkers, for instance (and I’ve been in Manhattan rains from Hurricane Ida on down) can be, well, insistent: I’m going low, and don’t you dare bother me.

Such negotiations meanwhile, as well as the overall art of wet walks, also encourage looking down. All in all it is an abundance of riches: dancing leaves on street trees above, shimmering glass-fronts around, sidewalk scenery below. This walker is a confirmed sidewalk freak.

If the rains hang around for a while, wet leaves on sidewalks stain themselves into urban art. Sometimes with the help of newly-dropped friends that haven’t yet been around long enough to fade.

On the sheltered side of the street — we’re talking (walking) residential blocks here; you can’t find this downtown — if the rains hang around long enough they turn sidewalk blocks into something moldy. I can’t believe I’m saying anything nice about mold — given the allergies of friends and family and too many people in sub-standard housing. But greenery patterns on sheltered sidewalks can also be lovely.

These (above) reminded me of the Impressionists. They were on a fairly steep hillside. It is wise to step cautiously around the green if you don’t want to interrupt your walking career with a broken hip.

But still, what wonders Mother Nature has for us.

Rainy day love may have something to do, in my case, with the long and not forgotten California drought. In California (and probably elsewhere) we talk about ‘water years’ – October 1 of the preceding year to September 30 of the one you’re thinking of. Official droughts have to do with measurements of rainfall in ‘water years’ and according to those measurements our last severe drought years were 2012-2016. But when your wetness has been coming from atmospheric rivers with long periods of dryness in between, drought can feel endless. I do not complain about San Francisco’s year-round walkable weather, but can we spell Climate Change?

Last ‘water year’ — 2022–23 — was one of the wettest on record for the Golden State, but we’re still heavy into conservation. (Pour the rest of your glass on the plants! Re-use towels, reduce laundry! I’ll skip the rhymes about flushing that are unsuitable for a family publication.) Drought years don’t fade easily from memory.

So here’s to rainy days everywhere. Rainy walks. Cozy coffee shops where everyone feels connected by the shelter. Umbrella dancing. Sidewalk art.

And not least, when the view from your window looks anything like the above, a clear message from God:

Grab a good book. Naptime.

America Collection/General interest
Posted on

Joining the MLK Day March

by Fran Johns

A FINE DAY FOR PEOPLE-WATCHING, SIGN-READING . . . & REMEMBERING

Marchers gathering on a sunshiny San Francisco morning (Author photo)

Walking shoes? Check. Sunglasses? Check. Enthusiasm? Check.

The annual Martin Luther King Day San Francisco celebration kicked off on a balmy holiday morning with a walk of a mile or so ending at downtown’s Yerba Buena Gardens, site of the city’s waterfall memorial to King. (Speeches, music, politicians, Check . . .) The march commemorates the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march; that one, though, was 54 miles.

(Author photo)

Sign-spotting was almost as much fun as running into old friends among the several thousand walkers. The sign above, waved with gusto by a four-year-old getting a free lift in his dad’s wagon, features an MLK quote, “The time is always right for doing what is right.”

Many of my favorites were on the T-shirts of young walkers, or piggy-back riders like this one testing the strength of another energetic dad (below.)

(Author Photo)

The event, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Interfaith Council for several decades, was held for the first time post-pandemic last year, but this year’s celebration brought out enthusiastic crowds and voices reminiscent of earlier, multi-thousand-crowd days.

MLK Day became a national holiday in 1986, celebrated on the third Monday of January. This year’s observance, though, fell on his actual January 15th birthday; King would have been 95.

Not to be outdone, I occasionally hoisted my own sign (Thanks, Alice Walker, for this good quote.)

(Friend-of-author Photo)

But I really wanted this one:

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