Category: Optimism Collection

Optimism Collection
Posted on

Political Vibes from Brazil

by Fran Johns
Brazilian flag on blue background

A LOVE STORY, A FILM AND A FEW FEARS ABOUT THE FUTURE

(Warning: Sometimes I just can’t help but talk politics)

Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash

A century ago two young people met and fell in love in Brazil, a continent away from their homes — his in Texas, hers in Virginia.

The story was that he’d been standing with a friend on a Porto Alegre hillside, watching the arrival of a ship full of newcomers that included a few fellow educational missionaries like themselves. And that he spotted her, a slender young woman with auburn hair woven in thick braids around her head, and said to his companion, “Saunders, I’m going to marry that girl if it’s the last thing I do.”

We had our own opinions about that story — my three older sisters and I — but we learned to smile politely and just let him tell it. The girl in question, who had come to teach music and folk dance to preschoolers, would answer our derision with her own smile and the response, “Well, that’s what he says . . .” Which may explain their long and happy union.

Remembrances are heart-warming; but reading about Brazil today can be scary.

“I’m Still Here,” the award-winning film by Director Walter Salles, has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, with leading lady Fernanda Torres, 59, up for best actress and generating talk about the Oscars. All this follows a failed bid, a quarter-century ago, by Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro for the best-actress Oscar that went to Gwyneth Paltrow.

As I’m not much of a movie buff, what I know about I’m Still Here is mostly what I read in the New York Times: “Set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s,” writes reporter Ana Ionova, the film “tells the story of Eunice Paiva and her five children, whose lives are upended when the family patriarch, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman played by Selton Mello, disappears at the hands of the military government.” Ionova quotes director Salles as saying “The personal story of the family is the collective story of a country.” And this is what, to me, is scary.

My family returned to the U.S. for good in the mid-1930s, when I was not yet two (yes, I’m sailing into my 90s now) and the winds of war were stirring around the globe.

Brazil, though, was forever my parents’ happy place, Portuguese the language they spoke to each other all their lives. They had been young enough to believe their schoolrooms were helping make the world better. Porto Alegre featured free opera and symphony in the city center, and they made lifelong friends whom I often met in later years. Though the politics of the country were tumultuous — my parents were friendly with the good-guy/bad-guy leader Getúlio Vargas (whose roots were in Porto Alegre’s state of Rio Grande do Sul) — those were joyful years for my family.

What I remember about my father’s politics — other than his policy disagreements with Ronald Reagan, whom he dismissed as “that cowboy in the White House” — was his ferocious opposition to any electorate that handed too much power to one man. He had watched the worst example of that with the rise of the Third Reich (born the same year as I) and had worked against more than one U.S. politician who had authoritarian inclinations in the last half of the 20thcentury.

The political forces behind the troubled 1970s of Brazilian politics were concentrated in a military junta  (supported by the U.S.) rather than a single person; but I remember my father’s sorrow over what happened to freedom and democracy there, and his joy when the dictatorship fell and democracy was restored. He was then in his mid-eighties; he would go on to live, active and engaged, into his 90th year.

My father did not live to know Jair Bolsonaro, who aspires to be dictator of Brazil, and whose supporters stormed the capitol when he lost his last attempt to reach that goal. But I think I know what he’d have to say about Bolsonaro and friends.

I have beloved friends and family members who voted, in the recent U.S. elections, for the not particularly truthful or generous man who has said he would be dictator “on day one,” who demands absolute loyalty, and has been given extraordinary power in advance by the courts that he put in place. I claim no superior knowledge and do not question the many reasons why they, and a slim majority of my fellow citizens, chose to send him back to the White House.

But still. The spirit of my father is omnipresent these days. I remember the loss of democracy in Brazil that I’m Still Here is bringing to light once again. And I know enough about autocracies not to want to live under one.

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

The Worst. Job. Ever.

by Fran Johns

SOME ARE MEANT TO BE DOOR-TO-DOOR SALESPEOPLE, SOME ARE NOT

Photo by Eddie Junior on Unsplash

(The following story resulted from a recent Labor Day conversation about worst jobs ever. I won hands down, despite one friend having spent a summer pouring gravel for a road construction crew in rural South Carolina – after which he decided he was college material. This appeared in a Medium memoir publication, and though much longer than anything I usually post here I thought you might enjoy it.)

It was a dark period of my otherwise bright life. Think alcoholic spouse and three children in grades one, four and five. Late 1960s. I was picking up any writing jobs I could find, including more than a few magazine ‘stringer’ deals that paid a penny a word — something guaranteed to ruin your narrative gifts. Those didn’t buy a lot of groceries.

Worst of all, my kids needed academic support. In those olden days when students had to look things up in books, home resources were critical. I had grown up with the Encyclopedia Brittanica in the upstairs hall next to the telephone; the Brittanica cost more than my mortgage. Plus, everybody who was anybody with school-age kids in the last half of the twentieth century had World Book.

The World Book Encyclopedia was the holy grail of pre-internet education. I desperately wanted a set of those cream-colored volumes for my children, and feared they would be through school before I could save up enough money. There was only one answer:

World Book offered free training for new salespeople (who seemed always to be in demand.) After you sold six sets you got your own set free — I think there were about 20 books in all — plus the requisite bookcase in which to house your prize. What’s so hard about selling encyclopedias, I asked myself. I signed up for the training course.

It was, as anyone who has ever taken a sales training course knows, about ten percent information and ninety percent pep talk. The information was a 5-minute spiel we memorized that would pluck every cultural, emotional and educational heartstring of every red-blooded citizen we approached.

As to the approach: we were carefully taught never to call ahead or try to set up an appointment, but to choose a neighborhood, ring doorbells, gain entry, deliver the memorized spiel and write up the order. Easy peasey.

It was the hardest assignment I ever had, before or since.

Some people are born to sell. I am not. Fervently as I actually believed in the value of my product, the idea of confronting a perfect stranger and trying to convince him or her of anything can still cause me to break out in a cold sweat and pull the covers over my head. Decades later, fervently as I believe our democracy is at risk, I still can’t do the door-to-door thing.

But stronger than my terror was my desperation. My beloved children needed the World Book.

On my first try I drove, as recommended, to a new suburban development and parked near a cul de sac. This being before traveling salesladies (or ladies of any sort for that matter) appeared in pants, I put on a crisp white shirt and my swingie wrap-around skirt with the big pockets — #1 morale-booster outfit — and slipped on my lucky red Capezio flats. Spiffy new satchel on my shoulder I marched bravely up to the first front door.

An angry-looking middle-aged woman answered, glared at me and slammed the door before I got the first word out.

I took a very deep breath and approached the next house. That door was opened by a youngish woman with a baby on her hip — and I had an opening spiel for that! Before I got past the ‘Good morning’ she said, “We’re not interested,” and slammed her door. By the time I got no answer at the third house I decided they were all calling each other to warn against the ditsy blond trying to sell them something, and watching my every move from behind the curtains.

I walked back to my car, shoulders straight, smile plastered on my face for all those eyes I could feel upon me. Before I got a block away tears were stinging my eyes. I quickly parked on a side street and wept. Then I summoned the courage to wipe my face, drive to another anonymous subdivision and start over. It was downhill from there. Six houses and five rejections later (the sixth wasn’t home) I was back in the car and in despair.

“How did it go, Mom?” asked the kids, excited to have a mom who dressed up and went off to work — as opposed to sitting at the typewriter in jeans. I did not have the heart to tell them it was torture. I told them I thought business would surely pick up tomorrow.

Tomorrow was worse.

By the third week I was sinking into the depths. But just as I was about to hit bottom, someone opened the door and let me in. She actually listened to my spiel. She said she’d think about it. We were never supposed to settle for less than a signature on the dotted line, but I was so excited not to have had the door slammed in my face that I didn’t even get her name and phone number. I jotted down her address and vowed to return.

There was not one day I set out on this journey without having to give myself a five minute pep talk just to start the car. For one chilly week the car was in the shop and I took to my bicycle. The exercise actually helped work out some of my anxiety and frustration, though I still made no sales during bike week. 

We were encouraged to do our presentation thing for the man of the house and the little lady both — women’s lib was just getting off the ground — but we weren’t warned about the predator man of the house. I was early into my fourth week when I met him.

A nice-looking young man in jeans and fraternity sweater (that should’ve been a clue) answered the door with a friendly smile. He said his wife was upstairs but he’d call her, and ushered me into the living room. I settled myself on the sofa as indicated, satchel on my lap. He returned to say the little woman would be right down, and why didn’t I go ahead. I did. Within a few sentences he rose from the chair facing me, called upstairs to the supposed woman and returned. But this time he sat on the sofa, edged swiftly next to me, reached one arm behind me and the other hand up my skirt. I grabbed my satchel, dashed out the door and was in the car driving away in about forty seconds.

That, plus the general humiliation I felt, would have ended my saleslady career but for one happenstance. I got a call from a casual friend in the Junior League — of course, I was in the Junior League, but I had prayed that no one therein would learn of my new job. 

“We’ve been meaning to get a World Book set,” she said; “and someone mentioned you were selling them. Can you order a set for me?” I was suddenly back in business.

Bolstered by my first commission check I also got smarter. By then it was November. I printed up several hundred cleverly decorated flyers declaring there was still time to order a set of encyclopedias and have this valuable gift under the family tree! My 10-year-old son and I attacked a new neighborhood in the late afternoon darkness, going house to house tucking flyers into front doors or mailboxes. Child labor laws or those prohibiting such use of mailboxes be damned.

I got two actual responses to that campaign, and sold my second set. I was on a roll.

Being on a roll still didn’t make this job any easier. I knew a little about rejection from the few freelance articles I was also floating into the universe, but those little slips were nothing compared to the cruelty of a stranger’s rude dismissal. Or the slam of a door in one’s face. I still fought tears on a regular basis.

But by New Year’s Day I had miraculously racked up another two sales and had a hot prospect thanks to the teacher of a friend’s kid who actually suggested he might benefit from this resource. I could smell victory.

It was a cold January in Georgia. But with the red Capezio’s traded for boots I could leave at the door I persevered. It never got easier. I never had a day I faced without fear and loathing. I still believed in my product, but cold-calling on perfect strangers who have better things to do than listen to a sales pitch does not boost belief in humankindness. I simply kept my head down, played the percentages as instructed and kept going.

In early February I closed my sixth sale and welcomed the beloved encyclopedia that would get my children safely through high school. The next day, I quit.

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

After Earth Day, Dirt Day!

by Fran Johns

Plant, dig, create — getting grimy can do you good

Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash

Freedom! Dirt lovers are uprooted and exonerated.

A recent New York Times story confirms that dirt is good. (The real kind, not the political or social media kind.) Dirt even contains microbes beneficial to our mental & physical health. Who knew?

Actually, I did. Mud pies were always my beloveds. You can express yourself in mud: Pressed-leaf creations, happy faces or sad. If you’re angry you can just splat it back down with great force. Digging restores the soul, and occasionally creates gardens.

I taught my kids to wash up before meals, but otherwise to love Mother Earth. Even a little on the inside floors if I’m being honest. Didn’t Native Americans build immunities by ingesting bits of bad stuff? Don’t you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die? (Take your time.)

Please accept this seal of approval: Go ahead. Get grimy.

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

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
Posted on

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.

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

Get Ready to Rizz in the New Year

by Fran Johns

Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash

Should we be worried about Rizz? I’m afraid so.

As if there weren’t enough to worry about — climate disaster, endless wars, A.I., fragile democracies — along comes rizz.

Rizz is the newly-crowned Oxford Word of the Year, which is a Very Big Deal. I mean, it won out over three other finalists — Swiftie, prompt, and situationship. I could’ve dealt with prompt. Even though I’ve always tried to be prompt and am thus a little miffed about AI re-purposing a perfectly good word. (I could not have dealth with situationship, sorry.)

Rizz, though? Now that it’s THE word, I am considering how it and I can get along. Officially it means “style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner;” unofficially it means all of the above, or, in general, maybe, pizazz — although pizazz never got to be Word of the Year when it slid into the lexicon a century or so ago.

Photo by Juan Camilo Navia on Unsplash

Rizz. Apparently if you have it everybody knows. If you don’t have it, as I secretly fear may be my bottom-line situationship, what can you do? (Situationship, in case you’re over 30, is when the relationship you’re in is not quite a real relationship, or at least you’re not having sex with whomever or whatever else you’re relating to. It’s complicated.)

The Oxford people tell us that rizz is “believed to be a shortened form of the word ‘charisma’, taken from the middle part of the word.” Charisma, according to Wikipedia, “is a personal quality of presence or charm that others find compelling. Scholars in sociology, political science, psychology, and management reserve the term for a type of leadership seen as extraordinary.”

Fleetingly, now and then I might have had some charisma. I like to think I’ve been influential in a cause or two, if not identifiably charismatic. But even that wouldn’t help when it comes to rizzhood.

You can’t, in short, rizz your way into being rizz, even if the new Word of the Year is both a noun and a verb. Rizz, it seems, just iz.

May your new year overflow with ripples of rizz.

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

A Poem to Calm the Soul

by Fran Johns

WHEN WORRIES OVER TROUBLED TIMES WAKE YOU UP AT 3 AM

Photo by Dan Stark on Unsplash

“You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you . .” 

We wish.

Czeslaw Milosz’ “Awakened” is a poem about death, but it speaks also to life. Especially today, when there are enough things to worry about — globally, locally and in between — to make calming poetry a necessity at 3 AM and a respite tool any other time of day.

So I keep “Awakened” handy, whether awake or asleep or in between. If peace on earth seems an elusive possibility, maybe doing what’s assigned is enough for today.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

In advanced age, my health worsening, 

I woke up in the middle of the night 

and experienced a feeling of happiness 

so intense and perfect that in all my life 

I had only felt its premonition. 

And there was no reason for it. 

It didn’t obliterate consciousness; 

the past which I carried was there, 

together with my grief. 

And it was suddenly included, 

was a necessary part of the whole. 

As if a voice were repeating: 

“You can stop worrying now; 

everything happened just as it had to. 

You did what was assigned to you, 

and you are not required anymore 

to think of what happened long ago.” 

The peace I felt was a closing of accounts 

and was connected with the thought of death. 

The happiness on this side was 

like an announcement of the other side. 

I realized that this was an undeserved gift 

and I could not grasp by what grace 

it was bestowed on me.

 — Czeslaw Milosz

General interest/Optimism Collection
Posted on

What Your Tote Bags Say About You

by Fran Johns

Do you really, really need one more?

I recently, happily became a Friend of Medium, which comes with a limited edition tote bag. I’ve actually been a Medium friend for several years — it’s a great platform with interesting writers and readers — but now I’m a Friend, capital F. That is to say, I increased my membership fee.

It’s not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things. I like the fact that now I can send stories, via Friend Links, to non-member friends who have long grumbled from behind the impenetrable paywall, and Medium writer friends will benefit from my attention to their stories.

But I asked them to hold the tote bag.

Not that I don’t love tote bags!! Cloth bags, canvas bags, reusable paper bags. Grocery bags, destination wedding swag bags.

But I can’t throw them away. I have, by rough estimate, 572,364 of them. I think there is a law somehwere prohibiting the disposal of a reusable bag — even for people who don’t live in California.

Here’s the inescapable truth: your life is in your tote bag collection.

This may be why, other than fear of criminal indictment, you can’t throw them away.

Speaking of criminals. In a very long history of parking my car in sketchy areas of San Francisco, only one time did thieves break in. I know enough never to leave ANYthing in a parked car. But a canvas bag containing a few of my favorite canvas bags, just so as never to be without a bag? Who’d have thought. Sure enough, some evildoer smashed my back window and snatched my bag of bags. Hopefully they are still in circulation . . . somewhere.

When toting stuff around on miscellaneous errands my mind often drifts toward existential questions. Foremost among these is the speculation that today’s endless catastrophies often feel like the End Times.

But somehow, if the planet implodes or whatever weary planets do, I have a sense that our tote bags will survive — relics to be pondered over when some new civilization looks back on us eons hence.

Maybe I’d better get the Medium Friend Tote just in case.

1 2 3 … 7