Breaking and Entering

Birthdays are like party crashers. They show up in your life uninvited and start making demands. More drinks, more cake, more attention. New shoes with your $5 off birthday coupon from Famous Footwear. Sometimes, you just have to invite them in and pretend you know them.

The other day, in an attempt to make friends with my 72nd birthday, I decided to treat myself to a half day at Kripalu, the yoga center. They were hosting TEDxBerkshires 2017, a program of TED talks by local luminaries accompanied by the usual gourmet vegan lunch offerings, yoga classes and meditation. I am by nature an underdeveloped consumer and almost never buy myself anything. This may be an area of self-improvement I'll want to focus on going forward. Maybe I'll make it part of my spiritual practice to indulge in some unusual self-gifting in every remaining year on or around the 2nd of August. In any case, I was terribly pleased with myself for whipping out my VISA card to make this purchase. Entering my card number filled me with a great sense of reckless abandon. So much so that I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of almonds to further feed myself. I bit down on a hard, resistant nut and immediately cracked off substantial chunks of tooth and old filling, crumbling teeth being an inadequately acknowledged aspect of aging. What are we to learn from this episode? Nuts can be bad for your teeth? Impulse buying is a sign of poor character and must be punished? The jury is out.

About four days before the Kripalu incident, I was sitting in my meditation sangha, experiencing a particular serenity. Outside the building, it was high summer in the Berkshires. Not wall-to-wall-traffic-in-Great Barrington high summer, but the lilies-blooming-and-bullfrogs-croaking kind. Inside, seven or eight people I don't know well, but feel connected to in a way I can't explain, were practicing in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Order of Interbeing. After the sit, there was walking meditation and dharma sharing. At the end of the 90 minute gathering, I went out to the parking lot in the late afternoon mid-July sunshine, got behind the wheel and backed into someone else's car. As I am in thrall to the need to uncover meaning in events, my first thought was - you better watch where you're going. My second thought was - I'm probably not as serene as I think.

Glimpses of serenity appear like weekend getaways from a pervasive underlying grind of vulnerability. No matter how many planks and bridges I execute on the gym floor, I am fragile. I am open to criminal mischief. I am human and I can be hurt. I am mortal. I will not always be here with my narrow shoulders and wide hips the way I am now. The reality is I have almost no control over anything. I can be more careful in parking lots, but sooner or later there will be damage, maybe even blood. Considered in this light, these petty larcenies are God's way of breaking and entering me, barking at me until I recognize what I am determined to resist. Nothing is forever. Serenity would be advised to learn to tolerate its noisy downstairs neighbor vulnerability.

Once, when I was 40ish, I was sitting in a restaurant in West Stockbridge with a group of friends, eating and drinking, partying in that moony, indifferent way we used to party. The table was set with burning candles. In those days, I had an unruly head of frizzy hair, my unkempt curls extending in all directions. When I leaned forward, the better to share the vodka-marinated moment with my friends, my hair caught on fire. But because the split ends were so far away from my scalp, I didn't feel the heat. I wasn't aware that I was seconds from immolation, from going up in flames like yesterday's papers, until my friend, Jimmy, himself dead only a few years later, threw his jacket over my head and extinguished the fire. I guess you could say that was a wake-up call. Now, I'm wondering, what was the common parlance for this light bulb effect before hotels offered wake-up calls and do we need a new word now that we are all responsible for our own getting woke?


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry, prose, photography and other work by wonderful older artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue. 

Common Sense About the Common Good

There are still some people in public life who believe in the common good, however antiquated that may sound. In spite of the libertarian, market-intoxicated invisible hand that keeps clutching the holy grail of individual rights, some people see a bigger, more nuanced picture. They're out there with legislative and regulatory graders, trying to level the field so that everyone can play. These people are accused of the sin of supporting income redistribution. They come under blistering fire for harboring gasp socialist sympathies. I call them public servants. A few such women and men remain in Washington, despite the irresistible pull of greed that motivates most of their colleagues to get out of bed in the morning. Public servants sustain a vision that struggles to calibrate the rights of individuals against the well-being of the whole. It's like marriage or parenting on a grand scale. How do I get my needs met while paying attention to your needs? Elizabeth Warren brings that vision to the Senate.

Warren cleans up good. I first saw her in 2011 at the Itam lodge in Pittsfield when she was running for office. She was smart, but seriously wonky, in keeping with her career as a Harvard professor with the snoozy specialty of bankruptcy law. She stood behind a lectern in a dark outfit and delivered a well-crafted speech on the decline and fall of the American middle class. Fast forward to earlier this month when I heard her again at a Town Hall at Berkshire Community College. Elizabeth, in an orange silk jacket that seemed to illustrate the fire she was radiating, bobbed and weaved around the stage like a featherweight prizefighter, quick, on target and lethal. At 68, she is on the brink of seventysomething and she is not taking no for an answer. Not when it comes to healthcare, student debt or any other aspect of public education currently presided over by her nemesis, Betsy De Vos. Warren has even launched a website called De Vos Watch to keep us focused and informed about the rightwing seizure of our schools and the threat to opportunities to our grandchildren. She is unapologetic in her recognition that a society that refuses to educate its children or provide healthcare for its sick, its disabled, is a society that is already writing its own eulogy.

It's a big step for me to attach to Elizabeth Warren. Much easier to identify with outsiders. The women I've most admired throughout my life have been rebels, noisemakers, people who thumbed their noses at convention. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley, who immersed themselves in political activism even as they wrote luminous and idiosyncratic poetry and prose. My Aunt Julie, who never married, had a string of lovers when that sort of thing was frowned upon, and carried her prized possessions around in a duffle-sized handbag. These were messy women, maybe even nasty, certainly not camera-ready.

Sitting in the stands yelling at the umpire, generally raising hell, is sometimes easier than occupying a seat at the table where you have to show up every day and do whatever you can to actually solve problems. In the past five years, Warren has settled into her seat and made it her business to read the weaponized fine print that those in power use to squeeze the lifeblood out of everyone else. The minutia of consumer protection, student debt, financial services reform, and now, healthcare. Through it all, she talks about the social contract, the unwritten law that constitutes the foundation of our commitment to the common good and the irrefutable evidence that the foundation is cracking.

The social contract is frayed, she says, without sugar-coating it. If we don't see ourselves in the anguished expression of the overworked single mother next door, we are not seeing either one of us. We cannot continue to drive over the same structurally compromised bridge and expect it to last forever, or collapse under the other guy's car. If we do not even believe in the common good and do not care to contribute to it, then it's a given that the air will become more toxic for everyone, the water will become less potable for everyone. More people will suffer from poor health and be less able to afford medical care. More children will grow to adulthood without the most rudimentary skills that are needed to survive in 21st century America. Hearing Elizabeth Warren speak earlier this month reassured me that belief in the common good is an ailing, but not yet endangered species. We must protect it as if our lives depended on it.


seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page. 

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.

You Belong to Me

I have a cousin in New Jersey who is 83. He and his wife meet us for lunch in Rhinebeck once a year. Because of the age difference, my cousin went off to college when I was only seven, so I barely knew him growing up. But now, I look at him over the chicken salad and I see my mother's nephew. When it's time to say goodbye and drive home, I'm bereft. It's like losing my mother again and again.

You belong to me, I think, watching him walk to his car, and I belong to you. This yearning to connect has always been with me, lurking in the background, often unnoticed. I hardly know it's there. It was the thin air I struggled to breathe growing up on the fourteenth floor of the apartment building on 83rd street with all of the other strangers in all of the boxes stacked high off the asphalt. No neighborhood children in the yard asked me to come out to play. No paper boy tossed the funnies onto the porch steps. When the front door slammed shut on 14E, the separation was complete. It was cozy in winter when the sleet drummed against the windows and the sun went down at 4:30. But in summer, you could see people through the gauzy curtains, out on the street far below, in the lingering daylight savings twilight. You could see them strolling by eating ice cream cones and you wondered...why are they so far away, so untouchable?

It could be that the flavor of this childhood, coming-of-age in Manhattan cooped up and sorted like an advertising flier into a post office mail slot, informed my resistance to joining. On one side of the scale, the breathless desire for belonging; on the other, the fear of it. Fear of membership, of the expectations of community, of choosing an identity that somehow excluded other identities. What would it mean to be unconditionally a Jew, a woman, those weighty nouns? I have crouched low in the trenches of that battleground for almost 72 years, but now I see a new story cresting the hill, a detente between desire and fear. The new story arises out of the discovery that communities are constantly in motion, more like verbs than nouns, while the nouns themselves are mercurial, gender identities unfolding on a spectrum, spiritual traditions freely borrowing from one another.

Communities merge and diverge like the reflecting surfaces of a kaleidoscope, each of us belonging to a great many shifting configurations. Just think of the temporal and spatial axes for starters. We belong to our families, from the mothers who cut our toenails and painfully combed the knots out of our hair, all the way back to someone foraging for mushrooms in the steppe. We carry the backpack of their genetic material wherever we go. My cousin is part of that baggage of blessing. Our stories interpenetrate their stories in the white spaces between the lines of text the way every line of Torah resonates with all the interpretations of all the readers across the millennia. This awareness of belonging to the line of kinship, passing the inheritance along from generation to generation for better or for worse, is a familiar understanding, a sometimes deep, sometimes maudlin acknowledgment of origins.

My belonging to all the world in the present instant is a more recent, a more radical discovery. It turns out that the skin on my belly is a membrane somewhat arbitrarily separating what I have already known or digested from everyone and everything out there that I could come to know. Costa Ricans, horses, the sky and the surf in varying shades of blue. With so many possibilities, belonging is not an imprisonment, an irrevocable condition. Belonging is an ongoing series of decisions to cultivate curiosity and trust, a recurring dream. Children know this. Once, I walked the length of a porch with my granddaughter when she was, maybe, 18 months. At the end, we came to a big step that led to the yard. Without a word, she held out her tiny hand for help. We took the big step together just as I take the big step with my cousin every year, drawing him close then letting him go. The communities that I belong to are affiliations of the heart. The people I make art with, the people I meditate with, the people I break bread with, the food I eat and the people who harvest it. I belong to you and you belong to me.
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I posted this link to an article in Orion Magazine on the seventysomething Facebook page...but in case you didn't see it, please read.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/

seventysomething now has its own Facebook page. I will be posting the blog there as well as poetry and other work by wonderful artists. Please Like the new page.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, Facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.