Molly Fisk's Blog, page 8
May 7, 2013
Bread & Roses (#286)
I don't know what's come over me lately but I cry at the drop of a hat. Yesterday it was an old labor song whose lyrics I was trying to remember, so I looked them up on-line. It was May Day, and my town is physically erupting in flowers, plus everyone was posting flowers on Facebook, and May Poles, and stories about Beltane and the pagan origins of the day. I love colorful ribbons twined around a pole by dancing children as much as anyone, but I wanted to remind myself of the day's history as a focus of protest in America, too.
So there I am, looking up May Day on that famous search engine whose name I refuse to use as a verb, and there are the song lyrics, plain against a white background, no java script, no graphics, no old photographs, and I read the first verse and burst into tears.
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
I'm crying for so many reasons. I miss Utah Phillips, and what an anchor of conviction he was about fighting for fairness in the world and people having enough to eat. He lived in this town, and I'll tell you, it was a great thing to have him here, anarchist, activist, folk-singer, reminding us what matters.
I'm crying for all the women, past and present, who are treated so badly. Some with violence and death, including some of our labor foremothers, and some with just the modern-day veneer of dismissal, as when Secretary of State Clinton got asked who made the clothes she wore, a question no one will ever ask John Kerry, her successor.
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
I'm crying with gratitude for the women and men whose protesting brought us the five-day work week, child labor laws, and eight-hour days. No one I know does much marching any more, and I don't understand why. I'm crying because it feels as though people don't remember how to band together to fight unfairness and I hate to see our great-grandparents' efforts wasted.
Maybe, too, I'm crying because I feel so helpless to do anything about any of it. It's a beautiful day again today, warm and sunny, flowers blooming like crazy all over town. Life seems so good.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
May 6, 2013
Borrowing Other Mothers
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All my life, I've been borrowing other people's mothers. Usually they had no idea, although I'm sure some figured it out, and sometimes I told them. In grade school, Joan's mother Ilse, an Austrian-born psychiatrist much older than my own mom, served as an intimidating example of the genre. I loved her from a distance, exotic in tailored suits, elegant gray hair, and foreign accent. She taught Joan and me to make apple strudel from scratch, and eat salad at the end of dinner instead of the beginning. She was appalled that my parents let me walk the eight San Francisco blocks to their house by myself, and insisted on driving me home.
Peggy's mom Doris got me through high school. When I couldn't stand the tension in our 15-room Victorian, I went over there, where three tall kids and Doris lived in 700 square feet and wool was always being dyed on the stove with onion skins or some kind of jam was in process, scarlet runner beans grew up the fence, people sang, and frisbees flew around the driveway. I can't remember one conversation I had with Doris, but the welcome I felt in her presence, as well as her no-nonsense approach to the kids not doing their homework, are still lodged in my memory. Watching someone's mother work all day at a job and raise three kids by herself while singing was a revelation.
When I went back East to college, mothers were the last thing on my mind. I had aunts and a grandmother nearby, and was practicing independence in any case. But one Easter I went to a party at Julie's family home, north of Boston. From their big house overlooking the Atlantic, about 40 of us went on a long, complicated outdoor hunt, not for Easter eggs but for painted rocks. It was freezing and windy but very bright, the sun sparkling off the ocean, and Julie's mother Jane was quintessentially warm, calling us back into the house for lunch.
I've probably seen Jane only ten times in the intervening four decades, but her sense of rootedness and deep curiosity has led me to hold her in my mind as a beacon. How she could stand, gracious in the eye of that storm of her rowdy children and all their rowdy friends, doling out food and napkins, keeping the dogs away from the ham, and still notice an individual, struck me as something to aspire to.
I loved my own mom, and consciously took on lots of her characteristics, too. But borrowing mothers who were different from her, whom I didn't have to defend against their own choices and sadness, enriches my life no end.
I found out just now on Google that Ilse lived to be 96. I haven't been in touch since she sent a lovely letter when my father died, 30 years ago. But Doris still sings, up in Washington State, and Jane writes me kind notes about these radio essays, which arrive in her e-mail in-box at that same house on the cliff overlooking the Atlantic.
May 5, 2013
May 4, 2013
May 3, 2013
May 2, 2013
May 1, 2013
April 29, 2013
May 1 prompt
Canadian trawler. Photograph by Chris Hancock Donaldson.
April 9, 2013
Divine Spark
This week, after nine years of nomadic nights and fund-raising, our local homeless shelter finally broke ground on its new, permanent building. Actually, the President of the Board just planted a maple tree in a redwood half-barrel, ceremoniously, but “breaking ground” is what they call it. Now remodeling can begin, changing this former church-and- office-building into a 54-bed shelter with kitchen, showers, laundry, and meeting rooms for guests as well as offices for the staff. The shelter is named Utah's Place, after folksinger U. Utah Phillips, who helped start it.
Also this week, another local champion of our homeless population, someone who has been feeding people hot and cold meals here for many years, died in a car crash on his way back from delivering food to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The irony of seven days being packed equally with happiness and sadness, and so closely revolving around the homeless, did not go unnoticed in our town.
Last night I sat on the sofa and watched the full moon rise. It comes up over my driveway at this time of year, huge and white between two little oaks. I wasn't thinking about homelessness, I was thinking about age. How I'd worked with an 80-year-old client that morning, and then had dinner with a 32-year-old friend. That I'd see my oldest student the next day, who's 95, and am slated to give driving lessons to a 15-year-old I adore. I was thinking, sort of distractedly while counting crochet stitches, how much I treasure everyone I know and how encircled I feel by people of all ages — somehow, at 57, in the right place.. I don't usually sit around thinking things like this, and it suddenly turned into something large and profound. I felt more and more quiet and amazed, grateful, lucky, the moon lifting into the sky, my heart full of love.
When I heard Tomas had died on the road, one of my thoughts was, “That could so easily be me.” I'm always off in a car alone, heading for Mt. Lassen, or southern Utah. That's what it would be like if I hit black ice and went off a cliff: people finding out over a couple of days and telling each other, shocked, disbelieving. Probably I will leave about the same-sized hole in this town that Tomas did. But I also felt a wild jolt of gladness that I'm not dead yet. It wasn't me this time.
Gratitude and grace spread all through me and out into the living room. I'm glad I have a home, with heat and light and running water. I'm glad I went to the ceremony at Utah's Place, even though I was horribly late. I'm grateful for eyes to see the moon, and that I took the time to find out this one's name: it's the Worm Moon.
I'm so glad the last time I saw Tomas on the sidewalk, I smiled at him and he smiled back.
