The Real Genius of Theater is How it Builds Community: Remembering Jean Wilhelm in Eastport

The towering Eastport Arts Center,
formerly a Baptist Church in Maine's
easternmost community.

As theater makers, we deal in physicalities.

The voices and bodies of actors. The buildings and stages in which we gather audiences and create imaginary worlds that heal our hearts and minds, that build new, temporary mini-communities with every performance. We learn to and honor being present in our bodies and places.

Our work often involves buildings -- saving old ones and at times building new to house our stages, roofs under which to bring people together.

So it was with our dear compatriot Jean Wilhelm throughout her career, but especially in the last two decades as she helped to purchase an old Baptist church in Eastport, Maine -- our nation's most eastern outpost -- and create the Eastport Arts Center.

As its website says, "The Eastport Arts Center (EAC) nurtures and promotes six year-round constituent groups engaged in theater, art, music, film education and community outreach."

Music to Jean's ears, and a song to my soul.

Jean, who was in her late '70's already when she relocated to Eastport, didn't do this on her own. She worked closely with another woman, Joyce Weber, who died two years before Jean, as well as many, many community members. Because in theater we don't do anything on our own. Theater is the art of the ensemble, of community. It is about bringing people together to share an experience, "to breathe," as one friend of mine said, "the same air."

This is its most potent power for change.

Jean Wilhelm memorabilia at her memorial
service August 13, 2022  in Eastport, Maine.

From the moment Jean sought us out at Opera House Arts in Stonington we knew she was a kindred soul. She believed deeply in the need for every community member to participate in and experience art of all forms. We asked her, in 2008, to direct a community playreading and she chose three exquisite short plays by Tennessee Williams: "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," "Portrait of a Madonna." The language in these plays is almost ridiculously beautiful, stunning, and Jean guided the community members young and old -- most unfamiliar with the work of Williams -- to find themselves within these stories from the 1940's.

Jean had fairly auspicious roots but, born in
1927 and graduating from high school in 1943, she became a woman during a time when being independent was not the norm. She had to, and did, literally sail her own course: straight through Smith College where she worked with the iconic Hallie Flanagan and on through advanced degrees in theater at West Virginia University and the University of Minnesota, on to the University of New South Wales in Australia and Goucher College in Maryland and finally on up the Maine coast. It was while getting her PhD in Minnesota that she forcefully introduced herself for hire to the legendary director Sir Tyrone Guthrie; opening up, as she said, "a whole wonderful sequence of events" including directing Guthrie's infamous worldwide touring version of Oedipus Rex in Australia in 1970-71.

The thing that most resonated with us about Jean was not even her artistic work -- we traveled up to see both Brian Friel's "Dancing at Luhnasa" and Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" under her hand in Eastport -- but her dedication to democracy: in civic life as well as in theater. The two came together for Jean as they do for us.

Jean's official President Obama
commemorative photo.

For example, at her memorial service on August 13, 2022, I newly learned she had been in front of the Eastport post office every Saturday -- protesting George W. Bush's falsified war in Iraq. She shamelessly supported Democratic candidates, including Obama. Her small-D democratic values powered her work -- as it did our own.

Jean's nephew Bill deBlasio, former Mayor of NYC.

As her most famous nephew, Bill deBlasio, former mayor of NYC noted at the beginning of his comments Saturday, the beautiful photo of Jean and Joyce talking with each other, taken by a student, was right out of the Nixon era of "un-indicted conspiracists." It turns out the two actually WERE conspiring at that moment, seated on a bench in the unfinished upstairs theater space above where the photography workshop was happening -- plotting the creation of the Arts Center.

In Jean's bright blue eyes, the world was always wonderful and marvelous and the charge was always ONWARD! This is just the expansive, glass overflowing attitude we in theater and really in all our lives need to accomplish our work and improve our communities, or so much of it would never get done. It is a world in which, in Jean's own words, death is “not frettable.” (sic)

ONWARD! dear Jean. And ONWARD! all of you making moments of beauty that gather and heal those around you, whether through theater or faith or civic duty.

#MaineCulture
#CultureChange
#NewBlogPost
#Onward

Goosed

Our biggest challenge along the
Erie Canal Bike Trail??

Hissing, beak wide open, wings spread, the goose came at my right flank. I swerved the bike and accelerated my peddling. It was a narrow miss.

The goose was protecting its brood, mate, young and fellow geese, of whom 15-20 were spread across the Erie Canal Bike Trail. Repeatedly. It's June, and the goslings are of different ages, many verging on adolescence, and the adults are in full molt: they lose their big wing feathers at this time of year, and cannot fly, leaving them extremely vulnerable.

And defensive.

On Day 1 of the ride we'd witnessed a rider knocked to the ground by a flock of geese in Tonawanda.

They appear to be the most dangerous part of our 400-mile journey. Clustered at many various points on the trail, protecting their young, charging us on our bicycles as we attempt to part their feathered flocks and urge them not-unkindly off the path into the canal.

But being goosed -- prompted, urged, herded -- is for many of us a rather necessary thing.

Doing a long ride such as this, dependent upon your own physical strength and mental determination, "gooses" one forward toward new revelations and perceptions. As any herd dog, or goose, might tell you: a bit of a sharp nip on one's haunches, a change of scenery, a physical challenge is often what one most needs to get to the destination(s) one desires.

Riding the trail last month, I was goosed to consider what it really means to be a 60-year-old queer, feminist, childless woman out in the world, a body visibly traversing in real, human time the state of NY.

In my welcoming Maine community, I live a fairly protected life in which such facts of my difference from the normative culture don't often present themselves. But out here, exposed to the hissing of geese and the fury of young white men, I am just an old white dyke in their way.

And since then, there is the Supreme Court with all its illegitimacy and unrepresentative decisions that threaten our individual human rights -- including overturning the "settled law" of Roe vs. Wade.

It's easier to forget in these days, when fluidity of gender and sexuality has been more normalized in many-but-not-all places, what internalized homophobia and misogyny feel like.

As I pushed my body and my mind along the path for those two weeks, I was reminded of the things I carry that for the most part I have successfully evaded. In response to the cat calls and questions and assumptive "sir's" comes the internalized reality that to be a masculine female is indeed not only to be triumphantly queer but to be wrong. To be a woman my age without kids or grandkids: wrong. How much easier it seems were I to take testosterone, grow a beard, lower my voice even further so I could just be one and not the Other: both. A queer butch woman, unapologetically without children, masculine and yet still a woman. Powerful in myself, cycling 400 miles: someone others in their fear of what is different would like to disempower.

My tactic for the past 50 plus years to prove my rightness to myself has been to assert the power of my sexuality. To seduce and to charm the world around me. 

But I am 60. I am tired. I don't want to charm anyone anymore. And it is in that final 10 miles, riding through the 40th mile to the 50th, that I feel very alone and sad: living proof that the choices I've made are naturally wrong. We all have these moments when confirmation bias is achieved and escape velocity not. This is the point of vulnerability at which the power of the loving community is paramount.

#newblogpost

#queer

#whatisnormal

#imokyoureok

#lovingcommunity

Post-Bike Trail Notes: The Many Roads Not Chosen

One of my many paths not chosen was the path of classical music performance.

Riding a bike every day, all day, creates that beautiful space that dancers and other performers know well: the life right here now, in the physical body in time and place.

As the cinder of the Erie Canal Trail from Buffalo to Albany unspooled beneath my wheels the first two weeks in June, I could spin into a kind of trance state of cadence and motion. Being.

Yet at every juncture, choice and often action were required. Wayfaring signage was not always available or clear, maps not detailed enough, priorities of co-riders not the same. And at times, even with due consideration, initial choices to follow a certain route had to be remade. Sometimes a path just didn't "feel right," and a 360-degree turn was required.

Bicycling is, of course, a well-used metaphor for life. And the trip gave me time to reflect on several roads I did not take.

The first of these materialized in the first few days of the ride when we arrived in Rochester -- home to the Eastman Kodak company, inventors of the Brownie camera that popularized and democratized photography at the beginning of the 20th century; and its philanthropic offspring, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Kodak Hall, the largest performance venue at
he Eastman School of Music in downtown
Rochester, NY.

George Eastman, the inventor who founded Eastman Kodak (Kodak is not a collaborating partner but rather a name Eastman devised for his company), ascribed to the philosophy of "noblesse oblige." He stood alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie as one of the most philanthropic men of his era. He provided Kodak employees the first "stock bonus" in U.S. corporate history, and invested millions in education at MIT and in Rochester. He was the largest contributor to HBCU's in the 1920's, and a pioneer in dental and medical philanthropy.

A scientist, he also recognized the links between the creative and scientific processes, particularly through music. "There are no drawbacks to music: you can't have too much of it," he famously said.

This passion led him to establish one of the nation's most famous music conservatory programs, the Eastman School of Music, where my path nearly intersected with Eastman's vision and philanthropy for music.

I became a trumpet player at age 9 by accident: we were invited to begin in our school band program at that age, and this was the instrument found moldering in my grandmother's attic -- provenance still unknown. But I took to "blowing my own horn" like a fish to water: I love music, and I love the feeling it creates in my brain and body when I create it myself.

The trumpet is an utterly collaborative, ensemble instrument: yes, you can solo, but it is not really the instrument for living room confabs. As a wind player, I pursued first concert band, then orchestral playing, then brass quartets and quintets.

My love for it was so clear that my parents -- who had earlier told me a piano was beyond our financial reach -- broke down and sent me off to NYC with my junior high band instructor to purchase a decent instrument along the hallowed musical hall of 48th Street.

But most importantly, they hooked me up with private lessons and somehow I was charmed enough to wind up with one of the best trumpet instructors in New England: Irvin Bourque, who had previously taught at the Juillard School and who had himself studied with the famed NY Philharmonic trumpeter William Vacchiano and played for the larger-than-life conductor, Arturo Toscanini (bringing a type of "What would Toscanini do?" filter to my life!).

All more esoterica on trumpet legacy than you may need on a Monday morning.

Mr. Bourque, who dragged me willingly with him from town to town as part of the Norwich (CT) Civic Band and several brass quartet/quintet configurations, had me headed toward Eastman, at which one of my best friends, a French Horn player, matriculated the year before I was to go.

Through her, I began to understand what it meant to go to a music conservatory. Hours and hours of practice alone in a cement block practice room! What of softball, what of history, what of writing, what of lesbian bars?!

The world was too wide and enticing. It distracted me from the alluring tones of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and landed me instead -- again, almost by happenstance in the form of a high school U.S. history teacher whose sister worked in Bowdoin's Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Ultimately, at Bowdoin, I DID spend hours and hours in that cement block practice room with my horn, as well as on stage with the college orchestra and pit bands, as well as on Bowdoin's fields and in its seminar rooms. Yet standing before the hallowed hall in Rochester fired my imagination: what a very different life mine would have been in choosing the Eastman path!

#music

#musiceducation

#EastmanSchool

#trumpet

#newblogpost

Our Longing for Home Along the Highways of New Ideas

We are all migrants on this continent,  even many of our First Nation peoples whose following of natural food ways resulted in the creation of winter and summer camps.

As White immigrants who arrived here fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression and seeking something better, we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional and ahistorical -- a country full of "firsts" -- while at the same time being obsessed with the concept of "home."

Yet the internet, that glorious, fast, invisible tool that sends information, our thoughts, and visual depictions of our lives flying around the globe, is by no means the first highway of new ideas in the U.S.

That badge of honor MIGHT be said to belong to the Erie Canal, opened in 1825. 

This new super highway was quickly flooded with those headed west, as it was a relatively flat and quick route that avoided crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It is said that more migrants and immigrants used the Canal to move into and across the western frontier than any other means.

Among those headed north and west in the mid-19th century were many escaped slaves, as well as others who just didn't "fit" where they were -- the queers, the radicals, those who wanted something other than the Puritan, male, patriarchal state.

The Underrground Railroad ran strongly along the canal with critical junctions in Syracuse, Rochester, and Niagara as gateways to Canada. These cities became known for their abolitionists, who also fomented other radical, social justice oriented movements -- including Utopianism, Mormonism, and Feminism. Enveloping all of these movements was the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that was so strong in western and central NY along the Canal that it became known as the "Burned-Over Diistrict." Without access to many trained clergy, individual laypeople created an evangelical air of "extravagant excitement" -- leaving the impression in many others that religion was a mere delusion -- all seeking the path to "go home" to the Lord.

Among those who had his beginnings along the canal was L. Frank Baum, noted author of The Wizard of Oz and a large number of fantasy books, born in Chittenango in 1856. A small, family-run museum alongside the canal exemplifies our obsession with Oz, Dorothy, the Wizard, the Witches, and of course the yellow brick road.

The scene I best remember from the cherished movie version of this book is at the end, when we are back in black and white from our Technicolor fantasy and Dorothy is waking up in bed surrounded by family and farmhands -- all of whom had become characters in her fever dream. "There's no place like home," she is chanting/mumbling as she awakens from her unconscious. There's no place like home.

As an adopted person and in spite of my wonderful adoptive family, I too am a person who will always be yearning "to go home." But as so many have said - from German-Jewish refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spoke of the need of the persecuted Jewish people to carry their libraries with them, in their heads, as they fled pogrom after pogrom; to current musicologist and musician Rhiannen Giddens, who speaks of the power of music to allow us to carry our ancestral homes in Africa and the Middle East within us as we flee and fly -- the only homes we have are those we carry within us.

One more reason for raising readers, writers, musicians and artists, and for developing rich, complex arts and cultural sensibilities in our selves and our communities.

#arts #culture #eriecanaltrail #bikeride #Oz #home #community

God’s Country

Day 4 of cycling the Erie Canal Bikeway found us in Palmyra, southeast of Rochester, about 100 miles and a third of the way along the Canal.

If that name rings a bell for you, it may be because you are aware of enough American religious history to know that Palmyra -- named for a village in what is now Syria -- is where Joseph Smith found the golden tablets from which he translated and printed the Book of Mormon. At the end of today's 28 miles, we participated in a guided tour of the local print shop which took on the massive job of publishing 5000 copies using 1830 technology from two new, 19-year-old female missionaries whose delight in the book's creation and meaning was palpably contagious.

Biking through the lush farmland here, it is easy to feel its inspiration as a source of revelation. From giant black walnut trees whose thick, low arms reach out in broad embraces to hummingbirds sheltering in visible nests and an orchestra of songbirds to the sheep and lambs roaming the verdant hillsides, it is easy here to feel the abundance, generosity, and awe-inspiring beauty that is creation. How blessed we all are, however we choose to make sense of our place in cosmology.

Smith was a determined and highly successful religious visionary, and the first and only home-grown American one. Mormonism is very particularly American in its belief in America and this nation, its citizens and Constitution as exceptional and chosen peoples. These beliefs, as much as the revelatory beauty of the world surrounding Joseph Smith, continue to inspire millions around the world to follow the Book of Mormon and Smith's other published teachings.

Gratitude: On Receiving Bowdoin College’s Common Good Award

President Rose, Trustees, members of the Alumni Council and McKeen Center for the Common Good, fellow honored guests, friends, family, classmates, collaborators and co-conspirators.

It is with stunned humility that I stand before you today and gratefully accept Bowdoin’s Common Good Award.

When this winter I received a FedEx envelope from the College delivered to our island address, I was gripped by a familiar fear.

The College had finally uncovered some bill I’d not paid!

This is comical in retrospect – I graduated 39 years ago. I know the College finance department is much more efficient than that…

Yet my instinctive fear points to who I am, where I come from, and the ambivalent relationship I’ve had to the College for much of my life – all of which make this award that much more meaningful to me.

I am deeply moved by, and grateful for, the College’s recognition of my lifelong passion for the arts, and of their power in my work in cultural and economic community development  in Maine. In particular, in our more isolated rural areas and with our young people. Work I have undertaken, in large part, as a way of returning to the State the great privilege of the excellent education I received here. And everywhere I go in this expansive state, I am awed by the number of Bowdoin alum I encounter serving the common good. It does seem as if the beautiful Offer of the College works deeply in us. With so very many deserving of this recognition, I am especially humbled by  this award, one I look forward to sharing with my many peers in service.

Having my my work recognized and amplified in this, the 50^th anniversary year of women at Bowdoin, is a huge honor and a tribute not only to me but to the many women who’ve worked collectively over these 50 years to make so much change possible.

I love the word common. I am proud to be as common as they get.

I am a queer, working class activist  whose heritage is only two and three generations deep on this continent. My grandparents had sixth and eighth grade educations; my parents were awarded high school diplomas; and it was hoped for if not expected that I would take the next step, to college.

An important part of being common is being PREVALENT: there are many of us. We are not exceptional, and that’s a good thing.

Yet there were not many of me when I arrived at Bowdoin in 1979. My family was always deeply uncomfortable when visiting. I and several of those here today, and many more, quickly learned to create commonality across differences to collectively battle our shared oppressions –boarding school students to financial aid kids, CIS gender to queer, black women to white women.

My best work and biggest successes have always occurred in the creation of these commons – the free, open, public spaces shared by all – and their communities. I am honored to have been one small part of the greater collectives that launched Bowdoin’s Women’s Resource Center, now the Center for Sexuality, Women, and Gender; that created Opera House Arts and restored the historic Stonington Opera House; that is currently forming the Cultural Alliance of Maine to strengthen the state’s commitment to its important indigenous, immigrant, and local cultures.

Every time we come together, for any reason – a meeting, a movie, a musical performance, church - we create new community: unique gatherings of commoners. From each community, we learn something. From each, we are able to launch collective action for healing, for hope, to advance our common good.

Our work is not done. Too much violence, and great and painful inequities, continue to exist and threaten to divide us. And so I will leave you with this. In 1980, one of the first books we purchased for the Women’s Resource Center was lesbian poet Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman Poems. In it she wrote a verse that appeared on many of our walls and T-shirts for years to come, a poster of which has since wound up in the Library of Congress. “A common woman is as common as a loaf of bread,” Grahn wrote.

“And she will rise.”

Let us keep rising. Let us commoners keep gathering in the commons.

Thank you.

 

Are We Too Late to Adopt "Community Rules"?

An annotated tax map of downtown Stonington, ME.
The pink dots represent properties owned by non-residents.

 

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and exacerbated a trend that was already well underway: the sale of our communities to investors and "non-residents" -- people who do not work here, vote here, or live here year round.

The map above shows the impact on the village of Stonington. Only 30% of our downtown properties are owned by residents. And only 15% are commercial enterprises. 

That means 55% of downtown properties are owned by non-residents. And outside of the village, 80%+ of the total Stonington shoreline is the same.

Some call this gentrification: when wealthier people from other areas, in search of a higher quality of life, gravitate toward beautiful, end-of-the-world places formerly populated by people there because of birth or work -- including artists. Because property values and incomes are higher where they originate, their interest in and purchase of local properties in communities such as Stonington drive real estate values beyond the reach of local workers.

Change is inevitable and those who engage with the same place year after year know the glories and the heartaches of these changes. The questions are: can we direct and influence change with community values and actions? Knowing what history has taught us: how could we do this differently? How might incoming property owners show more respect for preserving the cultures and places where they want to spend time, too?

Because in some ways, we might also consider some of these changes as a kind of ongoing colonization. After all, the generational White islanders who make up a majority of today's Deer Isle residents replaced the indigenous people who stewarded and used the natural resources for more than 2,000 years before we asserted our own White European cultures.

Here's a suggested, partial checklist of "community rules" for everyone's consideration -- feel free to add to and share this!

Get to know a place and its people and economies before purchasing property. Buying property in bidding wars "sight unseen" on the internet is no different from being part of a gold rush. And just like previous gold rushes, it's destructive to a place's natural and cultural resources. 

Our community is more than your financial investment. We live here year round, through the cold and muddy grind climbing March hill. We raise children here and struggle to maintain our local schools. We work here and what we harvest and make creates a sustainable year-round community. We vote and volunteer as firefighters and ambulance drivers; we serve on committees and participate in the municipal process, moving the gears to make a livable, sustainable place that can welcome visitors such as you. 

Don't put your own desires above the community's needs. I know this is a tough one given American individualism, but...well...it's not all about you and what you can afford and to what you feel entitled because you happen to have the cash -- or the real estate to attract the cash. Feel blessed by and grateful for your privilege. We didn't allow our "rusticators" of the past to gobble up all the real estate so that workers had no places to live, and they in turn didn't rent their seasonal cottages to others to churn in and out of every three days as if this is a party boat. Love Deer Isle-Stonington? Buy a non-winterized cottage and spend five months here, volunteering for nonprofits while you are here. Or establish a regular rental from a year-round person who needs the income to pay their property taxes. Already doing these things: thank you! Remember that you already own a place and vote and work somewhere else: you don't need to own here, too. 

Be of service, make a positive impact. If you've made it through the first three bullet points and are still determined to buy, sell, or rent a place, consider how you can contribute -- with your time, expertise and heart, in addition to your wallet -- where the community has the greatest need. Some communities add transfer fees to real estate sales to fund needed community projects. Or if you buy and are only going to visit for two weeks of the year, consider renting it for the other 50 weeks to a year-round, working community member. It's not as sexy or as flush with cash as being an AirBNB host, but it will eventually help you to become an actual member of a real and beloved working community.

In the meantime, the Stonington Economic and Community Development Committee is running a Short-Term Rentals Task Force with the objective of lessening the negative impacts some of these are having on our communities. We meet monthly and welcome your input to econdev@stoningtonmaine.org.

Our island is suffering from the top-heavy impact of a new wave of colonizers. Our workers have no places to live and are cut off from the source of their labor and passion on our working waterfront. Our natural resources and infrastructure -- such as Stonington's Sanitary and Water districts -- are stretched beyond their capacity. Our schools don't have enough students to be sustainable, and our teachers and nurses can't find housing. Our beautiful village is dark and empty for great swaths of the year.

What can we do differently?

Losing Our Nonprofit Religion: Bad Boards and Misunderstanding JEDI

Myles Jordan and Kirsten Monke, two members
of the DaPonte String Quartet, in a 2012 concert 
of new music produced by Opera House Arts
at the Burnt Cove Church in Stonington.
Photo by Karen Galella.

This weekend's news about the hostile board takeover of the Friends of the DaPonte -- ousting the founding musicians as salaried employees and changing the organization's name and mission while waving a false flag of "diversification" -- is, I can only hope, the straw on the camel's back of nonprofit board culture gone seriously awry.

The nonprofit sector, and the "culture of philanthropy" that supports it, has been -- like the "fourth estate" of the press -- an important leg of the stool that is the U.S.'s socio-cultural economy.

We all need it to be functional.

The sector's purpose -- to fill unique charitable needs -- is intended to take the capitalist rule of transactionality off the table: experiences and services are not measured solely on attendance and earnings; community relationships are more important than transactions. In the U.S., the sector, like government, exists to serve the common goods of our communities, filling gaps in public services that in other industrialized countries the government often provides more of -- including the arts.

And in the nonprofit cultural sector, some organizations are appropriately leading the way in doing the work of JEDI -- justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion -- centering the voices and work of those who have for so long been excluded, as well as adopting new ways and teams of cooperative, equitable working.

Yet over the last 40 years, in parallel with the "Reagan Revolution" move toward "supply side" economics, we've experienced an increasing amount of dominant, capitalist culture values and strategies creeping into the nonprofit sector, until today our common goods and charitable purposes are awash in a flood tide of transactional programming (services and events without relationships) and egocentric leadership (building individual resumes and prestige). Boards are too often comprised of affluent people suffering from the entitlement of "father knows best" because they've been successful in the capitalist marketplace, and they bring those unexamined, dominant culture values with them.

Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in the recent actions of the Friends of the DaPonte board.

The DaPonte's uniquely charitable, laudable, and purposefully specific mission was to advance equity for artists. The founders knew that to truly practice and present their craft, strengthening communities through access to live music and music education, they had to create a stable income base. Remarkably, over 30 years they achieved this. 

Now along comes an ambitious new Executive Director/composer and a board that misunderstands not only its governance role to steward the nonprofit's mission but how to pursue JEDI. The result: by changing the name and purpose of this nonprofit and firing the musicians as employees, they are stealing assets that don't belong to them and flying in the face of JEDI values.

Diversification of programming is laudable and necessary. So are equitable pay for artists and good governance values such as respect, listening, relationships, artist leadership, and stewardship. 

It seems clear the ED and board could not get the DaPonte to go exactly where they wanted them to go -- specific programming not being the purview of the board in any event -- so instead pulled the rug out from under them.

The DaPonte are artists who created a nonprofit with a small, singular purpose to sustain their craft and their community impact. If, after discussions with them, the ED and individual board members remained dissatisfied, they had several options open to them -- notably recognizing they are in the wrong place and departing to start their own nonprofit chamber music series. 

Instead, they've chosen the path of theft and disrespect, laying bare the damaging mechanics of inequitable governance run amok. 

Let's hope this incident can, first, be over turned and secondly that it sparks the necessary conversations, awareness, and changes the nonprofit governance model desperately needs.

#nonprofitmaine

#governance

#culture

How Together An Island Can Sustain What Matters

On May 7, all are invited to join a free, guided, 90-minute walk in downtown Stonington from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.: "Pier to Pier: A Jane's Walk Through Time, Fishing, Quarrying and Culture."

The Town of Stonington is hosting this walk as an opportunity for community members to engage with Stonington's history and also the serious current challenges with which the Town is grappling: sea level rise, fishing industry changes

Who is Jane Jacobs, for whom this walk -- part of a series of walks happening around the world -- is named? Why is the Town of Stonington, along with its partners the Deer Isle-Stonington Chamber of Commerce, the Stonington Public Library, the Harbor Cafe and Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, hosting this event?

creative ways to do workforce housing

D.C.: Cherry Blossoms and Heartburn

First view of the U.S. Capital from aboard the Palmetto.

I'm arriving in our nation's capital for less than 24 hours as I train my way back up the eastern seaboard. I'm feeling sad, somewhat disassociated, which is odd as I'm on my way home from a terrific visit with one of my oldest and best friends.

It's the capital building itself. It sends a direct current through my heart, creating a sharp burn from the moment the crown of its dome pops into view.

The cherry-lined shore of the Potomac.

From Fredericksburg to Alexandria, VA, Amtrak's Palmetto line runs up the Potomac. It is a big river, wide and throaty brown, but not as long as Virginia's famed James River. With its headwaters in the western Appalachian Mountains beyond the Blue Ridge, the James -- originally the Powhatan, like those who lived here for thousands of years pre-colonization -- brought in ever increasing numbers of British colonialists and took out tobacco, the labor intensive and soil killing export that made the settlements, with the labor of enslaved peoples, economically viable. The James dumps into the Chesapeake at the large, protected harbor of Newport News/Hampton Roads: a place I've never been but know as the primary competitor for the New England sub- and ship-building Navy towns around which I grew up and still reside.

D.C.'s fabulous cherries are in bloom along the Potomac, the Tidal Basin, and every street. Yet just as in my previous post about the desert, the burning pain in my heart vies with all this beauty for my attention.

I'm a product of the school of American Exceptionalism: I was taught to believe and accepted as reality that the U.S. is different from other nations, that our values and political systems are unique in history such that it is our destiny to lead.

A magnificent old cherry propped up outside the Library of Congress.

I believed it about our country and, as a citizen of this country, about myself as well.

I took off the rosy glasses about myself at 14, about the time when many, teetering on adolescence, do.

My first muse and champion, my Grandmother Mary, had died several years earlier. Fourteen was the age at which I first quit the Catholic Church and understood myself to be a lesbian. None of this fit the radiantly perfect image of who I was intended to be.

By 1975 I'd also had to adjust my rosy lenses in regard to the country. I wore a leather peace sign around my neck and had completed my high school prep watching the Watergate trials and Nixon's resignation.

Yet still, my "city on a hill" syndrome of romantic nationalism persisted. Once it gets its barbed hooks under your skin, removal can be difficult and painful.

In 1978, on our junior class trip to D.C., my first views of the Capital Rotunda, the Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington Memorials, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court awed me with their grandiose aesthetic portrayals of our "uniquely" American values.

Even the first Presidential election in which I was able to vote in 1980 -- with an apparently rigged Iranian hostage crisis, devastated cities and rampaging inflation working together to sink President Jimmy Carter, the most moral politician I knew -- didn't manage to put the final nail in a coffin that was almost but not completely sealed for me.

There have been thousands of nails added since. And still, I held onto something -- can I call it hope? -- until January 6, 2021 and the assault of armed citizens on the Capital building in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election.

Let's not kid ourselves. While the coverup of and gaps in the teaching of American history are very thorough, at some point most of us are forced to accept that a nation built on genocide, land theft, and enslaved labor is rotten at its core.

What some of us keep hoping for -- followers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others -- is that our efforts for change will create opportunities for redemption.

I'll keep working for #justice, for #love. But the sight of the capital dome, and the memories of armed hordes assaulting Capital police desecrating symbols of our democratic ideals, is now a shot of direct current that burns my heart.

The rear of the Supreme Court: "Justice the Guardian of Liberty."

#americanexceptionalism

#powhatan

Beauty and Suffering, Starsky and Hutch: Matches Made in Heaven

A velvet creosote bush two miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Deserts are miraculous places. Constant reminders of how much suffering exists within and alongside beauty.

The southern borderlands' dry clear light and relentless winds tattoo us, exfoliating potential tears and sweat from skin. Sitting quietly, we become the busyness of acorn woodpeckers, yellow-rumped warblers, lesser goldfinches, Mexican jays, a whole host of diverse hummingbirds. Jumping chollas, saguaros, flowering yuccas and creosote create vast expanses and palettes of color.

These dualities seem even greater here in the U.S.-Mexican southwest, what Gloria Anzaldúa identified in 1987 as Borderlands/La Frontera. Subtitled The New Mestiza, this book was and is iconic to me as a queer, adopted person. It is a layered work of prose and poetry, dream and theory and identity, built on Anzaldúa's life as a Chicana, lesbian, activist and writer to remap the ways we understand false physical "borders" of nation into the psychic and cultural worlds in which we are alive together (see the new critical edition released in 2021 by Aunt Lute Books. I was lucky to interview Gloria in 1989 when I wrote about this book for a special edition of TRIVIA, A Journal of Ideas I co-edited with Lise Weil.).

First day in the borderlands, driving our rented gray Dodge Challenger "muscle car" we call "The Ghost" and jokingly referring to ourselves as Starsky and Hutch, we were pulled over by Border Patrol. The car does have a certain "look" that might in some minds contradict our own "look" of old lady white privilege. Our GPS had us turning in circles as we emerged from a birding preserve in a canyon where, it turned out, BP had been running an "immigration operation" for a couple of weeks.

They searched our trunk. 

My generous partner in crime (Hutch) with "The Ghost."

This beautiful, painful, arid place, where the Sierra Madres meet the Sonoran Desert, is a good place to find myself mid-Lenten season. According to the christian bible, Lent represents the part of the liturgical year in which Jesus fasts in the desert for 40 days, at the end of which, starving, he is tempted by the devil. Satan does his best to lure Jesus with the rewards white America loves best: reputation, power, possessions.

Birdwatching in the desert during Lent: intentionally stripping away distractions from suffering and reflecting on the beauty of our connections. What are your primary distractions? Social media? Food? Love and affection and sex? Work? Wealth? Privilege? Accumulation?

Like the vermillion flycatchers darting ceaselessly above the San Pedro river to feed themselves, or the hummingbirds who eat all day long, work is both my primary distraction and connections.

A vermilion flycatcher, one of many perched along the San Pedro.

It's as impossible to ignore the green-striped border patrol trucks at the mouth of practically every wash, the proliferation of state troopers in the medians, as it is the brightly colored birds. Law enforcement is heavy here, where the U.S. has built walls and fences across the frontier over which indigenous peoples once migrated freely. Where we attempt to keep out those suffering from the violence and starvation of our own banana republic policies and actions.

Nationalism, punishment, greed, a lack of mercy -- these are the sins of our national culture against the world we've been given to steward and to share. As a nation, have we failed these crucial tests?

And still, like birds: how can we keep from singing. For justice. For love.

#vermilionflycatcher

#riparian

#lafrontera

#borderlands

#newmestiza

#newblogpost

The Northeast Regional, Part II: Freight Trains and Junk Yards

American automotive wasteland, as seen from the Palmetto.

"The consequence of the projection of national sins, and specifically racism, onto one region is a mis-narration of history and American identity. The consequence of truncating the South and relegating it to a backwards corner is a misapprehension of its power in American history."

--Imani Perry
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

It's still dark in NYC when I board the Palmetto for South Carolina.

The light emerges almost painfully slowly over the New Jersey marshes and petroleum plants.

By the time we hit Philadelphia, the car fills up. I am one of a small handful of White people on this train of 90+ souls headed south.

It's a 14 hour trip. I chose the railroad over flying for several reasons, the most important of which is that, simply put, flying has one of the biggest negative impacts on our environment.

Commercial air travel accounts for 3 to 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing demand for flights is outpacing efficiencies.

Yet still we feel, as White Americans do about so much, that our time is more valuable than the planet.

Off the soap box and onto the train! I'm on the train. I'm on the train. I'm still on the train, 15 hours later. Georgia O'Keefe said about her paintings, "Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time."

I'm on my way to see friends. Traveling, like all else, suffers from (White American) demands for immediacy.

We are delayed outside of Richmond, first by a freight train -- Amtrak runs on heavy rail lines for this route -- and then a medical emergency, requiring a wait for EMS services before resuming. Again north of Charleston by a second freight. Freight owns these tracks.

American freight, Richmond, VA.

Another reason I chose the train is that flying swiftly over landscapes has always felt to me like an unnatural way to travel. My body misses participating in the geographical changes in color, topography, and climate that occur when we move across hundreds of miles.

The differences between Maine and NYC, or NYC and Charleston, SC are significant both geographically and culturally. They spin out on the other side of the glass as well as on the inside of the train. Freight trains marbled with graffiti. Flat, rolling farmland already dressed in bright spring green. Shadbush in bloom. Richer, warmer skin and vocal tones.

It's a pretty grim weather day, sporting heavy, low-hanging clouds that mute these shifting tones. By Fayetteville, NC rain splatters the windows.

You know that old saying about being on the "wrong side" of the tracks? Facts are being alongside the noise, vibration, and detritus of freight train tracks does not make for optimal locations, so when you're on the train you get a good look at the hidden underbelly of American culture, the places we live and work that you don't see on the internet.

If you've never questioned overconsumption and throw-away consumerism in the U.S., take the train south and keep your eye on the landscape.

In North Carolina, acres upon acres of automotive junk yards spool alongside the tracks. I am astonished, a little fascinated, saddened realizing I've not considered the fate of this centerpiece of American consumerism.

We have junkyards in Maine, too. They can be part of the re-use economy. I've prowled several of them years ago, when parts were more interchangeable and accessible to standard humans: gas caps. Doors. Mirrors. Fenders. Rocker panels. It's the scope, the broad expanses of these tumbled fields of our automotive detritus nestled along the tracks that shocks me.

Where will your vehicle end up when you are ready for a new one?

How much time are you willing (or able: still a privilege) to take to visit friends and family?

Will the changes in the ways the pandemic has helped me to see the world more slowly take root more largely in our cultures?

#autohell

#soulofamerica

#imaniperry

#slowtravel

#georgiaokeefe

#newblogpost

The Northeast Regional, Part I: Salt Ponds and Fog

The southeastern CT shore as viewed from
Amtrak's Northeast Regional.

I'm on the Northeast Regional from Boston to NYC. First time in two+ years of pandemic time. The Ides of March. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong and I'll have no rationale -- say, a nuclear war started by Russia in Ukraine -- to run home prematurely.

This train service humps its way down the New England seaboard -- South Station, Back Bay, Rt 128, Providence, Westerly, Mystic, New London, Old Saybrook, New Haven, NYC. It rides the rails of the geography of my youth.

Boarding, I succumb to instinct and get a seat by the left-hand windows. As we run from downeast to southwest, these face the coast and the tracks run right along the shoreline.

I've driven down to Boston from Maine and already, by southern Maine, the coast has softened and by the time we get to to the salt marshes and broad rivers of CT it appears to me to be almost velvety in color, hue, and form. There is something so inviting and welcoming to me about those lengths of salt grass and cat tails and sand, the flat, calm, warmer horizon merging seamlessly into sky without the familiar border of granite teeth.

I get curious around Westerly RI. Even though I grew up on its beaches and in its restaurants and bars, house sitting here for my high school English teacher -- and even though, at 15, I was arrested here -- I realize I know little if any of its meaningful history. What I do know: that Stonington and Westerly high schools have one of the longest-running Thanksgiving Day football games in the nation (Bears vs. Bulldogs) -- that I think we never won during my tenure there?! -- and that there was a large Italian population (of which the cops were particularly comprised, at least in our urban myths).

When I look it up, I'm surprised and even a little delighted. Like where I now live, Westerly was historically a granite town -- maybe thus the Italians, as in Stonington, ME?! Not only that, but Westerly granite is known for its pinkish hue -- just like Deer Isle, famous for its pink tricolor.

Yet even more delightful are the salmon: “The Pawcatuck River flows on the western border of Westerly and was once renowned for its own species of Westerly salmon, three of which are on the town's official seal."

Its own unique species! We knew the river only as a state boundary, one we crossed fluidly and with regularity. It's short, only about 15 miles long, and flows into Little Narragansett Bay.

And the salt ponds. It's a wonder any of us survived weekends as teen agers driving in this area during the 1970's: drinking, smoking weed, driving through the inevitable fog. Driving into trees and cement block houses, going through windshields and losing too many lives.

But those beautiful large salt ponds, three in all, "serve as shallow, reef-like pools whose outer walls form the long, white beaches for which the town is renowned." These carry the names the land's original inhabitants bestowed upon them, and flow from my mouth in a round, familiar way that makes me homesick. Weekapaug. Misquamicut. Maschaug.

White America. Always driving into the fog, crashing, continuing on.

#StoningtonCT

#NortheastRegional

#Westerly

#Mystic

When Live is Live, and Why Live Matters

Lydia Diamond's adaptation for the stage
of Toni Morison's first novel.

My partner and creative collaborator and I ventured back into the world this weekend, taking in a live concert and two live theatrical productions. Huzzah! Each was magnificent. Our souls, our skins, our beings vibrated with the songs and words of others.

Let's talk for a moment about the power of "we all breathe the same air."

Let's let out a sigh of relief for the ability to do this safely, and for those who have ensure that: the scientists and their vaccines, the Biden administration and its focus on distribution and relief.

Let's humble ourselves -- just for a moment! -- in the sweet, anti-American mythology that each of us as individuals does NOT exist in our own pod of self-sufficient, bootstrapped being, but rather is dependent upon everyone before us and around us for who we are.

COVID, a potent symbol of this dependence, remains out there and we still want to reduce and halt community transmission and the variants it allows to develop.

We also want to heal the damage caused by social isolation.

We want to heal the damage to our hearts and souls by two years not experiencing live art together.

A fascinating new play at the
Central Square
Theater in Cambridge.

With luck, the pandemic has caused more U.S. residents to be aware of the elemental, crucial role live performance plays in our hearts, minds, souls and communities: in our shared humanity.

Truly, our crisis in culture -- the arts and humanities -- had been already building steadily in this country for decades pre-pandemic. TV's and even radios beamed entertainment directly to our homes long before the internet, eroding our need to venture into the dangers of the public domain.

Yet the performing arts, unlike TV, are not "just entertainment." When we are live in a room with others, we are not merely on a one-way road, consuming what is transmitted to us; or even in a two-way or multiple player super highway of electronic gaming. We are exchanging breath with the performers and other audience members. We are participating in the creation of that performance and experience.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum: the privilege of 
creating one's personal abode as
lavish performance-art-to-be-
experienced.

In fact, the role culture plays in our continuous development as human beings is a happy "withdrawal from utility," a delightful counter to the increasing transactionality and monetization of all things in our society: "art and thought are forms of activity that have no immediate end." (1) This is, of course, also why a liberal arts education is such important preparation (i.e., not "training) for the world of work and citizenship -- but that is a separate post.

I'll close this one by further referencing my "main woman" of political theory and philosophy, Hannah Arendt. In her essay, "The Crisis in Culture" (1968), Arendt argues that art is political: not in the ways it might speak directly to social justice and change but precisely because it is not a commodity and therefore requires us to gather in the commons where we must accommodate the perspectives of others.

More on the importance of "the commons" -- or the polis -- anon.

#ArtNotEntertainment

#StopConsuming

1. Julia Reinhard Lupton (2014) Hannah Arendt and the Crisis of the Humanities?, Political Theology, 15:4, 287-289, DOI:  10.1179/1462317X14Z.00000000085

My Life as a CNA #4: Our Fascinating Stories

Like many of you, I've become a little obsessed over the last few years with the mysteries presented by DNA connections and expanding Ancestry family trees. Like an Advent calendar, the little square photos of the digital tree open into unexpected narratives. There's so much we do not know even about those genetically related to us. Even those just a single generation removed.

And of course for me the mystery is doubled by my adoption. So I've got two trees going, with multiple collaborators: my beloved family of adoption, and the far more mysterious French-Canadian immigrants for whom I can thank my genes.

But the truth is the folx to whom we are actually related are only one surface of our multifaceted, glittering stories. I've yet to meet a single human whose story doesn't surprise and fascinate me. 

On my last day of clinicals at the hospital.
I'd just successfully fetched and learned how
and why to operate this Bladderscan machine.

Stories are one of the especially great aspects of being a nursing assistant. CNA life could, I guess, be called the opposite of glamorous (as many of you have pointed out in emphasizing it was fine for you as an entry-level teenager, but good to leave in that youthful past!) or well-rewarded. What CNA life IS is skilled -- the more you know about human psychology and the body, the better off you and all your residents will be -- AND an on-the-ground, direct caretaking profession that most often serves those with the least among us: the increasing number of U.S. citizens with dementia and its related diseases who end up in long-term residential care centers (i.e., nursing homes) because that is what our government safety net of Medicare and Medicaid will pay for.

My mom and...not my dad.
An unnamed soldier.

How we grow old and die is, sadly, very much about economics: which perhaps offers a more humane rationale on our "run-for-the-riches" U.S. dominant culture? I'm not going to conjecture further on this here; but I do know that everyone deserves to age and die with dignity which, for a majority of people, would be in their own homes. But that's not often how it comes down if you get to the end of your life with limited resources; and as 55 million Baby Boomers are expected to be diagnosed with some sort of dementia over the next 20 years.

As nursing assistants, we get to spend more time than any other professional with residents as we assist in feeding, toileting, bathing, grooming, ambulating -- and listening, and storytelling. The majority of folx in our care have been through many decades filled with experiences: childbirth, the deaths of spouses and children, school, travel, work, the challenges and diseases and traumas of poverty, sexism, racism, homophobia and more. Each one has a unique story so that by the end of every shift I feel I've been living in a new patchwork quilt of colorful, intriguing lives.

H. is 94 and tough as nails with the staff. But she looks like my grandma, and she is sweetly gruff with me. Her next door neighbor suffers from schizophrenia and bites and kicks and...is the staff favorite. Across the hall is a woman who has lived for 40 years off the grid and is now subject to the constant background noise of TV. In the skilled nursing wing, a man on hospice remains a voracious reader and paints images of lobster boats. His neighbor, only 66, is a former half-miler and confined to a racing wheelchair with early onset Parkinson's. On another wing is a 54-year-old disabled by obesity and a stroke who tells me, repeatedly, how difficult aging is (I didn't tell her my own age!). She's ended up here as a result of nowhere else to go and no way to care for herself; and is pretty mean with the staff out of her own lack of agency.

They are all (including the mean and desperate 54-year-old) fascinating. I adore them all. And the stories of their lives, and how those shape their current responses and choices, enrich me with every shift.

#CNALife

#caretaker

#mysteries

#storytelling

My Life as a CNA #3: Love Not Charity

The scrapbook my mother made for school when she
was eight years old in 1931 in Old Saybrook, CT.

When my mother was eight years old, in 1931, her assignment from some inspiring and resourceful classroom teacher was to create a family scrapbook.

It's a remarkable document, captioned in my mother's youthful penmanship, replete with some of the only labeled photos of our ancestors I've found amidst bags and bags of curled and unnamed images. It includes a handwritten list of the genealogy on my maternal side, and photos of my grandmother's house where not only my mother and her two siblings but I as well were blessed to have grown up.

My grandmother and then my mother held onto this priceless archive until my mother's death in 2014, although its existence had been long forgotten by the time of my arrival in the 1960's. I never saw it or knew of it until, after her death, I began to sift through the boxes stored in my mother's basement. The treasure of things not discarded.

Each day I am at the nursing home, I am reminded of how much, and who, we throw away.

Elderly people--similarly to, as is often noted, babies--require a great deal of love and caretaking. Many return to that undeveloped innocence where they no longer are able to independently perform their basic mammalian functions of toileting, walking, and eating; nor the more advanced aspects of our humanity such as speaking, singing and dancing.

The biggest difference between babies and the elderly? Babies are our futures, reminding us that life is eternal even when our own is not. The elderly--our ancestors--lives are in the past. They remind us that our deaths are inevitable and coming quickly.

Increasingly, in our White U.S. culture, elderly humans--because they are not rich in future-time--are becoming, alongside the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated--the expendable. We push them aside and into corporately owned, for-profit facilities because we have created a culture in which we have neither the resources nor the time to properly care for them in our/their homes. In some cases, we are forced to institutionalize them to ensure they receive the medical care they need in a manner for which the state will pay.

Blessedly, there is a loving abundance of care and caretaking in nursing homes. I've witnessed how this work is a labor of love for the women and men with whom I have had the honor to serve during my training. I've watched in their faces, and felt in myself, the constant stream of emotions that loving and caring for the stranger elicits: it is rewarding, fulfilling, challenging, difficult, exhausting, and thankless work.

And still, while we do not discuss it, we do not fool ourselves. We go home late at night or early in the morning anxious and worried, imagining our own futures. Like the CNA's who care for them, our residents ARE the poor: they are the ones on Medicaid and Mainecare who cannot afford assisted living or private in-home care. They are the definition of the Greek word elachistoi: "the least of these" as it appears translated in the gospel of Matthew 25:40--you know, one of those key parables where Christians are told "...whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me..."

The literal meaning of elachistoi is “the smallest or most insignificant ones," or, in another manner of speaking, the expendable ones.

What I've noticed in the nursing home staff, and in myself, is that our very often invisible, forgotten caretaking for these elachistoi is not some type of romantic idea or charitable act. It cannot be. It must not be.

For they are us. 

The Blessings of Fragility

 

I went to bed feeling blessed, with the wind roaring and the cold, cold snow still falling after a delightful blizzard dinner of roasted chicken, brussels, and glazed carrots. In other words, our power held!

How lucky we are to be warm, to be together, to be fed. There are too many who are alone tonight; who are cold tonight; who are unhoused tonight; who are unfed tonight. It really just takes every one of our efforts to inadequately try to be sure those with the least among us are cared for. We are blessed, too, to have that work.

And I awoke feeling our fragile and temporary it all is--and how this is at the root of our blessings. When we can hold it and not fear it (thank you, Thich Nhat Hanh). When we can love it and not have it make us angry. Especially in a nation in which anger seems often to feel like a birthright to the White settler-colonialist culture.

With the power still on, we watched the Sundance Award-winning film CODA last night. CODA stands for Child of Deaf Adults. The movie is a somewhat traditional, quintessentially "American" tale--a young woman from the working class fishing community of Gloucester, MA, overcomes all obstacles to attend a music conservatory for college--but it is beautifully done. The fishing details, the sense of place, are evocative if, as-ever, romanticized. There is also a remarkable scene where the filmmaker allows us to experience what it is like to be deaf in a hearing world. But it was the 17-year-old hearing protagonist's deep connections to her deaf family, and the conflicted emotions she feels in leaving them for music school, that resonated deeply with me.

I miss my mom and my dad. I wish I had been better able to cross the huge distances that developed between our lives as I came out, went to college, became an artist and an intellectual.

My dad was functionally deaf. He didn't lip read or use sign language, but did have a hearing aid in one ear which allowed him to hear enough to get by. But he couldn't stand being in crowds: the background noise was just too much confusion for him. And, like the family in CODA, he could not really hear live music. And my mom, for a variety of similar reasons of brokenness, did not like to go anywhere without him.

(c) 1987 Kathryn Kirk

They delighted in each other, in us, and our small, tight family. Our world was very small. 

Since my dad couldn't hear, they didn't attend all the concerts I was in nor any of the sporting or other events. As an adopted, queer kid wanting a bigger world, this just made me feel abandoned (although I could not give voice to that) and angry (to which I gave plenty of voice). 

My understandings of their fragilities and vulnerabilities came much too late. We spent years disenfranchised from each other, with sparse visits. And then, as they were older parents, they began to become ill and simply needed our love and care in return. While I was able to provide some of that, I too often resembled the son in the Harry Chapin song with which I grew up in the 1970's, Cat's in the Cradle.

Mae and Evert--like all of us, when we settle into it--were broken in their own ways. As mid-century White Americans, they were not married until their late 30's. Unable to have kids. One deaf and one with wayward eyes. First generation high school graduates of immigrant parents. And they had, and gave my brother and myself, many privileges as well--not the least of which is being White and educated in the U.S.

And love. And perhaps most importantly, they gave us their frailties: blessings on which to base our own development of compassion, empathy, and love.

#gratitude

#love

#blessings

#frailties