Luanne Rice's Blog, page 9

Excellence in Reading

Emily May Beaudry was born on November 6, 1898 in Providence, Rhode Island.  She was the second oldest in a family of eight children, two of whom died young.  She wore her long dark hair in braids.  At school she enjoyed dipping their tips into the inkwell and writing and drawing with them.  That got her into trouble, and so did fighting, which she did to protect her younger siblings from bullies.

The family lived in the Thornton neighborhood of Johnston, a section of Providence known for textile mills (Thornton was named after a village in England, the hometown of one of the mill owners) as well as the natural beauty of Silver Lake and Neutaconkanut Hill.   Emily’s grandfather’s house had a basement kitchen where everyone could put on their skates and walk right outside onto the lake, and the hill was good for sledding.  Emily’s many aunts were known for their grace on the ice, the way they could skate the grapevine and the reel.

The entire family worked at British Hosiery, one of the local mills.  Emily’s mother, Gertrude, had grown up in Nottingham, England.  Her parents had brought her and her brothers and sisters across the Atlantic with other mill worker families–a hundred and twenty people in all–to work at the hosiery.

In December 1884 the family crossed the North Atlantic from Liverpool on the Cunard steamship Aurania.  They traveled in the cramped and difficult conditions of steerage; on that same passage, several decks up, in a different class, was Dr. Dugald Campbell, a Scottish doctor who may-or-may-not be the great-grandfather of J.K. Rowling.  The ship made landfall on the eve of Christmas Eve; when Gertrude’s father asked the mill owner if they could go to a Catholic Church for midnight mass, the owner was dismayed; he had assumed that, being from England, these immigrants were not Catholic.

Gertrude went on to have eight children of her own; she named her second daughter Emily, after her mother.  Emily excelled in school.  She was high-spirited, and teachers sometimes scolded her, but she loved school.  Although she did well in all her subjects, her favorite was English.  She was a great storyteller in a family who loved to tell stories; a dinner at their house would be full of laughter and interruptions, and one person jumping in to finish the story another had started.  Books were expensive, and there wasn’t yet a library in town, but she read everything she could at school.

When she was in eighth grade, on January 31, 1913, she won the Johnston, Rhode Island medal for “Excellence in Reading.”

That was Emily’s last year in school.  She had to leave before ninth grade, to go to work in the mill.  “At the hosiery,” she would say, and never with resentment, or a sense of what might have been.  She had been a smart, spirited girl, whose education was cut short.  She had to help support the family.  This was just how it was done; there were no expectations of finishing school.  Whatever she may have hoped, whatever her secret dreams may have been, she put them aside and went to the mill every day.

Child labor was common.  Long workdays–twelve to fourteen hours–were the norm.  Wages were low, and the factories were loud and dangerous, with thundering machinery and poor light.  The workers breathed fiber-filled air as they spun thread and wove cloth.  The young millworkers perfected the art of spinning.  Weaving thread instead of stories…

Emily was my grandmother.  She lived with us from the time I was born, and I called her “Mimi” because I couldn’t say “Emily.”  She told lots of stories, but they were alway full of love–about how she and her sisters Florence, Josie, and Ida would take the ferry from India Point in Providence, down Narragansett Bay.  They would always intend to go out to Block Island, but they could never get past Newport–they loved it so much.  They’d cram into one small room at Mrs. Richardson’s boarding house, and go to Easton’s Beach to meet their friends.   Or she’d talk about Silver Lake, putting on skates in the basement kitchen and going out onto the ice with her aunts.  And her voice would lower, telling how the Grand Trunk Railroad bought up all those houses around the lake, including her grandfather’s, and knocked them down, and then the railroad never came through.

I never heard her complain about the mill, or about having to leave school.  I never heard her speak of regret.  But she kept her medal in her bureau drawer, in the original box.  She would sometimes show me.  Other times I would sneak into her room and open the drawer and look at her medal, and I’d wonder how it must have felt to be honored for reading, to be an eighth grade scholar, and then to be sent to work at a factory.

Today is her birthday.  Happy birthday, Mim…

I don’t have any photos of her as a child, so I sought out pictures of girls with braids who worked in textile mills around the turn of the last century.  I am posting two from this site, which contains old photos of child labor between 1908 and 1924.  I love these girls, they could so easily be Mim and her sisters.

 

Connecticut College Magazine Photo Shoot

I was so honored to learn Connecticut College wanted a profile of me for CC Magazine.  Amy Martin, the magazine’s wonderful editor, made it all happen.  Ben Parent, art director, and Bob Handleman, photographer, and Bob’s assistant–and fine photographer in her own right–Lindsey Platek came over one August day and we had a great time on the photo shoot.  Ben Parent is a real visionary, and Bob is a great artist, and they made my little cottage at Hubbard’s Point look so magical.  Not only that, Ben provided a great soundtrack, thanks to his band Rivergods.  Here are some photos from that day…

Connecticut College Magazine Profile

I was so honored to learn Connecticut College wanted a profile of me for CC Magazine.  Amy Martin, the magazine’s wonderful editor, made it all happen.  Ben Parent, art director, and Bob Handleman, photographer, and Bob’s assistant–and fine photographer in her own right–Lindsey Platek came over one August day and we had the most wonderful time on the photo shoot.  Ben Parent is a real visionary, and Bob is a great artist, and they made my little cottage at Hubbard’s Point look so magical.  Not only that, Ben provided a great soundtrack, thanks to his band Rivergods.  Here are some photos from that day…

There and Not There

Late October, looking west from Chelsea, tonight’s sunset is particularly iridescent.  I see the sky, and the Hudson River, and planes in their landing pattern at Newark Airport, and Dan Flavin untitled at the Dia Art Foundation, and I look through the stories of the new building and pretend it’s not there, and I think of this poem, one of my favorites.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evensong by Peter Kane Dufault

Last night when the sun went down

and the light lifted up— it was levered

off the last high land westward

through tier after tier of cirrus

and cumulus cloud,

all the way to the zenith— such

a finale of auroral cold fire

no one could speak here. We stood

like pillars of salt looking after it

a long while till it faded

into grey and dark-grey. Oh,

how do we survive it, how

do we survive, when more than we dared dream of

is given for no reason, and for no reason

taken away.

(From On Balance-Selected Poems 1978)

Strange Gifts and Surprises

Fall in New York is an exciting time.  It feels like the best of what you remember about going back to school–so many thrilling new subjects to discover and things to learn, while outside the weather is crisp and the leaves are turning.  Theater can be wild at any time of year, but in October many new plays have arrived, and are in previews, and there is tremendous energy and excitement in the air.

This is a blog about a play, but it’s also about friends.  On Sunday I attended a preview of Sticks and Bones by David Rabe.  It won the Tony award in 1972; my mentor Brendan Gill gave it a rave review in The New Yorker on March 11, 1972.  This is the play’s first production since then.  Directed by Scott Elliott, it stars Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Richard Chamberlain, Ben Schnetzer, Raviv Ullman, Nadia Gan, and Morocco Omari.  

The play tells the story of an American family in the aftermath of war, when their oldest son returns home from Vietnam.  It did what great theater can do.  It changed me.  It ripped me apart and put me together differently.  After it was over I saw friends in the lobby, but we couldn’t speak.  I think we babbled something, but speechlessness had taken hold.  I know I wasn’t in my body.  I was floating somewhere above this earthly plane where genius art and poetry and existential sorrow exist, where I lived for the duration of the play and quite a long time afterwards.

The timing of my speechlessness was unfortunate, because I found myself in a room with friends both old and new.  Bill Pullman and Holly Hunter first acted together in Crazy in Love, my first movie made from a novel of mine, and I got to know them while filming in and around Seattle.  Their performances in Sticks and Bones are breathtaking.  Bill inhabits his character with such ferocity, I felt completely rattled from seeing it.  Beth Henley–with whom I was fortunate enough to work on Motherhood Out Loud (both Holly and Bill have acted in several of Beth’s plays, Bill most recently getting a Drama Desk nomination for his portrayal of Fred in The Jacksonian)–and Carol Kane, had come to the play, and they were there.  And then Bill, Holly, the rest of the cast, director Scott Elliott, and David Rabe came out to join us, and I could barely speak because I was still living in the world of the play, the emotions it had brought forth.

In Sticks and Bones, David writes deeply of a time and family, a way of being that felt so familiar to me, having grown up during Vietnam.  The play caught so many details with such specific and almost magnified realism, yet managed to transcend everything actual–everything “real”–and somehow make it truer than true, realer than real.

I hope you will all go to see Sticks and Bones–if you’re coming to New York and have time to see just one play this season, I hope this is the one.  It will shake you up and make you think and make you stop thinking in the most thrilling of ways.

In a fun and somewhat surreal aside, earlier this fall I took a bus from Port Authority to Montclair NJ, with Bill, Holly, David, and Rachel, to see Bill’s lovely and talented wife Tamara dance in Liz Lerman’s gorgeous Healing Wars which, like Sticks and Bones, is about the trauma and effects of war.  There we all were, on the bus, on the way to see a great performance.  Life can be full of strange gifts and surprises.

The Tiny Terrace in the Sky

This morning the tiny terrace in the sky was a haven for golden crowned kinglets.

Every fall migratory birds fly south from their breeding grounds in the Canadian forests on their way to the tropics, and large numbers stop over in New York City.  Central Park is one big concentrated stretch of green from the air, and it attracts the migrants, provides a place to rest and forage before continuing the journey.

The tiny terrace is west and south of Central Park and has just one birch tree, one black pine, a hedge of ivy and Manhattan euonymus, and a small herb garden, but I am so glad to see the birds have found it.  

There is so much about New York that I love, but sometimes I can feel nature-deprived.  It is always possible to hike up to Central Park, or along the river in Hudson River Park, or Forest Park or Alley Pond in Queens, or Floyd Bennett Field or Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, or Van Cortlandt Park or Pelham Bay in the Bronx, or the magical Staten Island Greenbelt, but there’s nothing like sitting at one’s desk, glancing up, and seeing a bird in a tree just outside the window.

I’m not the only one who likes watching birds; to keep the birds safe from Emelina, and to protect her from falling off the terrace, I make sure she stays inside with Green Tara.  

Birds face enough dangers on their migrations, and New York provides special challenges.  They crash into windows on skyscrapers; it’s not uncommon, in the morning, to walk by tall buildings and find dead or injured birds.  Light can also be a magnet.  New York City Audubon and Project Safe Flight are working to improve things.

Creatures migrate.  It’s how they survive.  Humans, too.

Meanwhile, up here, feeling grateful for the delicate beauty of birds and sky.

Talking Bruce Springsteen

Today at 4 pm I’ll be the Guest DJ on SiriusXM’s E Street Radio, talking about Bruce Springsteen and playing ten of my favorite songs of his.

I am inspired by Bruce’s music.  From the beginning I was captivated by his passion for storytelling, the way he focuses in on the places and people he loves most, the issues he cares about, the underdog and the downtrodden, people’s stories that otherwise might not be heard.  He’s been a voice for migrants, the deeply human story of immigration, and that touches me so much.  I love his song Matamoros Banks, which he introduces with these words:

“Each year many die crossing the deserts, mountains, and rivers of our southern border in search of a better life. Here I follow the journey backwards, from the body at the river bottom, to the man walking across the desert towards the banks of the Rio Grande.”

There is so much to say, and I make a start during my hour on E Street.  I hope you’ll join me.

Lanterns in the Night

On October 18th Rachel Hartwig went to the Mojave Desert with her mother to participate in the RiSE Lantern Festival 2014.  She had been telling me about it, and I knew she was excited to go, and she told me she was going to release a lantern in my name, but I honestly had no idea how beautiful and meaningful it was until after she sent me this video (notice the words at the end.)

Rachel is a reader who has become a friend.  I first met her several years ago when she came to my reading at Warwick’s in San Diego.  She and her husband Mike had driven all the way from Las Vegas.  I thought that was pretty incredible.  She made the same trip this year, only she brought a cheesecake for everyone who showed up at the bookstore, packed it in ice to keep it cold, and served it to the gathering.  The cake was delicious.

No writer expects anything from a reader; we only hope you’ll enjoy our books.  But to think of Rachel going to the Mojave Desert to release a lantern in my name, with all the hopes and dreams and spiritual meaning it represents, is very humbling.  She also wrote this beautiful blog post.  I feel so honored and grateful.

 

 

 

Maisie and Tim: a Love Story

I wouldn’t exactly call Maisie a “problem cat” (there-are-no-bad-cats) but ever since she was a kitten, she has had a certain personality: contrary, cantankerous, particular in whom she allows to approach (no one.)  She was a rescue cat who had lived through the tragic circumstances of losing her mother too young and being left alone, sick, and flea-ridden until a kind vet in Old Lyme, Connecticut took her in.  I and the old girls–Maggie and Mae Mae–adopted her.

Time passed.  We lived in New York, and for a while in Malibu.  The dynamic of those three cats was of love, but separation.  Each kept to herself.  There were occasional stealth attacks–Maisie, stalking the others like a wild cat, pouncing, letting out lion-sounding snarls.  Maggie would sit closest to me, on my desk while I wrote, and after she died, Mae Mae nuzzled her way in.  After Mae Mae died, I waited for Maisie to claim her spot on the desk, but she never did.  She was a loner cat, preferring to sit under chairs rather than on them, staring at me with her green eyes, coming out to be fed, but rarely petted.

Then along came Tim.  He and his twin sister Emelina were also rescue kittens.  They moved in, and I was a little worried that Maisie, although now fifteen and less angry, would intimidate them.  They had such sweet personalities, loving to be held and petted, and often cuddling up with each other.  I watched Maisie carefully, ready to pull her away if I saw too aggressive a swat.

But that didn’t happen.

Tim loved Maisie from the beginning, but he was careful about approaching her.  The initial hello didn’t go very well.

So he watched.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And watched.

She noticed, and tolerated it, sometimes watching him back.

After a while this happened:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then this:

They made friends.

 

Tim is also very sweet with Emelina, but this story is about him and Maisie.  Emelina does, occasionally, hang out with them.

But mostly, if Maisie lets anyone close, it’s Tim.

He taught her about love.  She’s almost a different cat.  Amazing that love can do that.

 

Fall in Chelsea

Chelsea, my neighborhood in New York City, is beautiful and charming at all times of year, but there is something about fall that suits it particularly well.  The side streets are lined with townhouses, and many gardens are decorated with pumpkins and chrysanthemums.  

The restaurants, cafes, and markets are cozy on chilly days, and there are taste treats of warming deliciousness to try.  These photos were taken at Forager’s, a favorite place to buy provisions.

The gingko trees change color, and when the leaves fall, the sidewalks sparkle with gold.