You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘friends’ category.
Black History Month, day 7
Darn. I am too tired to write a proper post. I want to give this wonderful artist his due, so I’ll just post a teaser for now and write more about him in tomorrow’s post.
I love this photo for three reasons. It pulls back far enough to convey how fluid and soft Anatsui’s sculptures appear (they are in fact made of thousands of tiny bits of scrap such as bottle caps). It shows the scale of the piece. And–oh, my heart–it is a portrait of our late, beloved friend Bean.
(Thanks to Gilad Kfir for taking this gorgeous photo of them, and his kind permission to use it here.)
(c) Gilad Kfir, http://www.giladphoto.com
I have written very little here about the things we’re doing in Oaxaca. In between art, Spanish, and writing projects, there’s lots of time to just be and enjoy this city. I’m going back through our months here to fill in some of the stuff we’ve done.
Only a few weeks after our arrival, we had the terrific experience of getting together with someone we know very well from home. J. is a member of our church, has traveled here with her family before, and if I recall correctly has had a teenager from Oaxaca come stay with her and her family in Palo Alto. In June, she came to Oaxaca on her own and lived with a family here awhile. We asked her for recommendations of places to go that she’d like to see again, and she suggested we meet at the Museum of Philately (MUFI). I’m really glad she did, because I probably would have delayed going there for months, maybe skipped it entirely. I mean, philately? But it’s a lovely museum. The building itself is a treat–like so many buildings in Oaxaca, it’s built around patios and courtyards–and the exhibits were interesting. For example, in connection with the release of a stamp about corn, the museum invited artists to submit pieces about Mexico and corn. Most took the form of a stamp (not actual size, but a good 30 x 60 cm or more, the way the designers of stamps draw their originals) and the themes ranged from transgenic corn, which is an economic and environmental controversy in Mexico, to the corn-husk dolls that are common folk art here.
Then we all went to Café Brújula, also at J’s recommendation, where I drank her hot chocolate and she drank my mocha for quite some time before we realized we’d swapped. I hope the caffeine didn’t keep her up all night. The café is in an indoor shopping center and office building that had an absolutely spectacular arrangement overhead of papel picado, cut paper, for the upcoming Guelaguetza.
photo by Joy Morgenstern
Spending the day with J. was really special. When I arrived at UUCPA she was three years old; I’ve watched her grow up and into roles like Sunday School teacher and Worship Associate, and to see her negotiating another culture, be shown around by her, and just chat together outside from the context of church and family is like being on a time machine and watching the years whiz by. She’s such an intelligent and independent person–it’s a treat to hang out with her for a while.
And of course, she’s known Mookie since Mookie was a bump in my belly. When I have a long Sunday at church, Mookie often goes over to their house–I call it babysitting and pay J. and her sister, but as far as Mookie’s concerned it’s a playdate at the house with the best climbing tree in the world–and there has never been a time that J. and her family haven’t been in her life. Here the two of them are in the museum courtyard, surrounded by illustrations from children’s books (I never did figure out the stamp connection), and looking uncharacteristically serious.
photo by Joy Morgenstern
My friend is dying. He has been a member of my congregation, a colleague, a brother-peacenik in a local peace and justice organization, and a spiritual mentor. Now his end is very close, and his wife says they aren’t up for any visits or phone calls, and they don’t need any dinners, but they really want cards and cookies. I will never have another conversation with him, much less what I want even more, to lay my hands on his head and make the cancer vanish. All I can do is bake cookies. They’re almost done.
My friend Jessica Nathanson’s memorial service is being held today, in Minneapolis, at the college where she taught Women’s Studies and ran the Women’s Resource Center. I wish I could be there. It might help me realize that she is gone. It might give me a chance to tell her family how much she will stay with others of us, even distant friends like me.
Jessica and I were fairly close in college, but only irregularly in touch since then. The last time I saw her in person may have been her wedding, over 15 years ago, and I have never met her son, just admired the photos. A few years ago she got breast cancer, and treated it, we thought successfully. It came roaring back, and swept her away on April 5.
What I am remembering about Jess right now: hanging out in our first-year dorm, where we were hallmates. Visiting her in Schenectady in the middle of the long, difficult summer after that year, when I was a counselor at a camp for kids with learning disabilities, and she and her parents rescued me for a weekend at their home. Observing her explorations of paganism and evangelical Christianity with bemusement, but empathy–after all, I was feeling my way towards my adult identity too. Singing with her often during our junior and senior years, Jess on the guitar and teaching me folk songs and others I’d never heard. (When I logged onto my blog this morning, I saw a trackback called “Drops of water turn a mill, singly none,” and remembered with a pang that it was Jess who introduced me to that beautiful anthem. Several years afterwards, I became a UU, found that it was in my new religion’s new hymnal, and felt that I’d come home.) Reconnecting with her when she was a new mom and I was painfully childless, lifted just the same by her joy in her baby boy. Discovering what she had made of her curiosity, sharp intelligence and honesty: a career as a scholarly but down-to-earth feminist, politically sharp and vocal, with a passionate insistence on making room in her and other white feminists’ awareness for the experiences of women of color. Reading her blog, which was courageous and well-written, funny and scrupulously fair.
She was 42, and her son is about 10, and what is hitting me hardest about her death is the thought of his enduring this grief. My daughter’s birth made me feel very strongly that my dying was not an option. The world turns and catches us in the turning, though, without regard to such concerns. I hope Jess and her family reached whatever peace it is possible to reach with the knowledge that she was dying, leaving them, leaving her life far too soon. When we were sitting on her dorm room bed singing those songs, thinking our lives were just beginning, hers had reached its halfway point. I’m glad that she filled those next 21 years with such good work, with so much love.
Jess once wrote vividly about the tenuousness of life and how strange it is to be on the edge of a sorrow, able to go about one’s life while others not far away are enduring inescapable grief. I am feeling that strange mix of loss, fear, guilt, and temporary relief now. As one day, others will feel it upon my death, and perhaps read this and think, “And now she is gone and I remain, until death’s sweep comes closer and brushes me.”
I’m in New Orleans this week, at the other end of a long river from Jessica’s home and the chapel where others will remember her aloud in a few hours. I’ll be looking north this morning, giving thanks for her life, and thinking about what her family, her friends, and the world have lost.
Sermons in Stones 
Recent comments