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Why I carry my sketchbook and notebook with me. When our feet get tired and it’s time to sit and rest, I can write or draw, which makes the extra several ounces in my backpack very worthwhile. Yesterday, when the heat and elevation forced a rest, this nopal cactus across the street from the Santo Domingo church caught my eye.
I think I’ve probably adjusted to the elevation now. I used to dream of going to Macchu Pichu, but I don’t know if I could now. A jump from sea level to a mere 5,800 feet–Oaxaca’s elevation–takes me a couple of days. As with so many things, sufficient water and sleep help a lot.
Can you picture this?: A member of your family, or a dear friend, has been taken by ICE and locked in Alligator Auschwitz. Do you have someone specific in your mind? Okay.
You’re incredibly worried about them, of course. You get a lawyer, and you check the ICE database every day to see if there is any news of them.
Then, one day, they aren’t in the database. You check to see if you had a typo. No. They just aren’t there. You call your lawyer. The lawyer can’t get any more information than you can. This person you love has disappeared. Been Disappeared by the US government.
You are desperate for someone to help you–to do something–to force the administration to tell you where they are.
Now what happens? Either thousands, millions, of your fellow-citizens demand answers, pressuring their representatives and senators to demand hearings and ask the administration tough questions, keep shining a light into this dark corner of the country until whatever is hidden there becomes visible–
–or they don’t. There is no help. You and your beloved family member are left to suffer alone.
We’re not going to let that happen. We’re calling our members of Congress, now (or using the contact forms on their websites). We’re doing it again tomorrow, and again the day after that. We’re putting it on our to-do lists, and we won’t stop, because the life of someone’s father, sister, husband, best friend, child, grandson is at stake. And we know if one day it is our beloved who disappears, we will need the solidarity of our sibling-citizens to save them.
The Arts Praxis course I took last semester at the United Theological School of the Twin Cities culminated in a group show called Nexus and a gallery talk by all of the artists, some of whom made visual art and others of whom did music or theater. I kept checking for the video for a while, then got distracted by the rest of life, and just discovered that it has been up for a while. My part begins at 1:25:00, though I certainly recommend watching the whole thing to take in some beautiful work by other students. Our professor and the presiding genius of the Arts Praxis–and of the Theology and the Arts concentration–was Dr. Jennifer Awes-Freeman.
You cannot open more than one lateral file drawer at a time, of course. So I can’t take a picture of the three drawers of this four-drawer lateral file that are empty. But I’m sure you believe me.
In case I failed to post it here before, June 30 is my last day at UUCPA. I promised myself I’d have the lateral file, which was quite full, cleared out before leaving for our General Assembly (and the ministers’ conference that precedes it), which I do on Monday. The first three drawers took a couple of months, but I’m on a roll and confident that I’ll clear out the last one tomorrow. That will be awesome, even though the bummer of file cabinets is that the office looks the same whether they are full or empty. I don’t care. I will know they’re empty, and that a dreaded task got easier and easier until I was done with it.
I have accumulated a lot of paper in 22 years. I should plant several trees in compensation. Between meetings today, I took boxload after boxload to the recycling dumpster, feeling lighter each time. And I did a few rounds of distributing Stuff from my office to its former and future homes, such as the office-supplies cabinet in the main office, the kitchen, and the art-supplies shelves. Lighter! Lighter! By the way, no one at UUCPA need ever buy file folders, hanging files, index cards, three-ring binders, or paper clips again. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere need ever buy paper clips again, since I have never bought any and yet I never run short at either home or work, but that’s a mystery I don’t need to solve.
We’ll have lots of both members and guests at the service on Sunday, so my goal is to have the files cleared out and the office looking tidy by the end of tomorrow, Friday. (It was tidy before the last few whirlwind weeks of clearing stuff out. Things get so messy as they’re being reorganized.) I am dearly fond of my beautiful, orderly office–in the last several months, I’ve repeatedly thought of an old Onion headline, “Nine-month Fetus Finally Has Womb Just the Way He Likes It”–and I want it to look good, even if very few people pop in. A few will, for sure, because they are giving new homes to a bunch of my books, which are waiting for them in boxes and bags along one wall.
The desk is almost empty or, in the case of some supplies and files that our interim minister will need, neatly organized. The surface of the desk, though, not so much. So that’s tomorrow’s task, after drawer number four, and between some more key meetings.
I posted this on a social media site earlier today, but various important people such as my daughter don’t have access to it there. One of my most faithful readers and frequent commenters here was, alas, the person I’m writing about, and the fact that there will be no amusing or bemusing comment from him is another dull blow in my gut:
My father died yesterday morning at the age of 86. He had been declining sharply, and my sister E. and I were flying to Tucson this week–she is there now, I’m arriving tomorrow. But both of us too late to see him one more time.
I drift in a kind of numb disbelief, punctuated by waves of sadness. I know the feelings will keep coming and I’ll cry and laugh and write and draw about them.
Dad was funny, smart, curious, with a knack for defusing conflict with a bit of self-deprecating humor. He read voraciously and delved into whatever caught his interest, so that in recent years when we talked, he’d have something to tell me about his studies in ancient Greek or the paintings of Joan Mitchell. He really found his calling when he became an English professor, since he was a natural-born scholar and also a ham who loved to have the opportunity to hold forth on the stage of the classroom. He was very politically aware and liberal–not an activist except for the occasional bout of making phone calls for his Congresswoman, but he was proud that E. and I were. He was a poet, and later in life, took up abstract painting with abandon. He loved to travel, cook, and eat (“I love food,” he used to pronounce now and then).
Some of my sweetest memories of my father are gardening with him when I was very little, baking bread and learning how to shape the loaves, studying Pirkei Avot together when I was older and we were both devotedly Jewish, reading a book he had recommended or occasionally one he hadn’t (“Are you reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp AGAIN? The whole great world of literature all around you, and you’re reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp,” he said in mock-despair). Going to Mets games, especially one memorably cold Opening Day, when they made us just about cry by going into extra innings. “Do you want to stay?” he asked, clearly at least half-hoping I’d say no, but I said “We have to!” and he seemed pleased; fortunately, Gary Carter, in his first game as a Met, saved our freezing fingers and toes and became an instant hero by hitting a walk-off homer in the tenth. Traveling: to Israel for a whole summer when I was 12, to London and Paris when I was in high school, or just to someplace like the tiny Mohegan museum in Uncasville, an hour away from home. Countless plays–he did not actually know all of Shakespeare’s plays by heart, the way I thought he did (and matter-of-factly told friends) when I was little, but he loved the Bard, he loved theater, and he and Mom went to just about everything New Haven’s Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Yale Drama School had to offer, often bringing us along and requiring that if it was Shakespeare, we read the prose summary of the plot first so we’d know what was going on. The declaiming from Shakespeare at the dinner table, followed by a pop quiz: “What’s that from?” Eyerolling child: “I don’t know. Hamlet?” “Tsk. RICHARD THE SECOND!,” he’d say, clearly affronted that he had managed to raise children who were so ignorant, and overjoyed to have the excuse to jump up, grab the play off the shelf (he had two or three editions of the complete plays), and read us the whole passage. Day trips to Boston (Faneuil Hall, then a game at Fenway) and New York City (the Metropolitan or MOMA, then dinner at Tout Va Bien).
The grand adventure we shared at the start of the Blizzard of ’78, when he walked through the driving snow to get me at school and walk me home. His fiercely comforting me when I called to tell him that my ex-husband had died by suicide: “Now don’t you DARE blame yourself!” He and Joy’s dad, Marty, at our wedding, spontaneously rising at the end of our first dance so that Dad could dance with me and Marty with Joy. Holding Munchkin on his lap to read to her, and later, delighting in the poetry she wrote. His sitting in an armchair in the living room, reading, and occasionally saying “Listen to this” and reading something aloud to whoever was around. And the sound of his voice when he answered the phone–“Amy!”–as if nothing in the world could make him happier.
I love you, Dad. I’ll miss you forever.
A friend asked me this question about ten days ago. I said, “Hm, sounds like one for the column!” And here it is.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day has inspired me to look up art and music by indigenous people around the world. I don’t post photos of people’s work here because it makes it too easy for people to pick them up and disseminate them without credit, so please click the links to see them.
I knew nothing of Australian indigenous artists until I saw a museum show several years ago. Aboriginal art was having a moment (with that disturbing mix of overplaying and belated appreciation that we’ve seen so many times) and we were in Seattle during this exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. They were so, so beautiful, and taught me a lot as an artist: about assymmetry, for example. You can see a lot of the art via that link, though seeing them on a screen doesn’t do them justice. Until you get a chance to see an exhibit, here are a couple others I’ve found on the great gallery of the internet that I really love.
Untitled, Lily Kngwarrey Sandover
As a ceramic artist, I’m always blown away by the sheer technical brilliance of the pottery of Pueblo peoples. But of course it’s not just impressive in a “how do they DO that?” way, but expressively. From an exhibit this summer at the Metropolitan Museum, Grounded in Clay:
Jar, Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo
I was lucky to go to a college that had a strong ethnomusicology specialization, so I went to a lot of West African dance and music performances then, but I haven’t sought them out. Why haven’t I? Check out this gorgeous music from Beninois, Yoruba musician Taofique:
I’ve heard a lot of Lila Downs, who is one of Oaxaca’s most famous musicians, but I’ve never heard her specifically Zapotec music. She’s released other versions of this song under its Spanish name, “Flor Menudito,” but she has been recognizing how she was once ashamed of being Zapotec, and is now reclaiming that heritage and giving it its due. This is stunning:
Coming across the Gond people and their art was one of those many, many moments of realizing how limited my education has been. Not that we can learn about every indigenous group on the planet, or even come across their names–there are so many. But just to know that there is a whole world out there that I don’t know is a big shift. Like when I learned that we have probably only identified 10% of the world’s animal species. Except in this case, I was so unaware of the vast variety of indigenous peoples because those outside the U.S. were so seldom mentioned in any of my schooling (and those inside the U.S. were mostly written about in the past tense. They’re still here!).
My fall-in-love moment with Gond art was seeing the fish-shaped eye on the painting about prayers to Dharti Mata (Mother Earth) on this site. An eye! But it’s a fish! A fish! But it’s a person’s eye!
Thanks to friends of our family who owned a house near the Headlands in Rockport, Massachusetts, I got to visit this lovely town once when I was a child. All I remember from that visit is a house with circular rooms, the quality of the light in the house, and a feeling of complete delight.
When we got the chance to visit Rockport this month, I knew I had to find that house. It turned out to be easy to find online: my mother confirmed my memory of its being round, so I put “round house Rockport” into a search engine and was immediately taken to a vintage photo of the studio of Harrison Cady, who was a well-known illustrator in his day. I hadn’t remembered that it was once his house, or that he had lived in Rockport, but I knew he was related to our friends, so there you have it: that’s how they came to have a house here. Joy and I walked up to it on my first day here.
It’s right on the water:
The view from the place we’re staying is no slouch either:
From the Harrison Cady house, we went on to the Headlands, which looks out across the harbor and out to the Atlantic, which is located where an ocean ought to be. I’m sort of joking, since after 20 years living a few miles from the Pacific, I’ve stopped thinking of it as being on the wrong side, but it still feels more natural to have the water “on my right” as I face north.
Another difference between here and California is how much longer Europeans have been here in New England. You don’t see buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries in California.
This house was constructed more recently. In the period when our daughter had tiny imaginary friends everywhere, she would have loved it.
Also on my first day, we walked around the corner to the Unitarian Universalist Society. I didn’t expect it to be open on a weekday morning, but when I tried the front doors anyway, a man waiting in a car called out that he was a member, and could he help us? That question is used so often to mean “What do you think you’re doing?” that it’s hard to convey that he really meant it, but he really meant it. He and his wife had stopped by to take care of a couple of things, so they immediately gave us a tour. In the lovely, sun-drenched sanctuary, we discovered that, like UUCPA, they have a chalice shaped like a tree. Isn’t it striking? I like the nest for the flame.
They have beautiful rooms upstairs too, especially the tiny room for the tiniest children, with its windows on three sides giving views onto the ocean and town. We also got to see their solar panels, installed just last summer. Sadly, I am fitting this vacation in between Sundays, so I can’t attend a service. But it was great to meet a few UUs, who were as warm and friendly as could be.
This is as close to totality as we got in San Francisco. But at least the sky was unclouded. The “big sun” must be some kind of glare effect.
Listening to scientists describe totality, I want to see one before I die. Maybe I’ll go to Alaska in 2033, take in Denali and the Northern Lights while I’m at it. In the meantime, I’m watching it on NASA’s livestream right now.
I have a gym membership, but a few times recently, I’ve put together a home, calisthenics (bodyweight only, no weights) workout in order to keep up with my schedule while traveling. I liked it pretty well, so I thought maybe I would switch to these workouts entirely. It would certainly save me a lot of money. My main concern was whether they would be rigorous enough, being that we have no equipment except a couple of five-pound weights. Bodyweight is all very well, but eventually it may get too easy, and then I won’t have weights on hand to add difficulty.
I can now rest easy on that point. I did some research, created a four- or five-exercise regimen for a pull day, and started in on it. I completed one of the exercises this afternoon, a superman, and have been knocked absolutely flat ever since. Whoof. Lying in bed, aching all over, and now going to take a couple of ibuprofen and a nice soak. It’s possible that I’ll eventually get so fit that I’ll need to get some equipment, but that time is clearly a long way off.
Sermons in Stones 
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