Some memories, an explanation, a few things I've been thinking about, and more photos than usual
but no footnotes
When I was a child, my mother’s friends were magical beings, whether they were deeply embedded in my life or legends I occasionally glimpsed.
L had been best friends with my mother since they were six, and she was nearly as central to my life as my own parents, to whom she and her husband were both antithesis and complement. My parents were respectable professors with a house and Volvo. L was a writer and her husband was an artist. When I was small, they lived in a basement apartment on the Lower East Side (remember, I was small in the 60s). Then they moved to a ramshackle house in the country with a tumbledown barn where we loved to play. We were at their house or they were at ours nearly every weekend, our families vacationed together every summer of my childhood, and L held me down in every dimension, starting with her incredible collection of chapter books where I first encountered Judy Blume.
Though we occasionally spent time with PD’s family, mostly she and my mother had lunch every week at the Blue Parrot, which I thought was the most glamorous, grown-up thing you could possibly do.
ES was a hoot, ready for a game or adventure whenever she appeared.
ED was as important as L, but she lived in Switzerland from whence she appeared once or twice a year with chocolate truffles that looked like rocks and tasted divine, long before truffles were a thing - and then a multi-flavored ubiquity - in America. She stayed at our house, made us poached eggs, and let us brush her hair; her visits were heaven.
My mother is amazing at friendship, and her friends and their families became ours and still are. L’s daughter was my bridesmaid, and my older daughter was her flower girl. PD still writes me beautiful handwritten notes. My mother, ES, and I went to the October No Kings protest. My daughter takes ED to Red Sox games.
PK was a vaguer presence in my life. She and ES and my mother were friends and worked together. If I stretch back into my memories, I think she played tennis with my parents, but maybe only once. I’m pretty sure we visited her on the Cape, but maybe only once.
But another thing my mother is good at is keeping us all up to date on each other, so as years and decades passed, I generally knew what PK was up to. When we moved back to Boston and picked up my family’s Hanukkah party - with the addition of my husband’s family, along with a host of grandchildren - PK somehow got added to the list, and every year she gave everyone a Burdick’s mouse
Fast forward to this year, when PK started dying of the lung disease that had plagued her for years. She was mostly confined to her room in her excellent assisted living place. She was on 24-hour oxygen. And she was a little bored. So I started occasionally joining my mother on her regular visits.
Even as she shrank and coughed and whispered away, PK was a hoot. We talked politics, sports, and books. One day she was watching the rodeo when we arrived, so we talked rodeos. Another day, or it might have been the same day, we chose poems for her poetry group. I can’t even remember all the other things we talked about, but there is nothing like having a great time with someone who is dying. I mean, we are all dying, as the enlightened among us are better at remembering, but PK was dying soon, and she was still using all the energy she had to live.
I was supposed to join my mother again on her next visit, but PK died Sunday night. You know when someone is supposed to die - it was supposedly a matter of weeks back in the spring when she started dying - and then they don’t, and then when they do, it is utterly shocking? That’s how it was yesterday when we heard.
But what I really want to talk about is how I had completely forgotten that I owe an enormous chunk of my career to PK! Which is crazy - not that it happened, but that I had forgotten, or perhaps never fully thought it through.
I actually tell the story all the time: when I decided to leave academia, I did a lot of discerning and networking, ended up with three good job offers, and accepted the wrong one. Like, catastrophically so, to the point that four months in, my husband put his foot down and said I had to quit. When I wailed “BUT WHAT ABOUT OUR HEALTH INSURANCE?” he said, “we’ll manage” (which is one of many reasons we are still married after 33 years).
So I quit the job and started looking again. Which is when PK called me. Her husband was very ill, so she was quitting her job and she asked me if I wanted it. I very much wanted a job, but her job was creating a high school teacher education program at a local university, and I didn’t see how I could possibly do that, my only experience with high school being supervising a handful of student teachers when I was a professor. But PK didn’t care, and though I professed my unfitness for the position all the way up the interview ladder to the dean, they hired me.
It turned out I could do the job, though 18 months later they hired someone else for the permanent position of running the program PK and I created. That was actually a blessing in disguise, for I really didn’t want to be a professor, but in those 18 months, I had fallen in love with high schools, built a relationship with the next place I worked, and met many of the people who have facilitated the last 20 years of my professional life. In fact, I met the principal of the school where I do about half my work these days in that job. And it’s all because of PK. As is the fact that if you ever come to our Hanukkah party, you will get a Burdick’s mouse.
You might have noticed that I haven’t written for a while. Or maybe you didn’t. Only one person has mentioned it and that was only this week (this one’s for you, Kristin).
Here’s what happened: I was trying to write a post about my life with liars (I have had three significant ones, each of whom changed me as a person…which means presumably liars are changing us as a people), but I ran out of steam, largely because what is there to say about lying in a world where Israel continues to bomb Gaza, refuses to open the Rafah Crossing, is not letting in the agreed-upon humanitarian aid, and insists that Hamas is threatening the ceasefire? Then I tried to write a post about exceptionalism, which I do not believe in despite being a Jew (Chosen People) and an American (City on a Hill, etc. ad infinitum), which is why I’m upset but not shocked and horrified by our slide toward authoritarianism, but I ran out of steam because what difference does it make?
By then, I hadn’t written in a couple of weeks and it was actually a bit of a relief. Writing weekly was a lot of work, and while I don’t regret any of those posts, I appear to have run out of steam for generating new ones on the regular, at least for the moment.
However, I still have opinions! And here are some things I have had opinions about lately:
One Battle After Another: Loved it when I saw it, then read this excellent essay by Brook Obie about its depiction of Black women and felt like a stupid white woman, then read this excellent (and unfortunately paywalled, at least for me now, but it wasn’t before so maybe it won’t be for you) essay by Mary H.K. Choi about how it’s both fucked up and great, and then felt better. Seriously, though, this movie is exciting, inspiring, brilliantly acted (I texted my daughter: “I forgive Leo every single 25 year old”), problematic (as am I), and such fun to watch. Also, along with all its other tropes, it does fine horror movie work with the final girl (thank you, Carol Clover) and the return, neither of which I have seen anyone write about. Then again, I haven’t read most of the enormous pile of things that have been written about it.
I Who Have Never Known Men: This It Book came up enough times that I finally read it, and it was…fine. What I wonder, with all love, is if the young women who are going mad for it have read any other feminist-post-apocalyptic-isolation novels, in particular The Wall, which has a similar all-the-people-mysteriously-disappear-and-a-woman-must-Robinson-Crusoe-her-world-and-of-course-tell-her-story vibe, but which I loved. I don’t think that’s just because I read it first. The Wall has both a more vivid world and a protagonist who is at once more compelling and more repellent, which I suppose is a way of saying a more interesting protagonist, at least to me. Then again, I Who Have Never Known Men, as its title suggests, is more preoccupied with gender, which may be why the literary girlies are drawn to it.
Say Everything: Ione Skye’s memoir hits one of my favorite sweet spots: LA, movies, and rock and roll. I mean, Eve Babitz was her childhood next door neighbor! The Zappa kids were her BFFs! Early Keanu! More than we need to know about Anthony Kiedis! Daddy issues! Super fun, and then I went to her Instagram and she seems kind of unbearable, so I left her Instagram but still recommend the book IF it seems like your kind of thing.
Daisy Jones and the Six: Speaking of LA and rock and roll, I read Daisy Jones again (maybe the fourth time?), and it still delivers. I don’t want you to read Daisy Jones again - and if you haven’t read it by now, you’re probably good - but I do hope you have a book you can read over and over, keep loving, and keep finding new things in (my other one is Jane Eyre, because I contain multitudes).
Thomas Cole National Historic Site: We had to get out of Dodge, so we went to the Hudson Valley because I wanted to see Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora, and Contemporary Responses (which you have five days left to see) because it features one of my favorite contemporary artists, Francesca DiMattio. The exhibit was fantastic, but it was also great to immerse ourselves in Thomas Cole (founder of the Hudson River School) and especially to read some of his writing, where he waxed apocalyptic about environmental degradation and contemporary (1830s) politics, which I found reassuring. I know right now is terrible in its own special way, especially with regard to our slide toward authoritarianism and of course climate change, but I still find it helpful to be reminded that other eras have felt just as terrible to their denizens…and still they persisted.
Opus 40: While we were in the Hudson Valley, we also went to Opus 40, which is an enormous sculptural installation that Bard professor Harvey Fite spent nearly 40 years single-handedly creating in an abandoned quarry before he had a tractor accident, fell into the quarry, and died. The place is as sublime as its origins, and is now one of my favorite places in the world. I only wish I could spend a full 24 hours there, including sleeping out on the rocks. But I don’t think that’s allowed.
Because we still deserve nice things…
This story, which was next to something Thomas Cole-related in this 1840 newspaper, makes me laugh every time I read it.
Can’t promise I’ll write every Thursday going forward, but I will write when I have something to say.
I read the same book every April since 2016, called Shockproof Sydney Skate by Marijane Meaker. Have you heard of it? I still find new things every time, but mostly now it is just a comforting turn-of-the-seasons read. For the first several years I don't think I understood it at all but now I feel like I do.
However often you write, it's always a joy to find your words in my inbox. I know I'll always find a little wisdom, elegantly expressed. Thanks for making this dreadful moment a little less so.