Vermont and other states of mind

IN LOVING MEMORY OF DR. GERTRUDE NEILSON

2012-02-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

It is impossible to live on this planet and be entirely unaware of the freak show that is passing for a presidential campaign in this year 2012. Lately I have been drawn into the insane fulminations and strategies to oppose any health insurance plan that allows women to receive contraceptives. How can people be against abortion AND against contraception? Do they want to go back to the world of my childhood where women had eight kids, three teeth, and worked 18 hours a day seven days a week? What is wrong with these idiots!

I find myself remembering a heroic woman named Gertrude Neilson, a retired medical doctor who, at age 75, ran an illegal womans health care clinic in her home on the edge of the University of Oklahoma campus. In Oklahoma in the 1960s it was a felony to sell or otherwise provide contraceptive devices to any unmarried person below the age of 21. There were a few gas stations around town where the men's room had a machine that sold Trojans at three for a quarter. At that price they were famous for breaking, in flagrante delicto. There were folk remedies involving coke cola and saran wrap. And there was trying to jump out of a 4th story window, as one my dorm mates, who found herself pregnant and disowned by her religious fanatic parents, tried to do.

But that wasn't all we had. We had Dr. Gertrude Neilson, whose name and phone number were written on the walls of every lady's room on campus and for a several-mile radius beyond. She provided contraceptives, sex education, and well women's care to any young woman who had the courage to knock on her door.

It did take courage. We were for the most part virtuous young ladies brought up in the 1950s, crossing our ankles and waiting for Mr. Right, as God and our parents expected of us. In going to Dr. Neilson's unmarked door we were defying our parents, God, and the State of Oklahoma.

I remember my journey to Dr. Neilson's door. I had fallen in love with beautiful Brenn of the wavy black hair and big brown eyes, who read poetry out loud. Our attempts to stop the train just short of the Promised Land were becoming increasingly feeble and half-hearted. We planned to spend the rest of our lives together, so how wrong could it be? I called Dr. Neilson and in a tiny, quaking voice requested an appointment. She had a pronounced Norwegian accent and a rich, warm voice. "You come in and see me. It's okay. I see you soon!"

She lived in a big, two-story brick house surrounded by beds of flowers. I walked up the path to her door and across the big wooden porch like a person on her way to be hung. I rang the door bell and stood there, quaking and wondering if I was going to pass out. I was a sinner, and, with this act of premeditation, a first degree sinner.

The door opened and big, wonderful old woman who looked like the star of every oatmeal commercial you've ever seen reached out one big calico-covered arm and pulled me in, chuckling and making warm, little clucking noises. She interviewed me, went over me from head to toe, gave me wise counsel about love, sex and life, and then gave me birth control pills, saying, "Now, these take one month to start working so you stay on the wagon for one month!" shaking her finger vigorously. "Then you come back and see me again, so I see you are okay!"

I floated out of her office on a pink cloud of love and anticipation. On behalf of all the many hundreds of young women you saved from forced marriages, lives postponed, back alley abortions, suicide, Dr. Neilson, I thank you.

16 PICTURES OF ANGELINA GRIMKE - WHAT ARE THEY WORTH?

2012-01-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

Kathy Freeperson - poet, performance artist, radical feminist, activist, all around troublemaker - was my dear friend and writing partner for ten years. In 1992 we wrote and directed an evening of performance art, called BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT, that was so kick-ass wonderful women drove 200 miles to see it, and we filled the theater every night for a three-weekend run. We were then invited to perform it on the main stage at Florida State University in Tallahassee. At the end of the show, the audience rushed the stage. Poets don't often get to feel like rockstars - that was our night!

Shortly thereafter we were invited by the Women's Studies Department at FSU to give a Saturday afternoon poetry workshop, for which we would be paid $75 apiece. When it came to poetry, Kathy and I were easy lays - we would go almost anywhere for $75.

Kathy had many wonderful qualities, but when it came to money she was cheaper than Holloween candy on the Fourth of July. No one ever came out on top in a financial transaction with Freep (as she was called). So when I learned that our money would come in the form of a $150 check made out and mailed to Kathy, I could see that even on my economic scale, this was not going to be a profitable venture.

We worked out the finances of going up to Tallahasse. We would split the gas and motel bill evenly. Since I don't drive Kathy would have to do all the driving. In return I would pick up the restaurant tabs. Kathy ate often and she ate hearty, so this was going to be no small outlay.

We were accompanied by Kathy's 18-year-old toy poodle, Angelina Grimke, who was blind, arthritic, and farted incessantly. Kathy insisted that Angelina ride on my lap the whole trip there and back - to keep her safe and because, as she explained to Angelina who kept attempting to hobble into the back seat, "Your Aunt Arupa loves you SO MUCH."

It takes the state of Florida a long time to get around to paying people, so Kathy got our $150 check about three months later. She came over and gave me $20, explaining that "I had to pays some bills, and I'll get the rest to you later." Two months later she dropped by and gave another 20 dollars. I said that getting the money this way was taking some of the ya yas out of getting 'magic poetry money', as we called it. Kathy sniffed and said, "Unlike me, you are a married woman receiving the benefits of white male privilege so you should have no complaints." Okay.

A few months after that Kathy came by and gave me a Kodak envelope. She said it contained copies of all the pictures she had taken on the trip and should be more than equivalent to the 35 dollars she owed me. Whatever. I took the pictures. Later on I opened the envelope to find two pictures of me, two pictures of Kathy, and sixteen pictures of Angelina Grimke. I muttered, "**** you Freep!" and stuffed them into the back of a desk drawer.

In 2002 Kathy died of complications from diabetes. I was with her when she died. I knew from one of her poems what song her mother always sang to her when she was
falling asleep, so I held her hand and sang, "You are My Sunshine" as she drifted peacefully out of this world.

Several years later, when the whole episode of our trip to Tallahasse was long forgotten, I was cleaning out my old desk and found the 16 pictures of Angelina Grimke. The years fell away and I was remembering my beloved Freep and all the times we had - nothing could have brought it all back more than these pictures! I was so glad that she hadn't paid me with pieces of paper I would have taken to the store and traded for toilet paper and cat food. What is that worth? Sixteen pictures of Angelina Grimke turned out to be priceless.

Love you, Kathy.

God of the Magic Hair Brush

2012-01-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

I found that day, broke,
my hair so thick and curly
I'd have to cut it off my head,
still in its plastic case,
a new hair brush to replace
the one I lost.

'I won't replace all you lost,
your mother, father, sister,
gone forever,
but here's a new hair brush
just so you'll know I'm here,
as you walk the long, long road.'

'To streets of gold?
really.

'Now I'm old,
I've walked another forty years
on the long, long road.
I need another hair brush,
soon.'

THE GREAT FIMO EPIDEMIC OF 1976

2011-11-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

Fimo is a form of clay that is used by architects to build models. In art supply stores it is sold in brightly colored squares. Fimo is very pliable and can be baked in home ovens. It is perfect for making miniatures. In 1976, at McGraw-Hill, none of us had heard of Fimo until one day Helen walked into the employees lounge wearing large fruit basket earrings that were the most remarkable items most of us had ever seen hanging from a human ear, except in illustrations in National Geographic. They were perfectly made and shiny. With these earrings you could get a job in the chorus line of South Pacific. Helen announced that she had made these earrings herself. That was pretty hard to believe. Helen spent her spare time going through catalogues and ordering Stale Cracker Refreshers and soap dishes that play Edeilweiss. If she could do this!

That weekend found most of us at the art supply store buying Fimo. Fimo turned into an obsession. It even reached the point that an informal support group of Fimo widowers formed - men who had been living on TV dinners and spending lonely evenings watching TV with Mr. Hand, for months and months. I would overhear them in the lounge,

"She comes home from work and walks straight to the Fimo table."

"I woke up at 4 a.m. and she was at the Fimo table."

I began to moonlight for a dollhouse store, I made little plates of bacon and eggs or hamburger and fries and fruit bowls, mainly. Then I got an order to make 45 dogs, each one a recognizable breed. I had minus zero qualifications for this task. I sweated like a pregnant wart hog trying to make a banana that actually looked like a banana. So of course I said, "Yes,no problem, when do you want them?"

I had a month. I checked dog books out of the library and spent every waking moment I wasn't at work - unto the wee small hours of the morning - on this project. Dalmations. Russian Wolf Hounds, Jack Russell Terriors... Every moment I had to be outside I studied each passing dog. Months after the dog order was completed, I'd see a dog and my first thought would be, "He's scratching his ear at a 45 degree angle."

A week or two into this dog project I began to feel poorly. I was living on crackers and getting 4 hours of sleep a night. So I devised a special diet that could be prepared in advance and that would include an item from each category in the Food Pyramid.

FIMO DIP: Sour cream (dairy), bacon bits (meat), canned peas (green vegetable), dried onion soup mix (salad?)served with potato chips (starch), and peanut M&Ms (nut).

I actually finished this order, to the satisfaction of the shop owner and got my five cents an hour. It was, for me, what alcoholics call, "Hitting bottom." My Fimo obsession tapered off, as it did for my fellow addicts. To this day I have a few squares of Fimo in my scrap box, and once in a blue moon I make a hot dog or an apple.

MY EXPERIENCES WITH BANKING AND THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM: A PERSONAL MEMOIR

2011-10-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the plight of those who are watching their 401Ks (whatever they are) disppear into the maw of the one percent, have brought to mind my own memories of participation in capitalist America. They began early.

My mother gave birth to me nine months and one day after her 18th birthday. My father, whatever his sins may have been, did not engage in conception with an underage female. My mother was not prepared to be a parent. My parents had me call them Edith and Bill, and that is what they were, an Edith and a Bill. Edith struggled with parenthood, with a spectacular lack of success (that is another story) until Bill dumped us. I was three at the time. She left me in Vermont where I ended up living with my grandmother. My grandmother was less than thrilled. Nevertheless, she took up this role of caretaker with a grim and Vermontish determination to do it right.

For my sixth birthday I received several greeting cards, from friends of the family, that each contained a dollar bill. Visions of ice cream cones and barrettes danced in my head, until my grandmother announced that it was time for me to learn thrift and the value of money. She took me to the local bank and opened a savings account for me, with these dollar bills. She was the co-signer on the account, due to my extreme youth. I stood in the cavernous, Dickensian lobby of the bank and watched my birthday money disppear, to be replaced by a small ledger book, with my deposit recorded by hand. The bank manager came out from behind the massive mahogany counter and shook my hand. He welcomed me to the family of depositors at the First National Bank of North Bennington, Vermont and gave me a short lecture on the importance of saving money for one's future.

On a happier note, she also opened a Christmas Club for me, which I was to pay into at the rate of fifty cents a month, money that I could earn by doing extra chores. The following November I would receive $12 to spend on buying Christmas presents. I thought this was cool. The happiest day of the year at our house was the day we went to the nearby metropolis of Bennington and did our Christmas shopping, at Woolworths, which had a vast array - a Sultan's treasury - of fabulous gifts that could be purchased for five and ten cents apiece. Twelve dollars was a fortune and I was able to amaze my friends and relatives with little glass animals, a ceramic rooster, hair bands, and once some very cute little glasses with people dancing on them, that I bought for my grandmother. They were shot glasses. My teetolling grandmother had years and years of fun telling the story of how she received a set of shot glasses from me when I was in the third grade. Christmas shopping day was also the one day of the year that we ate at a restaurant, always the same one - The Green Mountain Diner - where we would have a hot turkey sandwich and a piece of apple pie. This was our yearly glimpse into lifestyles of the rich and famous, and we both savored every moment of it.

As the years rolled by, she continued to deposit my Christmas and birthday money into the savings account, and to show me the little book that slowly grew until, when I was a senior in high school, I had almost three-hundred dollars. It was in April of my senior year that my personal 1K (as opposed to 401K) bit the dust. I came home from school and walked in to find my grandmother smiling from ear to ear as she gazed down on a long-held dream come true - a brand new vacuum cleaner. She had closed out my account and bought a vacuum cleaner and a few other incidentals. She was ecstatic!

My reaction at the time was a kind of weary, "whatever." The money had never seemed like mine anyhow. In retrospect, I am able to be even more forgiving. My grandmother had known very little in her life but hard work and deprivation. She grew up working on her father's farm. When she was 16 her father sold her to a French Canadian logger who walked down to Vermont looking for a wife. When she was 17 she had her first baby. Her husband turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic and she spent the rest of her life working and raising children. She really wanted that vaccuum cleaner and by God she saw a chance to get it and got it she did! Good for you, Gramma, wherever you are. You were right - I was young and I had a better shot at life than you ever did. I didn't need the three hundred dollars.

The day after I graduated from high school she put me on a plane bound for Oklahoma City, where Edith had been living all those years. She had re-married and produced two more children. I was to spend the summer with her and then start life at the University of Oklahoma. Despite the demise of my savings account, I had money with me, $400 I had earned writing the best essay on "Why I Want to Be a Vermont Tree Farmer." This essay contest was sponsored by the Vermont Tree Farmers Association and was open to all Vermont high school seniors. I had no desire whatsover to become a tree farmer but I did know that I had a talent for writing and to heck with the poor sods that actually wanted to become tree farmers.

I graduated from high school on a Saturday night, boarded the plane on Sunday morning, and arrived in Oklahoma City Sunday night. Edith, who was the manager of Manpower Inc., a temp agency, gave me the glad tidings that I had a job, beginning at 8 a.m. the following morning, as a file clerk at the Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles. I had a pretty good case of whiplash that might be called Solomon Grundy Syndrome. Remember him?

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy.

When Edith helped me unpack she discovered the money order for $400 and suggested that I let her deposit it into her account, where it would be safe until I left for college in the fall. Here we go again....(my private thoughts), but I was a compliant child and I signed the money order over to her. The Department of Motor Vehicles paid me $35 a week. Edith gave me an allowance for busfare and nylons and that sort of thing and put the rest of my princely income into her account.

In the fall - surprise! - she told me that she had borrowed my money to cope with unforeseen expenses. I asked when she was going to pay me back and she snapped, "I've provided you with free room and board all summer and you have the nerve to ask me when I'm going to pay you back?" I concluded that the answer was "never," and indeed it was. When she and her husband dropped me off at the dorm her husband slipped me ten dollars and I began life on my own in capitalist America.

I did have a job, however. I was enrolled in the University's Work Study Program. There was one hitch. The University had a Student Minimum Wage of 60 cents an hour. The program was actually a form of indentured servitude whereby students bussed tables, scrubbed pots and pans, reshelved library books, cleaned the football stadium, raked leaves, pulled weeds - etc. etc. - for sixty cents an hour. Banking was not a problem. Even in the fall of 1963 sixty cents an hour disappeared so fast, I even had to shop lift an occasional tube of toothpaste, just to get by.

When I got real jobs, later in life, and had a little real money, I still never put much away into banks. The way I saw it, you could spend your life working at the Widget Factory and saving for your old age, or you could spend your money going places and having experiences and doing whatever it was you really wanted to do. So I opted for that. Let the ants have a safe old age. I would be a grasshopper (or as James Joyce so wonderfully said, "A Gracehoper.")

That was my heritage from Edith and my grandmother - don't spend your life working and banking - you may lose it all anyhow. Follow your dreams. Thank you, oh my distant progenitors, for this wonderful lesson. Even if I wind up spending my old age living under a bridge, I will be grateful for the wonderful life I've had.

DELICIOUS SLOTH....

2011-10-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

The best apartment I ever lived in as a single person was on Debarr Street in Norman, Oklahoma, when I was a college student at OU. It was a clunky two-story brick building, the front porch held up by square black columns, two apartments on each floor. I lived on the second floor where I had a two-bedroom apartment with a big living room, fire place, and small kitchen, for $80 a month all bills paid. I rented out the second bedroom to a young woman who needed an address so her parents wouldn't know she was living with her boyfriend, and lived there in splendor, for $40 a month. You could step out of the kitchen window on to a flat roof, where I kept plants and a couple of lawn chairs.

Football Saturdays were the best. Fans, big fat guys in red three-piece suits and red cowboy hats, with wives in red dresses, would flock into town. Me and my friends would be running up and down the street selling parking places we didn't own for $5 a piece. Then we would take our ill-gotten gains and buy a bag of pot for ten dollars and a whole bunch of junk food and lie out on my roof garden. None of us cared a rat's rear end about football but we deeply relished the prayer - a nasal intonation - broad cast for miles - asking the Lord to look out for our brave boys on the field and bring them victory. At some point there would be the best moment of all - still one of the musical highlights of my life - ten thousand people all singing "The Nose of Oklahoma Smells You, All the Livelong Day." Boy howdy, it just doesn't get any better than that. We ate and smoked and giggled our way through many a long fall afternoon.

When did I lose all that - when did I turn into a workaholic who feels guilty if she is not always doing something useful - whether it be cleaning the refrigerator or meditating, writing a poem or weeding the garden - when did I decide that I needed to move my life forward 18 hours a day seven days a week? I think it happened somewhere along the 25-year trail of raising two teenagers, caring for an aging parent, earning a living, running a community theater and, for the past nine years, managing a mobile soup kitchen - all while trying to redeem my soul and achieve self-actualization. What a load of baloney!

Maybe its also my Vermont childhood still haunting me. Every Saturday I had to memorize a psalm or a poem, chosen by my grandmother, and then declaim it for her Ladies Aid Society. This, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was her favorite:

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

-HWL

I spent today on the couch reading Huckleberry Finn and listening to old Irish music and eating raisin toast and grapes. There is hope for me!

THE RICH LADY ON THE HILL

2011-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Her name was Mrs. Whitaker. She lived in a two story white house, surrounded by green lawns and a formal rose garden. She had floor to ceiling windows, lace curtains, plum velvet drapes, silver bowls and Aubusson carpets. An invitation to her house put one, however temporarily, in the upper echelon of Prunewhip, Vermont's social register. When I was four Mrs. Whitaker gave a formal tea for the women of the Ladies Aid Society and my grandmother was invited. She took me along, scrubbed until I was raw, tortured into a state of sausage curls, strangled by a high-collared white blouse - as W.C. Fields said on his deathbed, "All in all, I would rather [have been] in Philadelphia."

Before my grandmother rang Mrs. Whitaker's doorbell (she had a doorbell!), she lined me up against the side of the house and said, "When we are inside, if you see anything unusual, don't talk about it unless someone else talks about it first!" She said it in her, "Disobey this and you will be found floating face down in the Walloomsac River" tone of voice.

We were ushered into Mrs. Whitaker's drawing room and immediately I saw something most unusual. In fact, I had the best view in the house of this most unusual sight, since I was several feet closer to the floor than the other guests. Scattered around the drawing room floor were small irregular lumps, each one covered by a lace doily.

I was so mesmerized by this display (oh so many years later this would become Installation Art...), I barely noticed the single-breasted (blue serge stretched over girdles that turned two breasts into one formidable rampart), mustached women cooing over me and passing me cookies. I waited until they were deep in conversation and pulled up a doily. Sure enough, just as I suspected, a petrified cat turd white with age.

Now this was unusual! In my limited experience, people did talk about unusual events. I sat in corners for hours on end listening to women talk about the antics of drunken husbands, newly weds who gave birth to extremely large premature babies, the idiots from California who tapped the elm trees in their front yard, etc. etc. This was more unusual than any of that, as far as I was concerned. I waited avidly for someone else to talk about the petrified cat turds cum doilies so that I could talk about them also. No one ever said a word.

I left this grand social event with the renewed conviction that grownups were part of some strange species I would never understand.

STARCOW

2011-09-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

The 1970s was the era of affirmations and prosperity consciousness. Groups of people danced in circles chanting "I AM HEALTHY, I AM PERFECT, ALL THE LOVE AND ABUNDANCE OF THE UNIVERSE IS FLOWING UNTO ME." I never made it very long at one of these sessions, to which I had been dragged by an enthusiastic friend, because my bullshitometer would be clanging so loudly, I had to escape the pain.

Nevertheless, in my own way, I have sought happiness and self-improvement. Today I realized that I am a STARCOW. That stands for Sick, Tired, Anxiety-Ridden, Crazy Old Woman. I accepted it. I started to like it. I could see myself, in a field in Vermont, bathed by light of moon and stars. My udders are withered and they hang low, my mottled hide is baggy, my future most uncertain - but oh, I am so beautiful - I am such an exquisite bit of mosaic in the body of Eternal, Universal Isness.

Once I embraced myself, once I accepted that I am a STARCOW, the negative judgments and conflicts I have been feeling with other people and with life itself, began to fall away. Maybe he is not a STARCOW. Maybe he is a SUDBARP (Scared, Uptight, Denial-Based, Angst-Ridden Politician). Maybe she is a DOPE (Defensive, Opinionated, Pretentious, Egomaniac). We are all something. Very few of us are Buddhas. But we are part of the mosaic-of-is. We are perfect. We don't have to become perfect to be perfect. LIfe does not have to be perfect to be perfect.

O Blessed World of Oatmeal

2011-07-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

grits gesthemane
blue baboons balloons moons
behind the world
above the fallen stars
of Ferlinghetti's
enormous
courageous
muddy boots
of cumming's Spring
we love
no caring
death may come
with Wordsworth's
daffodils.

OFF MY MEDS

2011-05-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

PHYSICAL METAPHYSICAL DADA DOO DADA*

dear einstein,

no time,

all life death earth air fire water
beds toilets ravioli
be
simul-heinous salvation

we are
anunciated starvelated, inebriacious ballerinas
Bibles barking door-to-door

as
wholly holy guacamole hooked and hooking
nookie-selling neon smokey town down corners,
beans to home and dominoes.

fumbling, tumbling lenten-lentil cheering
all the teams from here to here.

caucus, bacchus, pontiff, sacradental
wholly holy colostocomical donations.

grateful stately succulent jumping from a cake
this evening Year’s New Moose Lodge goosing,
now

stumbling down the garbonzo chain gang
garbage road of grace.

hanging by the neck until alive!

ambiguously ever after,

sincerely you,
arupa

*In an age where irrationality, materialism, and militarism have taken over – is it not time for a Nouveau DaDa movement? Let’s all Dadadadadada up and down the streets – in our golden slippers.

Poems du Jour

2011-05-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Least of These

Jesus

you got the shakes
picking up butts
on 13th Street,
some of them are long,
God is good.

Tennessee splits a
6-pack with you along
the banks of
Sweetwater Branch,
it’s all good.

Except Keesha’s on a rampage
wants your butt hanging from
a rusty tent pole
you head up stream,
fill a water bottle at the bus depot
for JC so he can boil his
colostomy bag,
out here
where You live.

_______________________________

Jane 6:13
stringbean hub
of the wheeled universe
comfort me..
long and green and cool
straight out of the can
or hanging on a dusty vine
in somebody’s grandmother’s garden.

2011-04-29T08:10:00.001-07:00

HONORING PAINFUL LEGACIES

2011-03-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

This week our nation honored the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. I remembered an elderly woman I met at a bus stop some thirty years ago. We began to exchange pleasantries. She then introduced herself, first telling me her name and then telling me that she was a survivor of the Triangle fire. She told me the story. She cut her thumb on a piece of machinery and was sent downstairs to get bandaged. While she was gone the fire broke out. This woman had children and grandchildren. She was retired from owning her own dress shop. She had traveled the world with her husband. Still, 65 years later, she defined herself as a survivor of that fire.

I began to think about why certain events become how we define ourselves. In my case, I define myself as a person who survived growing up in a violent family. All that I have done - all the therapies I experienced , all the spiritual journeys I have gone on, the works of art and writing I have created, and even my current occupation as a provider of homeless services are and have been a response to my childhood and part of my healing journey.

In my case you will never hear me say, "It was worth it." I would cheerfully refund everything I have gained as an artist and a human being to have spared my family the horrors we experienced. It was not worth it. Still, it is so important to honor and to make use of painful legacies. Otherwise, all that pain becomes useless and meaningless. It is wasted.

So, my friends, do not waste your pain regarding yourself as unfortunate or seeking solace at the bottom of a bottle. And when you do, turn the experience into a play, a song, a poem, or a foundation for helping other troubled souls.

KODAK MEMORES

2011-03-01T15:56:00.000-08:00

Summer 1962, at the music theater in Nyack, I shared a six-bedroom house with many other theater employees. One of them was George Finkel, the cello professor at Bennington College. One Wednesday night the household decided to go across the river into New York City for a night of drinking. I was not invited because I was deemed to be too young for this event. George had to stay home also because his wife said he had already had too much to drink.

After the revelers left George went upstairs. I turned off the lights and sat in a corner of the livingroom, staring out an open window at the full moon and smelling the scent of honeysuckles. Then I heard George coming down the stairs. He was carrying his cello and a glass of whiskey. He didn't see me. He sat down in a straight backed chair in front of the fire place, set the glass down on the floor and positioned his cello.

There, in the darkness and the moonlight, he sat and played by heart all the Bach cello concertos - with such feeling and such virtuosity - I left time and was in Eternity. I can still be there.

-THE END-

2011-03-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

2.

A few years later I was sharing an apartment with a tiny blonde student named Charlene. She grew up in a town with a name like 'Fred, Oklahoma,' where her father was the pastor of an extreme right fundamentalist church. She spent her childhood dressed like a character from "Little House on the Prairie," living in a house that had no radio, no television and no secular literature. The main form of recreation was nightly prayers and Bible study. Charlene celebrated her liberation from this environment by entering a passionate love affair with a 6' 2" graduate student from Ethiopia.

One day Charlene was off with her lover and I was home recovering from a bout of the flu. I was wearing an old flannel nightgown with orange juice dribbles down the front and a long tear under one sleeve. There was a knock on the door. I walked out of my room and discovered that my dog Moses had gotten into the trash, carried it into the living room and sorted it at his leisure, doing such a thorough job that the entire living floor was covered with an even layer of eggshells, coffee grounds, banana peels, unmentionable items recovered from a wastebasket in the bathroom....

I still answered the door, assuming it was just one of the other
student degenerates who lived down the hall. I opened the door and there stood Charlene's parents. Something clicked inside my head and I passed into a whole new, expanded state of consciousness. I became the Zen Observer standing on the bridge watching the scene unfold.

"Come in," I said. "Charlene isn't here but you are welcome to wait for her. Would you like a cup of coffee?" I spoke while leading them across the carpet of garbage, to the couch, as grandly as Queen Victoria leading guests into her private sitting room at Buckingham Palace. They collapsed onto the sofa, their eyeballs fixed at the ceiling. Sweat was breaking out on her father's forehead and her mother was breathing in little asthmatic puffs. After about two minutes they jumped up babbling about remembering another place they had to be - out of town - far out of town - and scrambled for the door, with me waving graciously and saying, "Charlene will be so sorry she missed you. Have a good trip!"

-THE END-

KODAK MEMORIES

2011-03-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

1.

Summer 1962 I got a job playing my viola in the pit of a summer stock theater in Nyack, New York. I wasn't much of a musician, but violists were hard to come by, and I also agreed to babysit for the directors 4 kids every other weekend. On the last day of the theater season I woke up with bronchial pneumonia - lungs rattling, 104 degree temperature - the full drama. I ended up in an oxygen tank in a Catholic hospital in Suffern, New York. After a few hasty visits from other theater employees, exspressing their extreme grief at leaving me in this unfortunate situation, I was alone. No books, no cards, no visitors.

At one point a priest walked into the room and stared down at me. I couldn't talk but my mind began babbling: "Father, I am heartily sorry for I have sinned. I have taken the name of the Lord in vain on several occasions, I lied to get served alcohol at a bar, and then I let Fred Lindsey feel my..." Oh, he's leaving. I'm not dying! Yahoo!

After I got out of the oxygen tank, I noticed an old cleaning woman who came in my room every day, pushed the broom around, emptied the wastebaskets, made a few passes with a dustcloth and left. She was a classic - fat with wisps of gray hair pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck, wearing a shapeless cotton housedress that was permanently hiked up just a little in the back, to accommodate her world-class caboose, ankle socks and old tennis shoes cut open at the sides to accommodate bunions. Of course I, age 17, saw her as a visitor from another planet.

I still couldn't talk above a whisper, but my eyes followed her around the room. She came over to my bed, stared down at me, and started talking. "You're young. There's still hope for you. Spend your life being alive. Most people spend their whole lives eating, drinking, sleeping, going to work, and watching TV. If you have a chance to go on an adventure - go! To hell with the consequences. I'm just an old fat woman but last year I visited my cousin in Florida and rode a surf board. the year before I jumped out of an airplane with a parachute. Be alive!"

Sometimes angels come in the form of old fat ladies with bad feet. She changed my life forever.

-THE END-

THE FAMILY CHRISTMAS LETTER

2010-12-25T08:35:00.000-08:00

Back in the sixties I worked on a hometown print shop that handled everything from Chamber of Commerce brochures to Bar Mitzvah invitations. Every December family Christmas letters - complete with Mom, Dad, Dick, Jane, Puff and Spot sitting under the tree - was a large part of our business. The proletariot, such as myself, who worked in the typesetting/proofreading department loved to read these missives outloud, giggling uncontrollably:

"It has been another Merry Madcap Year at the Hollister Homestead. Fenwick was elected to the City Council in March. In June we smiled bravely as we waved off our beloved daughter Honoria who is leaving us for her fellowship at Oxford. Bon Voyage! She has had a good year there, focusing on linguistics during the Pre-Cambrian era. Gabriel made the water polo team at Groton.

If you think Mildred is sitting home with Empty Nest Syndrome - I should be so lucky!.....(I will mercifully spare you the details of Mildred's wonderful year)."

Years later I would occasionally send out a family Christmas letter of my own, to a very select group of recipients:

"We managed to keep the kids off drugs for another year, we think. Freeman's exwife and her boyfriend lived on our screened-in porch for the month of April. We're not sure why, except they seem to be between assignments. etc, etc."

Real memories for real Christmas letters - might be across time and space, a lacy, silvered tapestry of moments floating like an unmoored Constellation through Infinity. (Think I could win the Bullwar Lytton Award for that sentence?)

I remember walking through the Vermont woods with my grandmother. I think it was in March. I was four years old. She took me to the base of a large tree and began diggging the snow. There, maybe four to six inches down, she uncovered the furled leaves and buds of next year's wildflowers. I especially remember the violets - so intensely green and purple against the mulch and soft Spring snow. Then she carefully buried them again.

In retrospect I think this wonderful/terrible Vermont grandmother may have had bipolar disorder. There was also the time she threw the Christmas tree out the front door of our house on Christmas morning. In a town of 1500 people this was Front Page News.

I remember searching through the snow, to find ornaments, and finding an antique, spun-glass, handpainted apricot that had been in our family for more than a hundred years. Miraculously, this enormously fragile ornament was unbroken. I hope that this apricot still decorates a Christmas tree in one of my cousin's living rooms.

TO BE CONTINUED....

Food Pantry Thanksgiving Blues

2010-11-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

Come be lost with me.
I have a number ten can of beef ravioli,
a case of Vienna sausages,
forty-four jars of peanut butter,
apples and oranges.

I want that paper mache turkey that
travels from set to set on a
TV soap opera show -
first out at Tent City,
then to St. Augustines Student Center,
then to me -
so fine.

I want my grandmother and my Uncle Seth,
transformed by the company of angels,
to come back from the next world,
carrying side dishes of
cranberries, walnuts and greens.

I want my old cat to come home.

I'm thankful for toilets,
running water,
a bed.

The Only Way Out

2010-11-19T08:28:00.000-08:00

the leap into Nothingness
for only there
do blueberry frigates drift
through oats and milk

a blue square from a pack of rolling papers

Blue

Square

source of all Art that
ever was or ever will be.

Outside the world of
the electrified frog lying on a slab
in high school biology
(back when apple blossom clouds
drifted through the air)

the legs jump
although it's dead!

Just like me
except Now

1950s Women

2010-04-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

In Prunewhip, Vermont in the fifties, children ran in packs, in and out of each other’s houses. One scene I witnessed almost every day, at least once, ran something like this: The father of the family heads out saying, “I’m going to the hardware store.” The mother immediately scoops up the nearest three-year-old and holds her out saying, “Take Baby Snooks with you.”

He’s trapped, since Baby Snooks is clapping her hands in joy. It was decades later when I realized that this was a control mechanism. Baby Snooks was her insurance policy that he would not follow the trip to the hardware store with four hours at a bar watching sports on the little black and white TV that sat on the shelf over every bar in town. Even though he didn’t help with housework or cooking, he was someone else for the kids to interact with while she went about her endless rounds of work. He wouldn’t come home drunk after spending a pile of money. Everywhere you went in Prunewhip, you’d see middle-aged men and three-year-olds traveling together..

Most husbands in the 1950s had total control of household funds. Women were given an allowance, out of which they were expected to buy groceries, clothing and school supplies for the children, and cleaning products. Anything left over they could - whoopee! - spend on themselves. Men often had expensive hobbies involving ham radio equipment, woodworking shops, power boats, fishing rods, guns. They went on weekend hunting and fishing expeditions with their friends.

Women, of course, wanted money. Most women had some kind of home business where they made what was commonly referred to as ‘pin money.” Women sold Tupperware and Avon. Some of them ran chickens in their backyards and sold the eggs. Others gave hair cuts and perms in a one-dryer hair parlor set up in a corner of their kitchens. They also saved Raleigh cigarette coupons and green stamps. They did a lot of dreaming - pouring over the catalog of items one could get for only three thousand cigarette coupons or five books of green stamps. They dreamed of new sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. A vacuum cleaner meant you didn’t have to roll rugs, take them out to the clothesline, and beat on them. Steam irons - that meant you didn’t have to roll and sprinkle the ironing anymore. Money meant you could buy a brand new prom dress for your 16-year-old daughter. She wouldn’t have to go to the prom in her cousin’s hand-me-down orange spaghetti-strap chiffon formal, which would have to be taken in and lengthened and would still be plug ugly.

If these women sound like a bunch of self-sacrifing ‘patient Griselda’s', think again. They were keenly aware of the inequities of their situation, and many of them had enormous contempt for men. I know this because my friend Joanne’s mother had a beauty parlor. We sat in a corner for hours on end listening to the women condemn men and laugh at them. Men were lazy, stupid and mean. Horror stories were met with gasps and lowered voices - we strained to hear, “You mean her arm is in a cast??” Tales of male buffoonery were told out loud, with lots of laughter. As the women warmed to their topics they would forget Joanne and I were there, and share strategies for avoiding sex with men, particularly when they were drunk. I lived in a household that had no men, and counted myself lucky in that regard. As a prepubescent female, I wondered why women ever got involved with these creatures in the first place. I considered the possibility of becoming a nun - it would be three hots and a cot, with no stigma of being an old maid. Furthermore, it would be a ticket to Heaven, and show all those morons in the sixth grade what a special and sanctified person I actually was. Win - win - win! At night I knelt by my bed and told God I was waiting for the call.

This is obviously not a fair and balanced account of gender roles in the fifites. In part, though, this was how it was. Although women have not achieved complete equity with men, we really have come a long way.

fEBRUARY IS OVER

2010-03-12T14:12:00.000-08:00

In Vermont in the fifties, February was a mean month. Houses had acquired a permanent smell of snowsuits drying behind a kerosene heater in the 'warm room.' The snow in town was gray and the surface of it speckled like a pock-marked face. Small children looked into their mothers' eyes and saw reflected bck themselves upon a platter, their rosebud mouths plugged with withered macintosh from the barrel in the cellar. Linda Kenyon's mother was seen at the post office with one black eye, and her arm in a cast. It was still unremittingly cold.

In school the teacher read a sonnet:
"When Winter Comes, can Spring be far behind?"
We laugh, and she moved on to long division.

Each evening my grandmother sent me down to the root cellar to forage for vegetables. By late February there were only a few carrots, limp as drunken bridegrooms. She would serve them boiled with a little brown sugar and they would still taste bad.

Today, modified by modern conveniences, there is still a pall that hangs over February. Perhaps it is the anniversary depression therapists speak of. People are glad it is the shortest month of the year.

For me, this February lingered on into the first few days of March. I got up this morning and cruised on to Charles Bukowski's homepage. He showed me intimations of mortality in a barbecued potato chip. Then Rufus, Livingston and I walked down to the creek. I waited for them, mentally composing haiku about homelss men and dogs shitting in the park. On the way home, tattered, rain-sodden azaleas flirted with me, like ancient southern belles, and I realized, "February is over."

This Very Earth the Lotus Paradise

2009-04-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

It's a June day in Vermont.
Carole and I meet in the field
between our two houses
to fly kites
and pick wild strawberries.

The sun is warm.

Everywhere we look there are
daisies, asters, buttercups,
Indian paintbrush,
black-eyed susans.

Tiny blue grapes grow in the hedgerows.

The trees are vast, leafy castles
a thousand shades of green, yellow,
purple, orange.

Tall grasses are adorned with
grasshoppers, ladybugs, butterflies.

Birds dip and fly.

The ground, too, is alive with
rabbit-holes, mole-tunnels.

Our kites fly high as we lie
on our stomachs
eating wild strawberries,
listening to locusts sing,
the hum of breezes passing through
grass and trees.

Blue sky goes on forever.

Excerpts from the Prunewhip Gazette (1953)

2009-04-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

Lime Jello Surprise

Ingredients:

One packet of lime jello (follow directions on box)
two tablespoons Miracle Whip
one cup Spam cubes
Several large leaves of lettuce
5 or 6 celery sticks (with leaves left on)
5 or 6 carrot sticks

Make a bowl of lime jello. When it is partially hardened, blend in two tablespoons of Miracle Whip and one cup of spam cubes. Let chill for several hours. Serve on a bed of lettuce. Top with celery (complete with leaves) and carrot sticks, inserted upright in the jello so as to create a 'forest effect.' Great for a children's birthday party!

LOCAL NEWS

Mr. and Mrs. Maynard Crouch returned to Prunewhip last Wednesday, after a ten-day tour of the Holy Land. They will present slides of their trip at 7 p.m. Saturday evening in the basement of the First Baptist Church. Maynard and Gladys also brought back a jar of water from the Sea of Gallilee, which will be on display. All are invited. Welcome back, Maynard and Gladys!

The WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto

2009-04-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

The WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto

PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that

ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the

RICH. ART IS NOT BUSINESS !

it does not belong to banks & fancy investors

ART IS FOOD. You can’t EAT it BUT it FEEDS

you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to

EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE

Because it is the INSIDE of the

WORLD.

ART SOOTHES PAIN !

Art wakes up sleepers !

ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR AND STUPIDITY !

ART SINGS HALLELUJAH !

Art is for kitchens !

ART IS LIKE GOOD BREAD !

Art is like green trees!

Art is like white clouds in blue sky !

ART IS CHEAP !

HURRAH !

-Bread and Puppet, Glover, Vermont, 1984

Moving on to Florida

2009-04-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

A lot of old Vermonters end up living in Florida. This is connected to realizing, at some point, that it’s possible to be warm during the months extending from October through March - to be really warm - to lounge about the house in a t-shirt eating ice cream in February.

When I was a kid I totally accepted being cold six months out of every year because I didn’t realize there was any alternative. I grew up in a brick house built before the Civil War. It had no central heating. There were many such houses in Vermont in those days. Each house had a designated ‘warm room’ where you could go down a layer or two (we routinely wore coats, wool hats, mufflers and mittens as indoor apparel) and lounge about having a cup of cocoa and listening to the radio. Being in any other room of the house meant working nonstop - sweeping and scrubbing with the dogged fervor of a chain gang at rifle point. To stop working was to freeze.

Vermont kids were expected to be tough. We never had a snow day except once when snow reached the sills of second-story windows. If the school furnace broke down, we sat at our little desks, suited up, trying to operate a pencil while wearing mittens. You could see your breath in the air. The boys in the back row - the class thugs - would bring two fingers up to their mouths and breathe out, so it would look like they were smoking.

The moment a Vermonter finds out about being warm is kind of like the moment Adam and Eve shared the apple. The gates of paradise swing shut and you find yourself in Florida. There are worse fates.

Southern Poetry
is sold
from backs of pickup trucks
on country roads.
Hand-lettered signs for miles say
HOT BOILED POEMS
BOILED POEMS
JUST AHEAD

Big Time Florida Saturday Night

The Korean store on the corner
sells gold hoop earrings,
barbecue sauce, ice cream,
six-packs of cold beer
sweating silver rivers of promise.
Cain and Abel cruise Magnolia Street
tires squeal,
short red dresses,
high-heeled golden slippers
dance across moon-shadowed
neon pavement waving tickets saved
since the Garden of Eden.
Mother Eve’s Dance Hall opens.
Duenna Live Oak fastens moonbeams
to her shawl,
hangs shaggy veils of spanish moss
across her gnarled eyes
not to see the scandalous carrying on,
hands clasped to warm ripe bottoms,
nibbling cinnamon ear lobes.
She hears
car radios clawing gardenia-scented air
with saxophones,
Big time Florida Saturday night.

Pleasant Street Neighborhood

Hot purple music,
Cajun-style despair,
Jesus ecstasies...
Bubba & Laverne’s Grocerette
boarded up...
shambling crackhouse...
Old woman growing petunias
in a washtub next door
wears a headrag,
praises Him
her hidden treasure,
her crown of glory...
The peanut man on his three-wheel bike,
head misshapen like a sideways goober,
Big Smile,
collecting cans
in a rusty basket...
Crack addicts wandering dazed circles
before the God by Faith Mission,
worn out from a night of
hustling money,
hustling rocks,
can’t sleep...
Smell of ribs from Mom’s Kitchen...
Men in three-piece suits whispering
in front of Dorsey’s Funeral Parlor,
close-in,
here where the dead roam with the homeboys
through spanish moss and live oak streets
while an old man boils shrimp in a barrel
under the sweet Southern sun.

Discovering the "L Word" in 1963

2009-03-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

It was September 1963, and I was a freshman in college. One afternoon there was a tapping on my dorm room door. I opened it and was surprised to see one of the little blonde cheerleader sorority pledges who ordinarily did not give me a second glance, standing there with a look of grim determination on her face. I invited her in. She refused my offer to sit down and launched into what was obviously a prepared proclamation.

"There is a lesbian living on this hall, and we feel that everyone has a right to know. We are going to the bathroom in pairs and carrying sharpened pencils."

"What's a lesbian?" I asked.

She haltingly explained. My inner reaction was a great big "WOH!" I thought I had read everything there was to know about sex, and now this! She left and I sat there thinking about it.
Finally I walked down the hall (no sharpened pencil), and knocked on her door. There was a whole group in there discussing the dire peril we were now facing.

"If a guy were living on the hall we wouldn't automatically assume he was going to attack us, would we?" I asked.

Everyone agreed. He would be another student - someone's brother, someone's boyfriend - and probably harmless.

"I don't know anything about lesbians. I didn't know there was any such thing until just now. Is attacking people part of being a lesbian?" I asked.

There was a silence. Finally, someone said, "I don't know."

Another silence. Then a brave piping voice said, "Well, let's find out."

We walked down the hall together - courage in numbers - and knocked on Marilyn's door.

"It's not locked, come on in." Marilyn was a big farm girl from the Oklahoma panhandle. Her bed was piled high with pink and purple pillows and she was reclining amongst them looking like
a butch version of Elizabeth Taylor in "Cleopatra." We formed a line at the far end of the room.

After an awkward silence Marilyn seemed to be enjoying, one of us quavered, "Is it true you are a l...l...l..."

Finally tired of the preliminaries, Marilyn said, "Yes, I'm a lesbian."

Long silence. Broken by another tiny quavering voice, "Does this mean...you are attracted.....to us....?"

Marilyn laughed, and she laughed, and she laughed - big rolling Ha HA HAs that must have vibrated through the entire building. When she could catch her breath she said, "I have a girlfriend who's a total knockout. None of you little chicken legs would stand a chance."

Although this was not exactly a compliment, it somehow just didn't sound mean, the way she said it. Within moments we were all perched around her bed asking a zillion questions about what it meant to be a lesbian and about sex in general, a topic that Marilyn seemed to know much more about than any of us.

We talked for hours. Marilyn's room became a gathering place on our floor. She taught us how to read Tarot cards and took us on a field trip to a gay bar. She showed us how to deliver a solid left hook to drunken, groping frat boys. The sex education she disseminated was accurate and highly practical.

I lost track of Marilyn after college, and I'm sorry for that. At points in your life you're fortunate enough to meet someone who opens vast new horizons. At the time I didn't realize how much courage she had, as a gay teenager in 1963. Thank you, Marilyn, wherever you are.

Millie Paddock's Baby

2009-03-25T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Paddocks lived across the street from us in Prunewhip. They were low on the social register, and furthermore they were weird. Mrs. Paddock and her daughter Gladiola went to chiropractors, who were universally considered to be quacks. They had no grass on their front yard and Mrs. Paddock was an indifferent housekeeper. They didn’t know how to manage money and were always going to the Lady’s Aid Society at the First Baptist Church for a bailout. The ladies refused to give them money - you don’t give money to people who are going to run over to Bennington and spend it on a chiropractor. But they would buy them a bag of groceries here and there, because it was the Christian thing to do.
Worst of all, well - I wrote a poem about this:

Old Man Paddock - 1953

Old Man Paddock was a vegetarian and he wrote poetry.
Twice a year he’d get drunk and terrorize the neighborhood,
going from house to house roaring rhymed couplets about
God, Jesus, and beauties of nature.
We’d all lock our doors, pull down the curtains and
huddle inside waiting for it to be over.
It was the next best thing to funerals,
where everyone cried and there was lots of
fried chicken and potato salad.

No-one was surprised when the Paddock’s youngest child, Millie, got pregnant at age 16. But here was the shame of it - every once in awhile a young lady of Prunewhip found herself with child out of wedlock. There was a procedure for this. Her parents would take her out of school, early on, because she had to go to Ohio and take care of her ailing grandmother. Then they would spirit her off to the Florence Crittendon Home of Redeeming Love in Burlington. She would stay there until the baby was born, give it up for adoption, and return to life in Prunewhip. These trips fooled no one, but they served to preserve the veil of propriety shrouding all activities that could not be done in the middle of the street in broad daylight. Millie Paddock, however, decided to spend her entire pregnancy at home and keep the baby. Furthermore, her slack-jawed, trifling parents supported her in this decision. They weren’t even ashamed. They sashayed around town going to the store and the post office and the June strawberry festival like they didn’t have a care in the world. This was so scandalous, people walked across the street if they saw Millie Paddock coming in the opposite direction.

At this point my Aunt Cynthia kicked in. She was a rebel, also, in her own way. She smoked cigarettes and never went to church. Nor did she make excuses for not going to church. She never claimed that she had a bad back and sitting in the hard wooden pews gave her blinding pain. She never said that she worshiped God as He is manifested in the grandeur of the natural world. She just stayed home smoking and sewing. She was the town seamstress. Her sewing skills were legendary. She could see a fancy dress hanging in the window of Drysdale’s Department Store in Bennington, go home, cut a pattern out of old newspapers, and make an exact replica of the dress. She could make three-piece suits that fit like a glove, and wedding dresses fit for royalty.

Cynthia was also the magic maker of doll clothes. She saved her scraps and turned them into incredible doll clothes complete with pockets, with little handkerchiefs sticking out of them, with a flower embroidered on the handkerchief. She could make felt hats and red rubber boots for dolls. All year she made these doll clothes and on Christmas eve she’d sneak around town leaving packets of them on little girls’ front doors. She hated thank yous.

Aunt Cynthia also hated gossip. If anyone tried to gossip in her presence she’d cut them off in mid-sentence, saying that none of us were any better than we should be. She did not like what was going on with Millie Paddock. A month or two into the situation she announced to one and all that she was making a layette for Millie Paddock’s baby. Then she went to work on it. I don’t think the Prince of Wales had a better layette than Millie’s baby. She lined a basket with satin and covered the edges with a lace ruffle embroidered with yellow rambler roses. She made a tiny mattress and pillow covered with fine cotton sheets and a pillow case edged with lace. She filled the layette with sacks and shirts and diapers and shawls and all manner of finery such as no one had ever seen before. As the months wore on, people took to stopping by Cynthia’s house just to see the latest addition to this fabulous layette.

When the layette was done she made another general announcement (you only had to announce something to one person in Prunewhip and everyone would know within an hour), as to the day and time when she would deliver this layette to the Paddock household. Sure enough, a small crowd gathered to watch her grand promenade up the Paddock’s front walk, across their creaky porch and through the front door, carrying the magnificent layette.

My Aunt Cynthia enjoyed a great deal of respect in Prunewhip, despite her peculiarities. You could not continue shunning someone Cynthia singled out for such a gift. Millie had a boy, whom she named Ernie. They took their places in the life of the town with no more disapproval than that reserved for any other member of the Paddock clan.

Prayer of St. Francis

2009-03-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Ghosts in Vermont: A True Story

2009-03-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

The last time I visited Vermont, I put a glass of little yellow daisies on my grandmother's grave. The glass was a big, thick Ronald McDonald glass I bought at garage sale along the road, for a nickel. It was all I could afford. We had just enough money to make it back to Florida, after a trip to Maine that turned out to be much more expensive than we had anticipated. My grandmother and I had a troubled relationship, and I could imagine her bitter sneer. I visit her grave once in 26 years and bring her wilted field daisies in a McDonald's glass. I tried to put a good spin on it, telling her I just wanted to remind her of when I was six and brought her dandelions sticking out of a milk bottle.

As we walked away from her grave, I looked up and saw an amoeba-shape made out of pure light floating so low in the sky it was well below the tree line. My mind immediately summoned up an image of Ruth Ketcham, an old lady who lived in Prunewhip when I was a little girl. I hadn't actually known her, and had forgotten her very existence for the past 20 years, so it was a surprise to see her so clearly now. She had had a long pointy chin that stuck out from her face like a shelf.

Two days later we went back to the cemetery. My husband wanted to make some rubbings of gravestones dating from the 1700s. I wandered over to my grandmother's grave. To my bewilderment, all the water had drained out of the big glass, which was now crazed into an intricate fissured web I had never seen except in a glass of water that was left outside one bitterly cold winter night. I could imagine nothing that would cause a glass to break in such a way, on this peaceful June weekend. I felt bereft. Was my grandmother still so angry, after all these years, that she pulled off a supernatural act of rejection? If Ruth Ketcham, who had been a tired old Baptist, was drifting through the air as pure light, anything was possible.

That was years ago. Now I think my grandmother was reassuring me about the after life, her and Ruth Ketcham.

After Visiting the Old Cemetery in North Bennington

I heard a woman say to her children,

"Be quiet! You'll wake the dead!"

New England has so many -

Revolutionary war soldiers under

crumbling headstones mottled with lichen,

marble lambs for babies who didn't

make it through the winter,

"Beloved Mothers,"

Old men who finally missed

the morning milking.

They deserve their long

unbroken sleep,

who fought such bitter winters,

got their crops planted and

harvested in such short summers,

never had much to do with.

I knew them,

I too was told not to wake them up.

(boots and corsets gone,

they drift among the buttercups)

Excerpt from The Prunewhip Chronicles

2009-03-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

Prunewhip's unswerving devotion to rectitude, duty, propriety - the life and death struggle to be clean, normal, and virtuous at all times - turned everyone into cowering hypocrites.
Children were frequently reminded that God was watching us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
and one extra day on leap years. God was watching me when I sat on the toilet reading a Nancy Drew book, picking my nose, and wiping the boogers off underneath the sink. Clearly my relationship with God was ruined. He might be extending love and guidance to other little children, undoubtedly He was, but not to me, or to Dickie Shaw who tried to talk girls into playing doctor with him. Dickie Shaw and I would be in Hell together.
Fortunately there were other chinks in the wall, some involving grownups. Crimes and misdemeanors committed by denizens of Bennington College didn’t count. Those people came from some other planet, and only served as a spectator sport. One professor got drunk on a summer night and sat on his roof playing a guitar and singing "I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now" over and over again. The lucky few who actually witnessed this event told the story over and over again, an almost unrestrained joy shining through their disapproving faces.
But the really interesting deviations arose amongst the townspeople themselves. Only a few were spectacular - such as Mrs. Whitaker’s petrified cat turds, or Mr. Cushman’s descent into madness - these were the Hope Diamonds of local gossip. The lesser gems - the fact that Kaki Peterson’s husband drank, and that Melanie Woodworth spent last summer at the Florence Crittendon Home of Redeeming Love in Burlington, and was not visiting her aunt in Minnesota, as her parents proclaimed. - these were the bits of information which kept people going from day to day.
Some people were outcasts no matter what they did, such as Clover Sweet, the garbage collector who was half Negro and lived alone in a small house in the woods. People praised Clover for doing an excellent job of collecting garbage and always being very polite. He was the most invisible man in town after his garbage route was finished. In all the years I lived in Prunewhip, I can never recall meeting Clover at the grocery store or the post office. Perhaps he had Rural Free Delivery, and drove out of town for groceries and hardware, to some cosmopolitan town such as Albany, 45 minutes away, where other Negros were known to live. It was my personal opinion that Clover was burdened as much by his name as by his ethnic parentage. Normal people had names like Arthur Whitman or Jimmy Beavis. Any guy named Clover Sweet would have been doomed to extinction no matter what. In later years it has occurred to me that Clover may have been a great yogi whose sadhana was to live in the woods in Vermont and collect the garbage of the unilluminated, thus bestowing his blessings upon us and assisting our eventual delivery from Vermont and the 1950s.

Front and Center

2009-03-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

1.Immortality In Vermont in 1953

where the TV station
had a program for kids,
Freddy Freihoffer’s Breadtime tales,
one guy with an easel who drew
Freddy and his friends,
while Mom, if there was a mom,
fixed meatloaf, stringbeans, baked potatoes,
a little scoop of orange sherbet for dessert.
When we ran out to the side yard of
stars and fireflies,
drinking in the night like mossy wine,
we never knew we would end as
pictures in a family album,
lined up against Mr. Balmer’s fence in our
jerseys, overalls, and little clodhopper shoes.

2. Easter

Sunday and there she is in front of the new Buick
in a pink dress with a white peter pan collar,
a straw hat with a round humped top, a short brim,
pink ribbon tied under her chin,
same color as the dress,
holding the little pink plastic purse
feminists poets will one day immortalize,
wearing white ankle socks and
patent leather shoes,
safe at this moment,
from overly friendly uncles with whiskey breath,
face stubble like razors against her skin,
from the silent rage of her father,
the too bright smile of her aproned mother.

3. Grandmother

Wears a black straw hat
festooned with plaster cherries,
above a grim face which seems
in retrospect to know
she is being recorded wrongfully,
not the true story.
This blue serge, corseted woman
made love, gave birth to children,
her skin gleaming with sweat,
it’s only later she had to
stand in front of the house
wearing a silly hat.

Old New England Houses

2009-03-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

smelled of cedar chests
and lemon oil.
High ceilings,
polished wooden floors,
endless repeating
clusters of grapes
along the walls.
There were no random objects
dropped behind the couch,
jammed into the back of a drawer.
Each thing was known, counted,
laid away in its rightful place.
Although some were mysterious -
a breast pump?
My dead grandfather's
two unsmoked cigars.

What if Our Struggles Turn Out to be Enough

2009-03-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

What if our struggles turn out to be enough
in the end,
long after we’re over winning and losing?
What if the money lasts,
the music, the food, the love?
What if we find ourselves in Bardos of
peace and justice,
when we’re old and hopeless possibilities
off to one side
like leaves of lettuce and slices of tomato?

Woody Guthrie

2009-03-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Woody Guthrie

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you

think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing.

Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs

that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to

fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs

that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked

you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to

sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing

are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the

other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own

kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at

\you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a

long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves

and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running

over with such no good songs as that anyhow."

- Woody Guthrie.

flowers

2009-03-07T12:08:00.000-08:00

Wild violets grow beneath a lilac tree. They bloom at the same time. Moss on trunks of maple trees, festooned with tiny flowers. I had to put my eyes right up to the moss to see them. Gnarled trunks. Lilies of the valley alongside the house. Indian paint brush, black-eyed susans, daisies, asters and buttercups growing in the fields. Golden rod in the fall - the fields ablaze! A flowering quince - rich and complex, deeply hued, like a bush in a Renaissance painting. A bed of peonies. Flowers planted in order of height: blue bells, forget-me-knots, sweet williams, phlox, and then an honor guard of gladiolas. Dandelions. What symphony....

2008-12-31T13:06:00.000-08:00

Prunewhip, Vermont winters in the 1950s looked
exactly like all the corny TV Christmas movies and
Hallmark cards you’ve ever seen. Some years we
would have an ice storm and every tree, down to
the smallest twig, would be coated with ice that
sparkled and shimmered in the obscure December
sun. Every garbage pail was covered with snow
and wore a white Santa cap. Each run down house
was blanketed in snow and had a magical fringe of
icicles around its roof. All mundane or shabby
realities were transformed into fairy tale sculptures
of ice and snow.

In mid-December school let out for two weeks and
kids played outside from dawn to dusk. Some days
there would be neighborhood snowball fights, one
side of the street against the other side. The
combatants met in a vacant lot where each army
had erected a fort of packed snow and stockpiled
snowballs behind it. When the cap gun sounded,
everyone started firing.

After the first freeze the fire department flooded a
sunken meadow and thatwas our skating rink. The
best game there was called Crack the Whip. All
the kids held hands, in order of height, and skated
in a circle, faster and faster and faster until the
tall kid at the top of the line shouted “All drop
hands!” If you were the shortest kid, you knew
you might land in a snow bank in the next county
and have to walk home, but that was the thrill of
it.

Everyone looked forward to Christmas caroling
with their Brownie Scout troop or Sunday School
class. Not only did you get hot chocolate and
homemade cookies at every stop, but you also got
to see your school teachers in their living rooms
looking like real human beings.
Another big event was the annual School Christmas
pageant. There was no separation of Church and
State in Vermont at this time. We had a fair number
of Jewish kids, whose parents taught at the local college,
and they schemed and struggled right alongside their Christian
pals to try to get a role that involved wearing
a costume, as opposed to having to sit on the bleachers in
civilian clothes and sing “OLittle Town of Bethlehem”
along with the talentless herd of ordinary kids.

Few of us aspired to being cast as Mary or Joseph.
That would be like expecting the lead role in a Broadway play.
We all knew Joseph would be a star basketball player and
Mary would be the most slender, delicate, socially well-placed,
and beautiful brunette in school (blondes were automatically
banned from playing Mary). You could hope to be a
shepherd. a wise man or an angel. I had blonde curls,
so that made me a frontrunner in the Angel competition.
One year I actually got to float out on stage and say, “Fear not:
for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people….”

Merry Christmas from Bob and Arupa, and blessed be the
moments of beauty and joy, for they will be with us forever.

In The Sweet Bye and Bye

2008-10-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

In the Sweet Bye and Bye

Young Coney drank extract of vanilla on Saturday nights. Sometimes he’d sneak into the basement of the Baptist Church and play the piano. He’d play “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” until he fell into the keyboard, sobbing, overcome by the beauty and pathos of his performance.

Coney was born in Shaftesbury, Vermont, in 1922. He lived with his widowed mother who supplemented her social security checks by raising turtles for pet stores in Bennington and Albany. She got a nickel for a plain turtle and ten cents if she painted a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the turtle’s back. Coney’s father, Old Coney, died in 1925. He fell asleep on the railway tracks one night, on his way home from the County Line Tavern, and got run over by the 4 a.m. freight train to Schenectady. Coney remembered him only as the smell of whiskey and a stubbled face. But he used to carve wooden toys for Coney. He still had them. One was a clown with jointed arms and legs, on the end of a stick, that could be made to dance and caper, or stagger, as Coney did, on his way up Main Street.

He’d played “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” 11 times on the Baptist Sunday School piano, each time a little louder, as he warmed to the subject, dedicating each rendition to a recent member of the Assembly of the Dearly Departed Ones. He’d worked his way down to Gladiola Paddock's husband, who got caught in a harrowing machine last Spring.
“Harrowing? That can’t be right. But it was harrowing! In the sweet bye and bye...That machine with the long tail that breaks up clods. George! George Paddock, that was his name.”

“In the sweet bye and bye,” Coney bellowed, smashing out graduated thirds on the yellow, out-of-tune keys, when the light snapped on and he found himself face to face with Roseanne Parker, the minister’s wife. Her hair was done up on wire brush rollers and she was wearing a plaid bathrobe that almost blinded him.

“You get out of here Coney, people are trying to sleep.”

“Yes Maam.” Coney left, grabbing tightly to the air on either side of him, to steady himself. “Sorry Maam. I was just leavin.’” She watched him stumble out the door, rigid with disapproval.

The cool night air cleared Coney’s head a little. All those renditions of “In the Sweet By and Bye” was bringing back his few, dim memories of his father. He pretended he was the wooden clown his father had carved, as he walked up the hill to his mother’s little house on the edge of the cemetery. He raised each knee up as high as he could get it and flapped his arms at the elbows, giggling, “George Paddock got harrowed and it was harrowing. Yep. It was just harrowing!” Coney climbed up on the low stone wall that ran past the Mattison’s house. That was when I saw him, still doing his clown imitation. I was eight years old, and my secret hobby was slipping out the front door, long after my grandmother and the other respectable citizens of Shaftesbury, had been asleep for hours. I liked to walk through the silent streets, noticing how the lilacs looked by moonlight, and pretending I had to dodge ghosts who had escaped from the cemetery and were floating through the air like big dandelion puffs. I guess I was just about as weird as Coney, even though I hadn’t had nearly so many years to refine and amplify my peculiarities. I slipped behind a bush and watched Coney, who now had his clown singing grand opera. “O Soap Dish Mio/Your name is Cleo,” Coney warbled.

I knew he was too drunk to notice me, so I climbed up on the wall behind him and pretended we were playing follow the leader. When Coney got to his house, he didn’t make it all the way to the front door. He stopped to rest by the flowering quince bush where, to his mother’s deep humiliation, he still was the following morning. My grandmother walked me to school the next day, ordering me to avert my eyes when we went by Coney’s house. She did not want me to see such a spectacle, because my father, after all, had been Irish trash, and it might give me ideas. I sneaked a look at Coney who was lying on his back, snoring, with his mouth open. I could not openly express my loyalty to him, so I started doing his clown walk, singing, “Oh Soap Dish Mio/Your name is Cleo.”

“Now you cut that out! Take my hand and walk like a young lady who is on her way to school.”

“Yes Maam.”

Everyone needs a secret life, and will construct one out of whatever materials are available. But I didn't know that back then. I thought me and Coney were the only interesting people amongst acres of Baptists and Methodists who lived their lives as if God were watching them every single minute, as the Reverend Parker claimed He was. I planned to enjoy my childhood and repent later on, after I got too old to do anything else.