I May Be Wearing White After Labor Day

If only to signal my surrender.

Class started on Thursday.  It is called Algebraic Structures.  I thought it might be a survey course on bridges and buildings built from first-degree equations.  I was wrong.  For the first hour I was following along, my head nodding as the professor's hand danced over the board.  Then he started to do matrices to solve for systems of linear equations and all of a sudden the board was analogous to the meta-joke about telling familiar jokes:  These guys had all been in prison together for a long time and a new inmate arrived.  When it was night and lights out, someone said, "16" and everyone cracked up. Someone else said "23" and people cracked up again. Someone else said "45" and everyone was rolling.  The new guy asked his cellmate what was going on and was told that they'd all been together so long, and knew all the jokes that instead of reciting the whole joke they'd numbered them.  And I'm sitting there going, What the hell?!?!?!?!???  What have I gotten myself into now?

I better check and see if the Sushi and Vegan Pastry Institute of Lower Transylvania will take me as a grad student. 

Saturday Poetry: What Did Thou Do to Thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

A young man, strong and black

A musket tore your back.

Three hundred guilders lost

Did Master rue the cost

of his African

so strong and black?

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

It is true

that thee are with us now

Thy Master’s guilders gone

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

Rings burned around thy neck

Eyes plucked from thy face

The Pearls of Africa

are missing from thy case.

Thy master stole thou eyes?

No others tell thou that

they still are used

to find your way, to this our home?

Young slave made blind.

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

Thy Master’s guilders gone.

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Look at thee

Africans strong and black.

(Look at me

African strong and black.)

Thy Master’s loss our gain

Thy mutilation is their shame.

Three hundred guilders thrown away

is not the measure of

Two warriors in our midst.

Returned to the Mother’s land

because of what thee did

to thy Master.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah. 

Saturday Poetry: Annie

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

On the train

A woman prettier than pretty

hair a red not found in nature

black stilettos worn for stature

butt made to serve tea.

She gets out from the same door as I

follow her down the steps

through a steel shamrock.

I am curious how easily she walks

and knows where she’s going.

To the token clerk, a lift of her hot ‘n cold cup.

He in his booth like a banished pup.

She turns around.

Come on, she says,

go with me.

You’re a nice girl.

Nowhere else you could be

but at the Shipyard.

Come on.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part III

I am going to keep this short because I've already used up my quotient of profanity for one day.  Came across this about Diane Well-I'll-Be-Goddamned Ravitch.  Like I said when I referenced her before here, here and here, I don't trust apostates.

What's the count now?  Three post-education reform books to tell the world what any person with sense already knew?  When schools like Choate, Dalton, Foote, Hopkins, St. Ann's, Sidwell Friends, Brooklyn Friends (you get my drift) start insisting on standardized tests and the curricula that love them, then I'll be convinced that No Child Left Behind is not the spawn of Satan.  In other words, in matters of education, I'll have whatever the elite is having.  Thankyouverymuch.

Etc.

I knew about the wrinkles and the aches and the pains.  I even was prepared for one's big nose to get bigger.  The sometimes not-so-subtle decline in energy, the been-there-seen-that attitude towards everything.  But the beard and mustache?  The teeth that break while you're eating a hamburger?  Come the fck on!?!?!?!?!

Geez.  Louise.  I'm old enough to expect that every quarterly visit to my internist will be followed with a "Let's run some tests ..." remark sure to send me into an anxious frenzy about tainted blood and exponentially massing tumors.  But waking up in the morning looking like a Snidely Whiplash avatar?  I.  Did.  Not.  Sign.  Up.  For.  This.

 When did I get old?  All of which has made me consider how to best get into the classroom as a math teacher.  Thinking now that I'll work towards certification so that at the pace I'm going (one class at a time) I should be finished by 63 years of age.  (Driving around the other day in the big-ass Nissan Cuthbert bought, slowing down just enough for some 10 year old boys to get out of the street before they became human Mobius strips and one of them says, Hi Grandma!  I'm done.)  I am trying to keep soul and body together enough to be effective.  (This summer's sojourn at the Fitness Center has been a life-saver.  My blood pressure is astoundingly normal.  It's so low that that I take my pulse to make sure I'm alive.)  The semester begins in a couple of weeks and along with the premature September weather (except there's still August light) -- watch, it'll be followed by one hell of an Indian Summer -- and the V-wedge of geese I very much feel that the summer is coming to it's end.

99% of the grand plans I had for the summer remain grand, and undone.  I've been working on the same short story for 3 months.  I'm practically rewriting every sentence (with the ghost of Raymond Carver looking over my shoulder) yet it feels premature and illegitimate.  Like putting lipstick on a pig because I don't think the story is fully baked, but without this kind of cosmetic attention I don't know if I'll stay embedded enough to figure out how to fix it.  I am putting an artificial deadline on getting it done.  I cannot, can't even conceive of doing fiction and doing combat with my next class, Algebraic Structures.  (4 credit hours of begging the professor pull out my fingernails instead, I'm sure.)  Off goes the writer's beanie, on goes the mathematician's beret.  If summer weren't so hot I'd order another month, but 30 additional days would just be the Sword of Damocles over my head 30 days longer.  So, it ends when it ends.  The story and the summer.

There are 2 things that I did accomplish:

1.  Strength-trained myself into better shape.  Now when I raise my arms I don't cause a tsunami in Indonesia, and

2.  made quite a lot of progress on my Front Yard of Eden (notice the pumpkin taking over):

 

If I'd Wanted Heat I Would-A Moved to Myrtle Beach

It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt.  Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about!  I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse.  I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather.  A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face.  I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere.  Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle Beach™ instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton.  Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead.  I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then.  I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.

My father was one of nine siblings.  We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George.  Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions.  My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression.  My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits.  That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense.  When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different.  I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north.  A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.

Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real.  The social order of centuries was just barely giving way.  My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college.  The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become.  Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated.  It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur.  There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home.  (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral.  After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.)  And undisguised poverty.

And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me.  I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes.  But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut.  Dunkin Donuts.  Walmart.  AutoZone.  Starbucks.  Sprint.  And Myrtle Beach?  The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.

So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns.  And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there).  And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.

Lake Street Dive Plays "I Want You Back"

Just got back from Myrtle Beach a few days ago.  I got nothin'.  So, enjoy this!

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part IV

Remember, I said that I was almost finished.  From one of my favorite blogs, The Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience, There's No Riot Going On.  He's uniformly brilliant in his analyses of American culture, literature and politics.  I don't get there often enough.

And, from a humane perspective, and it dovetails with the work our own West River community is doing, a commentary by Michel Martin, on NPR's Tell Me More an audio essay entitled Is It Time To See Each Other's Tears?

Word.
 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part III

I'm almost finished.  One thing that saddens me is that as we've turned into an almost entirely secular culture, the voices speaking about the morality of actions exits, or at least merely whispers in, the public square.  In it's place is legalistic hair-splitting, high school debate tactics deracinated of any purpose other than to dominate an opponent.  Amy Davidson posted a thoughtful piece, What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?, and for me the most valuable byproduct of it is a post by someone tagged theoutsider that comes as close to anything I've read so far of looking at what happened from a moral dimension:

OK, there are a lot of things that bother me about this case, but the thing that's getting to me the most right now is that a lot of people, when talking about how Martin behaved or should have behaved, are talking about him as though he was a fully-fledged adult. I don't personally believe he was a helpless innocent child, but he was also not a fully-grown man. And the reason I find this so irritating is because there are so many laws - not just in America but in many countries - which are predicated on the idea that until a person reaches a certain age (16, 18, 21, whatever) they are not allowed to do certain things largely because they lack the capacity to make good judgements in certain situations. It is assumed (sometimes correctly) that most people cannot make responsible judgements about things like alcohol, driving, sex, smoking, and enlisting until they reach a particular age.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part II

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice.  For me it's this:
 

That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort. It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws. On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you. But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. (n.b.: emphasis mine)  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

 And, for the record, yes, OJ was guilty as hell.
 

 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet

When I turned on the radio this morning one of the first things I learned is that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.  I was not surprised.  Long ago I learned that criminal law -- either prosecutorial or defensive -- has little to do with ethics.  I was about to say justice but even that term is loaded.

After have read a few of the past days' postings and the subsequent comments I stopped.  There is very, very little more to be learned from the immediate commentary and too many people commenting think they know 1) exactly what happened and 2) that they passed the Florida bar and are qualified to practice law.  But here are a few, I'll call them psychosocial, thoughts: 

1. Males fight.  And fights escalate.  The presence of a knife or a gun changes the dynamic and it allows one of the fighters to become more aggressive, or at the very least turn defense into disproportionate offense.  When that occurs, 2 things happen:  a) one of the aggressors de-escalates so much so that both parties internal "threat" switch is turned off, or b) extraordinary physical harm and/or death happens to the unarmed fighter.
2. Black males are the King-Kong of the American landscape.  And we all know it.  Charles Stuart knew it.  Susan Smith knew it.  Both used that knowledge to great effect.  Extreme examples, I know, but there was little or no initial skepticism of their claims in each instance that black men had been the perpetrators of the crime because it seemed so plausible.
3. A 17 year old kid is dead.  With an acquittal of the man who killed him, how do you possibly square that circle in a moral universe?

Saturday Poetry: Mantra (excerpt)

to be read aloud in staccato con brio:

Words words words

I make my loving from the

words words words

For instance

these words

the beginning of

another story.

Let's call it

2 trench coats

(or a cure is discovered

for polio).

She comes to he

who is a stranger

she is wet

through and through

her hair is

curling all around her

he is dry

as a bone

he has been

being taken pictures

of

for the Fashions of the Times

layout.

A trenchcoat in July.

But no matter

he doesn't sweat

his pores are too fine

for that.

Scuse me she says to him

tapping him on the shoulder

which he whose profile cuts

the air like an

origami bird

doesn't like

scuse me she ways

again and again and again.

Your attention

I want your attention

please.

he turns to her

he looks at her

trench coat

a good coat

in good shape

she may be worth

listening to

at

for

have you seen him?

she asks

him he says

him who?

God, she says

have you seen him?

He pauses poses

thinks

(Beauty can think, too)

and replies,

no.

No, he says

again

no.

But if I do

(for he expects to see him

but without leaving this earth),

if I do, he says,

you got anything

you want me to tell him?

Oh yes

she says

tell him tell him

tell him this for

me will you?

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

(how many times I got to say)

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me.

 

Q: What's A Black Plastic Bag to a Foster Kid?

A:  Luggage.

For much of the semester and summer I have been watching The Wire.  I first started watching a couple of years ago when my sister ordered it via Netflix.  I was probably never so nice to her as when those DVD's would come in the mail.  But, all good tailcoating must come to an end.

Then, godblessamerica, I found out that the local public library had some seasons on their shelves.  That didn't last long -- they would get checked out and never returned.  (I'm sure there's some library parlance for people who build their personal collection from public holdings.  My term of art would be Lazy Assholes, but that's just me.) 

 By then I'd watched much, but not all of the first 3 seasons.  Between bouts of math anxiety I realized that I was going to school at a state university and surely they would have it in their collection, perhaps because some sociology professor was using it.  So, I put on my most impressive bowtie and waltzed over to the circulation desk and alternately growled and grinned at the helpful work-study circulation clerk and before you know it I left the building with Season 4.  And a promise to hold Season 5 for me.  Then I went back and got Seasons 1, 2, and 3 and watched them all over again.

For those who don't know this, The Wire has been described as the greatest show in the history of television.  A Dickensian masterpiece of the 21st century.  It is studied and taught, it has blogs and forums devoted to it, and I am just one of its many obsessive "readers".  Like other great literature and visual art, I will return to the entire series again knowing that my understanding and appreciation will deepen.

But.  A funny thing happens on the way to becoming the darling of critics and intellectual arbiters.  Perhaps it's an occupational hazard as a critic to feel ownership of what you write about.  Perhaps, when you're a white, male critic in a hierarchy that always places you on top, you don't have to be cognizant of, much less mitigate, your blind spots.  I'll leave that to be sorted out to Cultural Studies Ph.D.s.  But in the copious analysis I've read (in a vain effort to stay immersed even after having watched all 5 seasons) I often feel only half-sated because there's so much richness that goes unrecognized.

I felt it for instance when I read about the accuracy of Dominic West's accent.  An English actor speaking the dialect of a working-class cop in a mid-southern city.  And not often enough about Idris Elba's (Stringer Bell) or Clarke Peter's (Lester Freamon) (the former is English, the latter an American expat who's lived in England for years).  Or Chicagoan Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale).  And then it dawned on me it's because it's the assumption that the white actor is further away from his "essence" than any of the black actors, who are, regardless of role, speaking the way they speak anyway, y'know what I'm sayin'?  Therefore his work is more deserving of plaudits and the astounding craft that the other actors bring to their roles is underappreciated.

Or, as in this post from The Wire Blog, entitled "Dumpsters and Garbage Bags".  I'm glad I found it and will come back to it as this obsessive constructs her own map of the show.  But I think the blogger, who's dissecting the entire series while he teaches the show, missed what to me was the obvious symbology of the garbage bags and why they are so brilliantly apt.  I wrote him:  To kids who've ever been in foster care, often the only "luggage" you own are garbage bags.  Kids arrive at their short- and long-term placements with all their worldly possessions in those bags.  They speak of impermanence, disposability, cheapness and lack of individuality.  Which can be the life of a foster kid.  So, a garbage bag is as familiar a totem to poor folks as a laptop or an iPhone is to a hipster.   My initial feeling was he should know that.  Maybe he should, but the more important issue is that I need to hear from women writers, from other black writers, from city dwellers.  How they watch this show and the insights they'd bring.  A roundtable of Rashomon-like POVs.

Notes on The Summer So Far

It's been a while, n'est-ce pas?  What can I say?

I am in recovery mode -- recovery from last semester's Foundations of Mathematics class, from the greater than usual marital strife, from a winter spent in the arms of a physical therapist.  And now it's summer.  That season I hate where my feet, encased in rubber bands -- or at least that's what it feels like to my nerve endings -- proceed to swell.  I can smell again:  With this much moisture in the air all the globules of matter from sweat, toilets, the kitchen's compost bucket, perfumes, and cooked food attached to the water molecules and travel up my nose.  I've started counting the days until September.

Here's the thing:  if I don't get the tough work done in the morning, it simply doesn't get done.  And by that I mean the writing.  I'm working on a story, "For Those Who Think Young", and am at what I'll call the molding and paring stage.    I start with the knife and carve off pages.  I take off words and paragraphs here, add words and paragraphs there.  I pinched a scene off and attach it to another part.  I walk around the creation, still dissatisfied, but not dissatisfied enough to punch the damn thing into a mound, pour water (totally new ideas) over it and start the wheel again.  It's an exercise in finding the essence of the story.  Two things I know about writing fiction:  1) there's the story you think you want to tell and 2) there's the story that emerges as you struggle to do 1).  On a few rare days the work goes well.  I am here in the office ignoring my surroundings.  It's just me, the paper and my favorite purple-inked pen.  Other days, the more common ones, I'd rather be doing almost anything else than writing.  A root canal without anesthesia?  Where do I go for that!?  How about a colonoscopy???  Sign me up, please!  Or a stint as a short-order cook at TGIF's?  Can't wait to begin!!!!  Just don't make me write.

Two things I am doing this summer that are different than last.  I am going to the gym.  I've grown to look forward to it.  I'm not fooled; there's always a honeymoon phase.  For now, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have a date with strength training.  I can see the difference in my body.  I even attribute the work to keeping my blood pressure shockingly low (at least for me), so much so that next time I see my internist I'll ask him to start tapering me off the meds.  And although my feet are permanently swollen these days they are are not nearly as huge as the watermelons of the Summer of 2012.  Don't get me wrong, my f(@#(#ked up back is still fckd up, my right hip still feels like someone stabbed me with a long needle, and I'm not too proud to ask for help to turn over, but still, things are much better.  I am stronger, nimbler and my arms don't look like cottage cheese dipped in chocolate fondue.

And I'm gardening again.  The peace treaty hammered out with Cuthbert left me with the front yard as my domain.  After hiring help to move raised beds, and turn the soil, I called on local gardener friends and pals and have planted a crazy quilt of hostas, echinacea, fewerfew, daisies, strawberry's, ferns, and who the hell remembers what that green thing is called.  Some of the transplants went into shock, but gardeners are patient animals, and I just whacked them back and sit in the dining room window with the day's first cup of coffee and imagine what next spring will look like. I think all this working out is so that I can get down on bended knee in the fall and plant some bulbs.

Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

Saturday Poetry: The Big Blonde

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

There are dreams

that belong to you

long before you know what to do with them.

You are memory’s steward

so that when

a dream comes, it is

as the comics say

déja vu all over again.

It’s not the first time since childhood

she’s been on my mind

The big blonde, sheathed in black

singing into the studio microphone

back when

Jazz was a thing supreme.

Remote then, behind the glass

not to be touched, a porcelain doll

Inviolate.

Now she greets me at the Shipyard’s gate.

My head bows as sunlight bursts off her platinum hair.

I just know behind the tortoiseshell frames

there are sapphires glistening on her face.

Then she smiles at me

Teeth couched in fuchsia lips.

For me time stops.

I am awake.

I Was Sposed to Keep My Mouth Shut

I still have rules.  Not many, particularly not many that I haven't broken exposing myself as a Liar and A Hypocrite (as well as a Gentleman and a Scholar), but some nevertheless.  For instance, I never drink alcohol before 11 am.  Kept that one.  So far.

As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven.  Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at  different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.

 I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too.  After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello.  Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.

I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday.  While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries. 

When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite.  And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk.  But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit.  Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....

And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy.  Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced.  It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do.  (Her:  Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.)  She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.

When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands.  She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city.  But, again, I cut her off.  Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood.  A fact and I'm not even angry about it.

Or am I?

Enervation

There are those words, that no matter how careful you are, you can't shake the original incorrect definition your brain has latched onto for dear life.  Enervation is one of those words for me.  I cannot help thinking such things as joyous, lighter than air, ephemeral, light, and so on and so forth.  Instead it means (h/t to Merriam Webster):
 Definition of ENERVATE

1: to reduce the mental or moral vigor of

2: to lessen the vitality or strength of

— en·er·vat·ing·ly adverb

— en·er·va·tion noun

Examples of ENERVATE

1. <a lifetime of working in dreary jobs had enervated his very soul>
2. <the surgery really enervated me for weeks afterwards>

And that, Dear Reader, is what I feel today after my first full body workout after about 10 years away from the gym.  How could I resist?  The university offers a 3 month membership for $25 (although godknows I've paid for this many times over in all the  "registration fees" I'm assessed each and every semester I enroll in a class.)  And since I've gotten tired of the sound of rotating helicopter blades every time I raise my hands above my head (and yes, my age cohort female friends, I'm talkin' about us) I thought why not?  Why not indeed?  I drove my sorry ass home, took a shower, sat upright for a half-hour and then promptly went to bed with my clothes on.  Tomorrow I expect to be put in an iron lung.

I've been through this twice before -- once in my late 30's when my friend Shawn seduced me into going to the Harlem Y with him.  (I should have put a camera around my neck and pretended I was a tourist.)  After that I told everyone who'd listen that I felt like I'd just birthed quintuples and then got run over by a Mack truck.  Then the bout of fitness in my late 40's because the Brooklyn Y was 2 blocks away.  That's where I started to lift weights and loathe yoga.  Both times I grew to love the bodywork; wouldn't miss it the way some wouldn't miss church.  Now, in my late 50's I'm at it again.

The stakes are higher for sure.  So far this year I've got a 4 figure physical therapy bill to pay down, and every time I stub my toe I fear I'll be paralyzed.  It's time to preserve what I've got and if I'm lucky maybe go at this long enough to actually experience an energy gain and significant weight loss.  I am my own summer project.  But first things first:  how am I going to get out of bed tomorrow?!

Mother's Day Observed

Only 2 things I’ve ever wanted to be in this world:

A Writer      √

A Mother    √

Lots of people I have to thank for that not the least of which is my own mother, Robbie, a woman who could put the loon back in lunatic and

Dailey

Khaalid

Lela

Lilli

Remo and

Shaquana

It is for them and because of them I live.

Happy Mother’s Day one and all …