My Gritty Grandmother's Rooming House

My grandmother by adoption, Signe, immigrated to New Britain CT from Sweden when she was 18 years old in 1916.

She came to help her sister care for her twin girls -- Eva and Valborg. Her sister passed away, and Signe pretty much raised the girls.

She married a fellow Swedish immigrant, Axel Hjalmer, in 1923 and immediately had my dad, Evert Hjalmer, who followed his dad's footsteps and became a machinist. They lived in industrial New Britain, home of Stanley Tools/Works. Machinists were in high demand

They lived in the same area of New Britain their entire lives, all around Walnut Hill Park and the hospital: Hawkins Street, Arch Street, and finally the house in these photos on Prospect St.

Axel died in 1951. My grandmother supported herself by taking in laundry (she had a wringer washer in the basement) and renting rooms to her Swedish "old men." She herself lived in three rooms on the first floor of this house, sharing her kitchen and bath with the two downstairs roomers (I hated them despite their separate entrances). The three upstairs roomers had their own apartments. She lived independently there until one day when she was 85 she sat down on the end of her couch, had a heart attack, and died on my 22nd birthday.

I loved her dearly. She took me to Sweden with her for a month when I was 13, where I met her sister and brother and cousins.

I've visited her former home twice in the last decade. On my first visit, in 2016, the house as shown here in dark brown with the tree out front still looked much the same as it had while I was growing up.

But this last week when I visited much had changed. At first I thought the house had been torn down, as a new parking lot gapes right next to it where once other houses stood. But it is still there: It has been re-sided and the tree torn down, the tiny front yard paved for parking. Throughout my 60+ years this was always a run-down neighborhood and, unlike many parts of New Britain that have gentrified, it is maintaining and perhaps deepening its scruffy character!

This house meant so much to my grandmother, to her gritty life sustaining herself as a single mother and woman and immigrant. I love that she maintained her pride as a woman home owner by running it as a rooming house, and wish it seemed to be a bit better loved these days. But I am glad it remains.

#changeistheonlyconstant

#loveyourancestors

Finding New Havens for MLK Day 2025

We once understood the word "haven" to mean harbor, or port.

A safe haven. A new haven. A port in the storm.

We've navigated through our share of storms recently, both personally and as communities and as a nation. Storms on every level.

My spouse's recent and unexpected brain surgery, from which she is recovering super well. 

The loss of young people in addition to old in our small, rural community.

The return of our nation to a man who embodies selfish, abusive male values antithetical to the well-being and equity of all people, contradicting our own.

Aren't we always looking for havens? And finding them where we least expect them?

This new year of 2025, our new haven has been literally New Haven, CT, on Quinnipiac land, and Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Since we landed here rather than on our intended vacations, and as someone who grew up 25-50 miles down the coast from here, I've been repeating the joke that I never in my life dreamed of vacationing in New Haven!

Growing up during the 1960's and 1970's on Connecticut's eastern Long Island shore, New Haven was never a place one thought to visit.

All U.S. cities were in decline during this period due to "white flight:" the mass exodus of middle class residents from cities thanks to deindustrialization; poor urban planning including the redlining of neighborhoods and lack of investment; and the continued centering of the car in the heart of American suburbanization, which had begun in the 1940's. 

By 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. The gritty, small Connecticut cities to its east, including New Haven, were not in much better shape. The redlining was particularly fierce in New Haven. And in 1970, New Haven played host to a series of prosecutions against the Black Panther Party, and related protests, cementing its infamy.

Yet founded in 1638, New Haven was one of the nation's first planned cities in addition to being one of its first settled colonies.

Like so many colonialist communities, it was established as a theocracy. It's centerpiece, Yale University, was established with funding from the former colonial governor of Madras, with funds from the East India Company.

The city became a hub of industrialization thanks to Eli Whitney, who founded not only the cotton gin but also Connecticut's formidable gun manufacturing economy, earning the state one of its first unfortunate nicknames as "The Arsenal of America." Much of Connecticut's considerable wealth, especially in comparison with other New England states, remains based in the military-industrial complex. New Haven is an archetype of American colonialism.

And a place in no way viewed by my parents as a "haven" for their prowling teenager, who nonetheless escaped westward on I-95 for concerts at Toad's Place and New Haven's famous thin crust apizza. The crime. The deterioration. The immigrants newer than themselves, speaking languages not their own.

How odd, then, to unintentionally return here 50 years later.

How odd indeed the way landscape works its way into our bodies early on, becoming a part of our cells and memories in ways I would not have thought possible.

I left this landscape permanently, after a previous departure, in 1982. Yet the gentle, salt marsh strewn coast criss-crossed by railroad tracks and marinas; the mighty sweep of the lower Connecticut River running through the deciduous hardwood forests; and the familiar suburban pathways and landmarks of my ancestors -- Killingworth, New Britain, Middletown, Deep River, Chester, Old Saybrook -- are etched into my fiber.

And at last, against all odds, New Haven has truly become a "new haven" for us.

And So This is Christmas...

One of my favorite, and absolute, truisms is that the human brain requires a minimum of seven times of hearing / seeing / learning something before we really hear or understand or incorporate it.

A priest I admire and follow recently said that the reason we celebrate Christmas is because we need this annual reminder of the hope for who we can and might best be as humans: loving, peaceful, generous, forgiving children.

Because that is really the story of this night, isn't it? That god is born into each of us, that we can incarnate god in how we choose to be.

Perhaps then it is little wonder that we have buried this simple message -- as clear as a bright star drawing us toward it in the sharp cold of a winter sky -- with so many layers of stuff that it is almost completely obscured to many.

We really do have choices in the face of both the hardships and luxuries we encounter.

The Christmas story, and the Advent readings leading up to it, are just one religion's way to remind us that humans are not a priori violent, greedy, self-centered and vengeful even if those traits are the ones we seem to idolize in those we elect as leaders.

These stories exist in every culture and every religion.

And still they are not enough to keep us from putting the false idols of wealth and power first.

They are not enough to keep us from failing to forgive each other and instead seeking vengeance, hurling not only words and rocks but also policies and missiles.

The proof that we are flawed beings is everywhere. We all experience how difficult it is to make the best choices. How tempting it is to want too much, to step on others in our urgent desire to acquire.

What a challenge it is to serve by being last, rather than always trying to be first.

The proof is inscribed in history and across each of our individual hearts.

Christmas offers the x7 reminder of the yearly hope that we can instead recognize the god-nature in all around us, and choose the god-nature in ourselves.

We can return to that baby in the manger in ourselves, and carry that love, peace, generosity, and forgiveness forward into the new year.

Every year a fresh start -- as long as we can find and hear the stories under all with which we've buried them.

Dorothy Day: Living the Beatitudes for All the People

Yesterday was the great Dorothy Day's birthday.

I wonder what she would be thinking of the state of the U.S. today.

Because many of you won't know who Day was -- she was born in NYC in 1897, two years before my own grandmothers -- she was a journalist and Catholic reformer who co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and worker movement.

This movement aimed to unite workers and intellectuals in shared activities from farming to education, as well as starting "houses of hospitality" for the urban poor.

She is up for sainthood and has my vote because of her staunch support for the Catholic "preferential option for the poor" social teaching which prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable in ethical and political decision making.

During her lifetime, Day protested the Vietnam War and was arrested in 1973 in California while demonstrating support for the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez.

This country's "christian" culture, largely founded on Calvinist Protestantism, could probably use an injection of thinking and action like that of Day's, which is grounded more in the Beatitudes than in the Commandments.

Today's U.S. culture and economy has continued to evolve through the "robber barons" of the early 20th century (Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon, etc.) to the tech oligarchs of today (Musk, Bezos, Thiel et. al.).

In channeling this Dorothy, I think we will not be well as a nation until we give up our single-minded focus on the accrual of personal wealth and happiness and focus more on the common good -- in our daily choices, actions, and public policies.

"Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40)

A necessary saint for our times. Remembering Dorothy Day on her birthday.

Minority Report

The dogs appeared to be fairly alarmed Tuesday evening, no doubt from our energy, and uncharacteristically huddled up together...

I am no stranger to feeling in the minority but this week is a good reminder to us all that it is not a good feeling and therefore one no one should have.

As I arrived home from work yesterday afternoon, two sheriff's deputies SUV's, blue lights and sirens screaming, rocketed down the island past our house. Shortly thereafter, a pickup truck came out of nowhere up to my bumper then raced past, cutting aggressively close to my vehicle.

These are both ordinary events in our rural world. But I am jumpy. It's not grief I feel as much as dread: the feeling you have in waking from sleep that something bad has happened and your life is forever changed.

I went through years of physical harassment and discrimination in my youth for being a queer woman, and have been grateful for the progress we've made that made such experiences not gone but more rare as I've grown older.

Baby dyke at 14 in 1975, in the chair where I 
devoured Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation.

Yet I can feel that again: that uneasy, insecure sense one has when one is forced to recognize their minority status. The feeling, and oppression, our citizens of color as well as women and queer people have always had and continue to confront. The privileges of my education and skin color have granted me a bit of a pass for the past couple of decades, for which I am grateful.

None of us should ever feel threatened by being in the minority -- including those who "took back" the country with this week's election.

In many ways, it is a "taking back:" a grab for power made ugly by language and action by people who our culture has made to feel insecure -- predominantly white men but others who hope to rise to the top, too. The white European culture on which this continent was colonized as a nation is one of hierarchy, material wealth, and yes, violent extremism. In this way, this election is a "going back" to the rot at the root for which we as a nation, unlike Germany or South Africa, has never gone through truth and reconciliation.

No one should be made to feel less than others, or threatened for who they are by the power of a majority. That's not the point of truth and reconciliation. It's not about blame. It's about mutual, shared understandings.

We don't need power over each other for everyone to have enough if some don't grab more than their share. But turning around this deep, deep culture -- based on the patriarchal accrual of wealth and power at the expense of others -- is proving difficult to evolve.

It is seductive. We all buy into it. We participate.

To think of "education" as some sort of elitism is a tragic component of all of this, yet we have created this problem, too, by putting education financially out of the reach of too many. We all have helped to create this "elite" by not fighting hard enough to ensure everyone has what they need to participate and to succeed.

Only 37.7% of U.S. citizens has a college education. Yet in 2022, the median earnings for those with a bachelor's degree were a shocking 86% higher than those with a high school diploma, and college degrees have been a de facto requirement for those holding public office and making the policies that impact us all.

So I've been part of a minority all along -- just the one holding power.

We need to listen to those who voted to return Trump to office, and seriously consider their reasons without dismissing anyone.

We can do better.

And as Kamala said so beautifully in her concession speech yesterday afternoon at Howard University: the fight for equity and justice for all continues. It's never been a short fight. It's easy to be exhausted by chaos and fear and we need to re-think, re-create, re-gather for the long haul. We all have accountability, we all have responsibility, we all have a part to play, now and every day.

If you missed Kamala's speech, delivered at Howard University because the young people are those who need our greatest concern, you can listen here: https://youtu.be/d9FVB6-7BN0?si=fOHO5Ic1TtvqJQyl

#newblogpost

#seekequity

#EndThePatriarchy