Quietening

 

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” — Eleanor Roosevelt 

I'm working today. I always work weekends. Retail. Done it for decades. Don't remember the last time I was off on a Saturday. So no protest march for me today. Sorry. Can't be helped, or rather it probably could be -- just for today -- if I'd had the foresight to ask for the day off. I did not. Only heard about today's national action yesterday. Not really connected as I once was with this sort of thing. Can't call in sick anymore unless I'm genuinely sick because one do actually get sick more at sixty-one and I don't have much sick-time available just now. Used what I had for that last trip to urgent care, for which I just received my second bill in as many weeks; this one for $1099.41. Two thousand dollar deductible still not met for this new year. Among other things, my insurance provider is about to change again -- and I'm pretty sure my available paid sick-time is going down to three days a year. Three. If I'd known about today I could have submitted a vacation request (though that's supposed to be done two weeks in advance.) Not that my vacation is what it was. I've only just begun to build it back up again since I used it all when I was in Pennsylvania helping with home hospice care for the late, beloved mother earlier this year.

So, yeah, no mass protest on a Saturday for me. My heart.

Here's another quote while I'm at it, this from Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine: “How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.”

Ouch. That's hard to hear and I'm the one quoting it. But then I am also the one who led off with all that personal information to explain why I can't go today. 

I have a friend who has posted photos from the protests at the facility where she lives  -- hilariously she insists on calling it "the home," in a throw-back to those sad institutions from our rural youths. I've seen the menus where she lives now. Nice. I could eat there. Proud of her and her fellow "inmates" for getting out on the street and making good trouble.

Another friend lives in a community so isolated from anything like civilization I'd expect the attendant at the gas-station to warn "outsiders" not to be there after dark. My friend is protesting with other hearty souls today, whatever the Spring weather that still looks remarkably like Winter there. Proud to know her.

Nowadays I work at the bookstore with a pretty small crew. Another sign of the times.  All of them but me are intelligent, politically engaged, resourceful and very vocal young women. Admirable humans to a person. Some of them had to come to work today too. Less options, some of them, even than I had. They work or they don't make rent, some of them. I would not presume to speak for them. I would take this moment to remind all my friends and all the marvelous strangers protesting today that we are with you, and would actually be with you if we could.

Myself, I married into the middle class roughly forty years ago. Without the beloved husband, and even after more than two decades at my present employment, I don't know that I would ever be able to so much as think of taking a Saturday off to go to another protest. Maybe I'd still be more committed to the struggle. I can't honestly say. (I have been. I hasten to add that not to excuse my absence today but just to attest that I am not an asshole. I may be somewhat diminished by time and changing circumstances, but I'm still not that guy. I've been. I would be right now if I thought I could.) 

Some of the people who are being most effected by what is happening in this country right now won't be there today. Some have to work and can't get the day off. Some are quite rightly concerned about ICE agents and deportations. Some won't have the means, or the access to transportation, or the mobility to participate in a march and rally. There are people very much at risk to whom the idea of protesting would not occur.

No shade. I'm not trying to make anybody there feel bad for showing up or not, or that I'm not, or that there are many who would be that can't. Nothing but gratitude for all present. Again, thank you. 

I don't get to speak for anybody else who isn't out there today. In offering my thanks to everyone who did show up today, for whatever that is worth, I also want to remind everyone marching that more follow than you can see. 

Years ago when I went to my very first candle-light march for those we were losing every day to the plague, I was particularly struck by a couple of unexpected things. First, that neither the solemnity of the occasion nor our seriousness of purpose prevented us from quietly laughing, smiling, whispering, embracing our friends, probably in some cases even cruising. We were there to mark and remember the dead, not to imitate their regrettable silence but to protest the very injustice of it. So even when for once we were not loud, there was still the hum of life all around us; words, breath, cries, above and in a kind of rhythm with those thousands of marching feet. That is what made our silence, when it came, so powerful.  "Media vita in morte sumus," indeed, but what I think I learned that night was that even in the midst of death, of mourning, of loss, we were in life. 

Remember, it is no exaggeration to say that the people we were protesting then? They wanted us dead. At best they were indifferent to our deaths. Staying alive was not only necessary to our protests, staying alive itself constituted a protest. It still does.

The other thing I learned a little later, and this was a very hard lesson indeed, was that we are often called to witness for those who cannot. When I marched on Washington, DC, or across the Golden Gate Bridge, or for choice, or in support of the Farmworkers Union, whenever and wherever I was able to show up in my admittedly rather spotty efforts at activism, I was there not just for myself. I was there for my friends, for the ill, for the dead. That was usually about all I was actually good for. I was never an organizer, never a committee member, or a regular volunteer. I was just there. I represent my losses. I held a place for my betters, occupied some small corner of their absence.

So do that for me too today if you can. Not dead yet. Still fighting. Still defying these fascist sons of bitches. Thanks to all out on the streets today from one who couldn't make it out there today. I am with you. Untold millions follow behind. Our strength is in our numbers, our ancestors, the memories of all who came before and fought as you fight today for the dignity of us all.

I offer my thanks, and again, my thanks. And again. Again. Again.

Mum Says (a eulogy for my mother)

 

Beginnings and endings are never so simple as we would wish. Few things are, are they? We wish for simple things: a simple solution, an easy answer, an easy birth, an easy death. We are seldom granted any such. More’s the pity. 

Instead life is harder - and richer  - than we could ever have imagined when we were young. Even the simplest life; the most honest, straightforward existence is fraught —and full. And yet, “No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year,” said Cicero. We hope to die, when we come to it at last, “in a good old age, full of days.” Another wish not often granted. 

And even when it is, it is seldom enough. It is not enough now. How could it be? How can we be satisfied when life is all we have, all we’ve ever known, all we leave behind when we go?

Ninety three years our mother was here. Full of days. Still, not enough. How could it be? If you knew her, if you loved her as we all did, as she loved all of us, present and absent, how could it be? 

I’m grateful for the time we had.

What would she want me to say now? That she looked good. She’d want me to mention that. That she has her eyebrows on. A nice outfit. Her hair done. This was not vanity. She was proud, but not vain. There was effort put forth, right to the end. It mattered to her, the effort; that she looked good, that her clothes looked pretty, not expensive but nice, that her husband was proud to be seen with her. She liked color, pattern. She had taste. 

She would want someone to say that she didn’t look ninety three years old — even now. That she couldn’t possibly be that age. That delighted her every time it happened and it happened a lot.

What else?

She loved flowers. She arranged them beautifully. She made pretty things from paper, scraps, paint. It mattered that there was beauty, all around her pretty things, even as her world grew small, her eye was on all of it — that things were… so. “Not where that goes. That looks better.” It mattered. What she couldn’t find that was bright or cheerful or right, she made, made better, made brighter, made right. In a long life she’d seen enough ugliness, hurt, pain. She fought against the dark with the tools she had to hand: color, pattern, scissors, paint, furniture. And of course she could see in the dark, couldn’t she? ”Owl lady.” She needed but a very little light. She used what there was.

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” - Garcia Marquez

When the love of her life died after sixty two years together, she knew a new solitude. To be so alone at last was hard. They had been everywhere and always together. One never thought of one but with the other; Jerry and Stella — almost one word for 62 years. And then not. She filled the quiet as best she could. She was never left entirely alone — and for that she would want me to thank again and always my good brother and my amazing sister-in-law who between them made her life and home possible, and kept both my father and mother alive for years longer than either might otherwise have lived. I will never be able to thank them enough.

What she knew best was love, in which she was lucky and knew it. And what she had she gave away, always: food, affection, care, kindness. In this above all else she fought against not just the dark but the false light of being seen to do good. She despised the lie of public piety and ostentatious good deeds. She said once of a neighbor of my grandmother’s, “She’d be happy to stop and help — but she had to get to church.” Wicked little woman, was Stella. Funny.

“I guess I wasn’t very nice,” she’d say afterwards — when she’d been a bit sharp. Sometimes I’d agree. Didn’t much like that. “You not supposed to agree, damn you.” And then she’d call me a “smart ass,” and we’d giggle.

What she did mostly she did because it was right, because it was what you did, how you do, because that’s what you do if you aren’t awful. She could not fathom people being awful. “What on earth do they get out of it?!” she’d say with hurt astonishment, genuinely mystified by evil. Knew it when she saw it though it might take her a very long time, and even then she’d shake her head at what must have brought someone to be so cruel. 

She intended us all to always do better if we could, when and where we could. She did not understand people who wouldn’t or don’t. She always felt the need to see good in others. She was often disappointed. Never stopped her. 

To love is to help where help is needed.

“You don’t have to like it, and they don’t have to deserve it. Just do it anyway.”

From when we were very small and she was our world to when in the end she was small and we were hers, she never didn’t pay attention. There was great humility in this, and a greater good. “Do what you can.” She never claimed to know the answers to large questions. She could not explain much of the wider world, or why people did as they do. She knew we all might do better, and that she might, and that that was not always enough — to know that and to keep trying — but that it would have to do.

When I was mourning another loss she told me, “Just do what you can, then see if you can do a little more.” She said, “That’s all I know to do, all I know to tell you.”

And a hundred times she’d tell me she was done. Very seldom true. She just might try again.

And so she did. And so we do.

But then all our mothers are saints when they die, at least in the newspapers. She laughed to see so many perfect marriages memorialized, such stainless reputations and sterling characters — if only in the obituaries she always read first in her newspaper. She was particularly amused at the idea of everyone automatically becoming a sweet little old lady if they lived long enough.

She’d read or hear about someone having been “a blessing to all” or “a gift to all who knew her,” and she’d say, “Not really,” or “not that I ever noticed,” and smile. Wicked little smile.

She told me years ago, “Whoever you are already, old age just makes you more so.”

Old age took much from her; her husband, a grandson, but it left her nearly all she had always been, to very nearly the end. She was funny, sharp tongued, self-deprecating, kind.

“If you can’t do anything else,” she told me time and again, perhaps because I particularly needed reminding, “you can at least try to be kind.”

I try. I will try. 

She also taught us what it was to be useful, to work, to help, to be proud, to fight, to survive, to defend one another, and to laugh — specially at ourselves.

She’d say, “Don’t you laugh at that,” when she was mad or foolish — and then she’d laugh.

“That’s all I know to tell you,” she’d say. “It will matter more,” she told me, “that you tried.” Even if it mattered only to her, if only for her. “That’s for you, not for anybody else. You do that for you.”

“You’ll want to know you tried.” 

And so we do, don’t we? We try. I am trying. And so we shall.

Thank you, my sweet, tough little mother, our Stella, our North Star, for all you taught me, all you gave all of us. I promise. We will try.

Sorta Sorting Sinners

 If I'm being honest, the reason I drive the same way to work every day is because that's the way I drive to work. It's the same reason I make tuna salad the way I make tuna salad, why I put on my socks before I put on my trousers each morning. There was probably a learning curve to the way I drive to work back when I moved to Seattle and got the job, but twenty-some years in who remembers? Don't ask me how I came to this or why I do as I do — I just do, yes?

Part of my routine commute is that I take an exit downtown and then just follow the feeder lane back onto the freeway just before Cherry Street. I don't remember why. Something to do with traffic and a bottleneck. I don't remember. I just do. 

For years the three left lanes after the exit narrowed to two and then to one and then rejoined the freeway. For a couple of years recently, there was construction that forced everyone not exiting right to move to the left lane almost immediately. Bottleneck. Defeated my purpose (?) That may be the only time I changed my routine and believe me, I took some convincing. Eventually the construction, whatever it actually was, ended and I returned to my usual drive. However now, when one pulls up to the last light before returning to the freeway, there is not one light, there are not two, now there are three lanes and three traffic signals that go green one after another and feed all three lanes onto the Interstate. 

This is… better? I trust it is. I can’t say. I tried to read a whole book once about how parking defines American society. It’s an interesting idea but I couldn’t finish the book. The only thing that is more boring than cars is traffic. Turns out, parking is more boring than traffic.* Evidently I cannot be made to care about any of it even when I think I do. I can’t read maps well either. Don’t have that gene. Transportation generally? Yes, please! Glad to have it. Wouldn’t want to have to walk everywhere. Stopped taking buses when it became clear I’d never see my husband awake again if I didn’t drive to work. Three cheers then for the wheel.

Now, how does it all work? No idea. Cars? Just so much magic. I do what I'm told in terms of gasoline and oil changes and maintenance generally and hope I don't offend the engine faeries or the suspension gremlins. This is very much how I also take my pills in the morning, why I save my receipts with sales-tax, and what I actually understand of the bookstore’s hellish inventory system. I just try not to piss off the imps and the angels. 

And yet here I am about to talk about traffic again like I suddenly have something to say.

Here goes. Since I can’t listen to my radio in the car anymore — it’s not broken, our country is — I’ve been driving mostly in silence. Maybe that’s why I’ve noticed something mildly interesting about that additional traffic light and feeder lane. Mildly, mind.

As I’ve said, I’ve no idea what that third lane and light are meant to do and I genuinely don’t care. Trust it’s doing what it’s supposed to. What I see it do every morning though? It sorts out The Shits. 

You know those people who think changing lanes gets them somewhere sooner? Yeah, those. The right-hand lane, the one that has always eventually had to merge left before one gets onto the freeway, a car could just sort of end up there. Not always worth the effort of merging left until circumstances necessitate. But that second lane to the right of the right lane, that new third lane? That one has to be chosen. It doesn’t exist as such until after the last exit off to the right. To even go to that third light the driver has to get there. It’s a choice. 

That’s The Shits sorter.

From the lights to the freeway entrance is less than what? Five hundred feet? (Estimating distance in yards etc. isn’t really a thing of mine either. Let’s just call it “not far.”) So what possible advantage can there be in getting the whole way over to the far right to then have to inevitably merge left shortly thereafter?

The line is shorter, sorta. It moves sorta faster. 

But the real answer? Pretty sure the real answer is that it doesn’t do shit. It takes a few seconds off the drive maybe? A car-length or three if it’s busy? That’s nothing. That does nothing.

Years ago a very dear friend was staying at our house for a week and arranged to get his regular newspaper, to which we did not subscribe, temporarily diverted to our address. That’s how much he loved his hometown newspaper. In addition to being a devoted reader of the Los Angeles Times my friend happened also to be a devotee of lane-changing on the freeways. I was actually with him the morning his favorite paper published a scientific study proving that repeatedly changing lanes had no statistically significant effect on drive-times, fuel consumption, or anything else other than a greater propensity for what we used to call “fender benders” when there were still fenders to be bent. That’s right. Complete waste of time that accomplishes nothing, aggressive lane-changing. I suspect my friend almost lost faith in his favorite paper for printing such obvious and deliberate lies. 

I was easily persuaded myself, and not just for the pleasure I took in my friend being wrong.

So scuttling over to that third, supposedly faster feeder lane? I’d bet you a dollar today that it does nothing. And yet every morning they do it, The Shits, that mad dash out of the left lane. They scramble and scurry to the right and then the right again. They bolt and jockey and speed as best they can and they achieve what exactly? Break-lights. They get to jump a couple of car-lengths? Ahead of whom? Me? Is that a thing worth doing? Am I such an impediment? 

You should know I generally let The Shits in pretty much whenever they want. They always merge late. Always. Sure sign. I understand why you might hate me for doing this. I hate doing it. I get it. I wait my turn. I get over before I’m required. I observe the rules generally. Maybe I go a little fast sometimes, but that’s pretty much it. But yes, if some driver waits to merge until there’s really no excuse to have waited so long, I’m the person who lets them in rather than play bumper-chicken to try and block them from cheating. I agree this isn’t right. In a just world I wouldn’t do it. If this was a line at the movies (remember those?) or for the free government cheese, I would object loudly to someone cutting in. But in my car? A car I had to pay for? A car I have to insure? I’m not fighting The Shits. They're dangerous. They will hit you. They don't care.

You know how they are.

And we all assume we can anticipate who they are by what they drive as well as the way they drive. Not entirely false, I shouldn’t think. You drive a Tesla Truck or a giant pickup with tires higher than my car windows, I would guess you’re likelier to be one of The Shits. Stands to reason. Sort of a class thing: dudes in expensive douche-wagons. Likewise all the balding brats in Bugattis, the men with modified mufflers, feckless fucks with fancy rims. But The Shits come in un-moneyed versions as well, rednecks in those demolition-derby junkers they repair with tarps and tape and meth. No idea how they keep going, though obviously nothing’s going to stop them short of a major car fire. Pray note that the horn seems to work in everything driven by The Shits. Turn signals are less reliable. They must burn through break-lights, them boys. (There must be females or presumably the genus excrementis would die out. I would not know, but my guess is they all fuck like they drive; fast, haphazard, without a thought to anybody else on the road. Just sad to think on.)

Every morning I watch them. Far from a real majority, you understand, The Shits. But they are noticeable, yes? All I've ever wanted in a car was reliability and anonymity. Exact opposites then. Most of us just don’t want to die on our way to where we have to go. Simple rule. The Shits could not give a. That’s really why they stand out in so not a good way. Not just rude like the people who drift or wander or never signal (obviously a lot of crossover here though,) The Shits are all daredevils. The lot of ‘em, whatever sports car or shitbox they happen to be driving, whatever fancy corporate job or appointment with their drug clients to which they all are rushing, they all roll as if pursued by cops, bears, and the bad Transformers. 

That’s why there’s the last minute third light and lane then — to let them pass.

Seriously, I know it feels wrong. It feels like we’re letting them win somehow even though it’s really only a competition amongst themselves. And even if we are letting them get away with something, and even worse if somehow we’re wrong and they’re right and it is somehow a contest to see who can get wherever before whomever gets there first in the natural, logical, inexorable way of things, we have to let them. 

Just let them go. 

Let The Shits go, people. Let them pass. Better out than in-line behind you. Healthier for everyone to keep an eye.

Of course there are other sorters as well, other sorts of metaphorical third feeder lanes as it were; the ballot, most obviously, but that one can be tricky to trust — as we’ve learned to our collective horror yet again. But there are others, some more subtle, some not:

As a bookseller I’d say Bukowski, reading 48 Laws of Power or anything by Robert Greene, returning travel guides after thirty days with your paper airline ticket still in the book, asking for Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar and being shocked it isn’t on the shelf — expressing shock generally at the absence of anything in a bookstore in 2025, frankly. Also asking for the book you wrote before saying you wrote it, buying golf books as gifts for non golfers, and just buying golf books come to that. Then there’s the existence of golf books — and golf.

There are things not specific to how I earn my living but I've learned to recognize from being in a retail service job, like people who eat while talking on the telephone, or go shopping when they have the flu, or stay in public with a noisy pet or a screaming baby. Also anyone who comes in or stays to browse five minutes before a posted closing time, or brings a full basket to register after closing has been announced.

Wider popular culture is a virtual labyrinth of third feeder lanes. Warhammer, professional gamers, professional poker players, owning a casino, owning a sports team and or moving a sports team to another city, Andy Cohen, “contemporary worship music,” twenty thousand dollar handbags, complaining about fake twenty thousand dollar hand bags, TikTok videos of “recipes” that involve crockpots or skillets and whole loaves of store-bought, pre sliced bread, etc., etc.

There must be lots of others. You decide. Make your own list. 

The great benefit of being aware of the ways life lets us sort out The Shits is that most can then be avoided, at at least let pass. DO. Honestly it will help. You know the signs. Ignore them at your own risk. Seriously, it's no good going to say a tailgate party and then complaining that there are exactly the people there that one would assume go to tailgate parties or worse, people who use "tailgating" as a verb. How could one not know? They went to a football game hours early because presumably football doesn't last long enough?! Admittedly there are not many of us who can give The Shits a hard pass altogether. They will come up. But at least we can stay out of their lane, yes? At least we can usually see them coming. 

They sorta sort themselves.

* * * 

A couple of days ago the family of Anita Bryant announced that she had actually died at 84 on December 16th, 2024. Presumably they delayed making her death public because it is pretty hard now, even in Oklahoma to find someone to drive the stake through her withered, black little heart and bury her anonymously at a crossroad at midnight.

For any not old enough to remember the lady, in 1958 Anita Jane was 2nd runner-up in a national beauty pageant. She went on to sing on USO tours and on the kind of records and television shows that old church women loved like striped candy. She made the kind of music shared with young people as a punishment for kids who liked to dance to  that colored Rock and Roll music. Eventually Anita became the television spokesperson for Florida orange juice, making seemingly endless commercials in which she grinned bug-eyed with delight over a pitcher of "sunshine."

And then in 1977 Anita Bryant became the face of homophobia, leading a campaign to repeal an LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, Florida. And she kept at it, eventually getting her pancaked mug on the cover of Newsweek, among other dubious accomplishments, as the Queen of the Righteous Lie. In fact she became more famous for the vicious bullshit she spewed at and about us than for anything she might have done in the way of art or motherhood or faith in the sweet baby Jesus. For a spell there, we were her lifestyle. 

In case I've been unclear, she was a complete cunt.

Though her supporters always blamed "the gays" for wrecking her entertainment career, she actually fucked it all up with the fundamentalists when in 1980 she finally divorced her piece of shit first husband. Back in the days before Trump, the Bible-thumpers really didn't cotton to divorced Jezebels. Thereafter she sank like a dunked witch. Had she just stayed hitched to that abusive dude, she would still have been the darling of dipshits, and a babe among the bigots. Titter.

The harm she did was no joke. Her campaign became the model for American religious fascism in the twentieth century and the effect across the planet was and continues to be devastating. LGTQIA people proved a perfect scapegoat for reaction and hate. For our every victory, major or minor there has been an opposite and equal backlash that invariably still uses the template Anita helped to invent with her "Save the Children" campaign in the 1970s. 

And no, she never really repented, never apologized, never accepted responsibility for the thousands of lives and careers she ruined, the children she encouraged to kill themselves or helped send to religious re-education camps. The old bag lived to a ripe age and long enough to see her granddaughter marry a woman -- though she presumably did not attend the wedding. 

The reason I mention her here is most obviously because blithe as I might be above about avoiding The Shits and just letting them pass, there are evils too great to let go by. Anita Bryant was one. 

When I added my voice to chorus crowing over her corpse on social media, a well-meaning friend, "for the sake of compassion for all" suggested that even a monster like Anita might by the end have had regrets, might have been embarrassed or even ashamed. No evidence to support that supposition. But even if there had been, even if in her obituaries anywhere there had been some appeal for reconciliation and forgiveness, I'm afraid I would still be joining the kick-line virtually dancing on her grave.

For all of my annoyance at the thoughtlessness and arrogance of the rude and the self-important goobers sorting themselves into that third lane, none of them to my knowledge has or may ever do the like harm individually of this lovely, usually soft-spoken, former Miss Oklahoma. Think of that. 

She is in rare company: Reagan, Schlafly, Falwell, Buckley, Murdoch, Jesse Helm, Limbaugh -- she is among the monsters and the murderers of my youth and young adulthood. Thousands upon thousands died unspeakable deaths, often alone, often without family, directly because of the lies she told and never bothered to correct.

For all my irritation with The Shits, that's usually all that is and all most of them are. Collectively, as they recently proved again, they contribute mightily to the general coarsening and peril to the Republic, but there are ill manners and bad people, and then there are monsters.

Nothing for it but to fight the monsters. Only so much can be let pass. 

Fuck forgiveness. I'm not a Christian and I am not obliged. She didn't ask and I'm not offering.  I'm glad she's dead. I hope her death was every bit as horrible as, say, the death of my friends who deserved none of it and who suffered and died young without their mothers to comfort them. 

And here we are again. The Triumph of The Shits is upon us. Here be monsters aplenty. One less in the world. 

Good. 

*Golf is more boring than anything other than the men who talk about golf, parking, and traffic, and anyone who dresses for golf anywhere but where golf is being played.

Ellipses (Intro for My Christmas Reading 2024)

So I still don’t know what to say or do about… that, you know... THAT. That thing that happened, this ongoing, seemingly unending... what? Revenge play? Fiasco? Triumph des Willens? It feels frankly like a terrifying reenactment of my worst nightmares from Junior High: Revenge of the Jerks? Anyway, I doubt you know quite what to do about this either. And even if you do, I'm sorry, I don't want to hear it just now. Nope. I don’t want to hear you out. You may be right. I may never know. Trust me, it's not you, it's me. I absolutely do not want to talk about any of this. I don't want to commiserate, or consider our options going forward. I do not need to process. Honestly, I don't want to hear about any of it. I don't want to read about it. I definitely do not want to even think about it. No. I don't want to watch it happen. I don't want to know if or how it does. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but for me that’s new. I've never felt quite this way before. 

Of course, this is not my first political or cultural setback, by no means my first ass-whuppin'. Unsurprisingly at my age, I have been disappointed before. I lived through being a little sissy in the sixties and then hair-styles and unbuttoned shirt-fronts of our fathers in the seventies, and then the Reagans and AIDS in the eighties! And how many Supreme Courts? And how many protests of how many wars? And, yes the first round of this thing and a pandemic! And yet this somehow feels almost worse, does it not? I've never been quite this brim full o' existential dread. I've never been this personally immobilized. 

It's not disinterest on my part, you understand. I didn't wake up the day after and not care.  And it's not that I'm defeated -- I mean  obviously we were, all of us and potentially our children's children and the planet, etc., etc. Nope. I just don't want to. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, "I would prefer not to." So this is just... What is this? This is the ellipses in which we find ourselves at the moment. The ellipses in which I've decided to rest awhile. Dot dot dot. Get it? What comes after? No idea. 

In his novel, Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence says, "That's the place to get to -- nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere."

Well, yes.

So I decided for the time being to not even try to see past the end of my nose and so I haven’t, much. Decided to do... nothing. And still not doing anything much, roughly a month later. Now that’s new. That is not and has never been my M.O. So, if I'm not doing anything to counteract the horror, what on earth am I to do instead? I mean, if we are not going to address the elephant in the room -- or aaaaall the elephants soon to be stomping and trumpeting and shitting aaaaall over the place, well, what then?

And I thought, “Maybe just listen to music?”

So, on my commute I decided to listen to Bill Evans, not news. Do you know the great Bill Evans? Pianist. Jazz great. Love him. So Bill Evans, not news.

That phrase, "not news," now I come to say it aloud, that's rich. Obviously I meant I won’t listen to "The News" anymore, so I've stopped tuning the radio to NPR's Morning Edition et al. I’ve stopped reading most of the newspaper too. I can’t look at CNN or any of the morning shows or anything that might bring it all up again. For fear I'll hear him, you know? That voice. But not even that, just the mention of. I can't. Doesn't much matter the purveyor or the medium; print, digital, broadcast. Unbearable. Anything but that. So "not news." Anything but news. No news. 

And now I think about it, "not news" is also true in the sense that my confession is not exactly "news." I am evidently not alone in my paralytic incapacity, not the only one staying in the ellipses, now am I? Seems I'm actually on trend for once. 

And then there's yet another suggestion wedged into those two little words! If you know me, if you so much as look at me, it can't be unexpected that I would choose to listen to jazz rather than pop or country or sports radio. So that's "not news" either. I mean, I wear a beard and blocked hats and clogs. I still say things are “cool” and “not cool." I’m the gay who didn’t really care about Ga Ga until she sang with Tony Bennett. Come on. Jazz makes sense for me.

Though to be honest, I'm usually more of a "Basin Street East Proudly Presents Miss Peggy Lee" kind of jazz aficionado. You know, gay. I like a lady who sings with the band, preferably a cool chick in elbow-length gloves and a chignon. I like a chanteuse, a Miss Dakota Staton armed with a cigarette, and a sly wink, mic'd, minked, marvelous. I like a lady who knows her way around a double entendre and a double bass. I like sass and snap and swing, and if we're going to have two cigarettes in an ashtray, I like a vocalist who's heart may be broken but who's voice never breaks. Never really been a fan of ruins of Billy Holiday, I'm more a let's listen to Sassy swing some Gershwin, daddy. 

So when I went on my news hunger strike, I pulled out a whole raft of my favorite female vocalists. And that  -- was a mistake. Why? It was all those goddamned torch songs. In the car, driving to work on the freeway and Carol Sloane sings “For All We Know” and I’m in tears. Embarrassing -- and frankly a little dangerous. Try another record. Carmen McRae does "Please Be Kind", of all things, and I'm gone again. Floods, blinding floods. It was a problem.

In the end I couldn't even listen to cool, cheery June Christy or even dear, baby-voiced Blossom Deary for fear they'd do a slow ballad and sing about the one that got away, or their disappointed dreams, or go into I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry. Can't. I was afraid I'd tear up and maybe smash into the divider or drive off the bridge.

So no singers. So instrumentals? So Bill Evans.

Not that Bill Evans couldn't make me cry, as it turns out. As I mentioned, great pianist/composer and fully capable of that tendresse douloureuse that catches the throat without so much as a word said. So his instrumental of “My Foolish Heart” shouldn’t but it did. Heartbreaking. Reminding me of other heartbreaking things, moments, results. Which is how I ruined even Bill Evans. (And by the way, Bill Evans playing with Tony Bennett on say, Some Other Time?! Definitely on my go-to-tears list.) 

Here I was thinking I was safe with Bill Evans at Town Hall, 1966, and Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1968, that sort of thing. Swinging. Brilliant. Abstract enough to keep my mind off the other, but not so abstract as to prevent me following the tune, so Bill Evans. Maybe Stan Getz? Maybe Miles. Maybe even Monk (which is about as far as I go.)

Instrumental jazz, no later than Be Bop because I'm hip but not so hip as all that, I thought. Have you heard Miles Davis play “It Never Entered My Mind”?! Fuck. Gone.

So maybe not jazz. 

This may all make me sound cooler than I am, by the way, all this jazz talk. (Does it? No? Well, it used to when it wasn't age appropriate, when I was an unlikely eighties kid who preferred Dinah Washington to The Clash. That was charmingly eccentric. Now, as I said, I not only look like that guy, I am.) 

I am still not cool though. Never have been cool even when I briefly affected smoking jackets and a cigarette holder. I tried, but no. Too emotional, frankly. Highs, lows, no cool. Way too late now to take it up even if I could. So I am the uncool jazz fan; not quite a square, but not so hip as all that. I can’t read a note of music or talk intelligently about Evans’ chord structures or his use of “rhythmic displacement.” Just an enthusiast, just a listener. Obviously a sentimental listener. Though I hasten to add that I'm not one of those Glenn Miller reactionaries who only likes swing because bald guys slow dance to it and the girls still wear really red lipstick. Ick.

And before anyone suggests string quartets or heaven forbid Yo Yo Ma playing Bach cello suites, the classical catalogue proved me weirdly wet-eyed too. I'll spare you the details as I am even less qualified to talk about Debussy than Ellington, but it was rough. So... silence then, at least in car, for eleven miles each way. 

And at home? I believe this is called a helpless shrug?

What, for example am I reading?!

Well, Middlemarch. Not just Middlemarch though. Never just Middlemarch.

When it happened, I happened to have started reading a big new book about the Queen. Seriously, The Queen of Bloody England. Nothing so utterly remote from reality as a Windsor. Nothing less like current events than a Saxe-Coburg Gotha, baby! (That was their name you know, because of Albert, before his grandson with the pointy mustaches and the withered arm set the world ablaze in 1914 and changed the royal sauerkraut into victory cabbage and the Sax-Coburg and Gothas into those dear ol' tweedy Berkshire county folk, the Windsors. Hashtag TikTok history, hashtag fun facts about the dull rich.) 

The Windsors! If you don't know, they're just like Game of Thrones but without dragons, or ash-blondes, or sex, or engaging personalities, or magic, or looks — except by marriage and when those boys still had all their hair and weren't fight over their wives. Most importantly the current royal family is without politics or even any interest of themselves. That’s the job. I'll concede the occasional touching anecdote and gesture, the great writing and acting in The Crown, but the reality Elizabeth Windsor? Nothing further from strong emotion than Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand and the Cook Islands, Lord of the Isle of Mann, etc. She was in fact the studied, practiced, all but perfected embodiment of keeping well out of it, the serene, high muckety-muck of staying above the fray, sovereign of the static smile and the neutral chat, the matchy-matchy hat and purse lady, dear, only just dead Lilibet of the Coins, Stamps, and Pounds.  

So Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, by Craig Brown, author of the equally and unexpectedly delightful Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Excellent reading. Good distraction. Hardly a tear to be shed. Okay, maybe one or two for ol' Liz. (Margaret on the other hand was an absolute monster! Wonderfully rude, snobbish, stylish, thick, selfish. Ghastly woman.) 

So safe, neutral reading. 

And then something about ol' Lizzie, of all people, really piqued my interest. Are you familiar with The Queen's Christmas Message? I guess it's The King's now, but I'm not obligated as an American to think about the present monarch at all and I don’t. So, not to give the whole history of this very modern British tradition, but basically the late Queen's late Pa and even later Grandpap used to do this on "the wireless" and then she kept it going, on the television since 1957, and then on The Socials. That's where I watched a bunch of these things. And I read a bunch on the internet too, trying to crack the code.

Basically everything British stops cold at 3PM on Christmas Day and the monarch appears virtually 'round the isles and whatever's left of the Commonwealth (aka the former Empire) and there's a wee speech. It's a pretty unique speech even as monarchal speeches go. Basically, it is just Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the ol' Sax-Coburg Gotha Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluksburgs and it makes the Opening of Parliament sound like Valerie Solanas' Scum Manifesto. I mean. This thing is hypnotically predicable. Honest. Watch one. Watch her first one, Elizabeth, from 1957. 

It is odd. First there's that voice:  "It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you."  

Indeed.

Everything about The Christmas Message is ever so slightly weird, at least to an American: the completely predictable repetition of festive cliche, the artificiality, the frank absence of any discernible talent for — I don’t know, public speaking? BUT (big but,) it is also kind of charming. It's sweet. It feels both harmless and heartfelt. From the obvious presence of a film crew to the set up in The Queen’s what? Living room, is it? Back parlor? Home office? From the setting then to the lady’s rather awkward but very real attempt at what I'm guessing is... warmth? Anyway, an argument could be made for The Queen’s Christmas Message being the first reality tv.

Watched her last one again. Opens with a band, closes with a choir. In between, there the old girl is, bless 'er, Christmas pin, same hair since  -- ever, same message, same monotone delivery. The Queen.

And it's perfect of it's kind. Don't ask me if I cried because that seems where this was heading, doesn't it? But no, I did not.

What did it make me think about? What did it change? What did she give me personally, by way of a message?

Christmas.

Shut up. It did not seem that obvious a month ago, even a week ago, at least to me.

I decided to think about Christmas, about tonight actually, about this part of my Christmas, my tradition, our thing we do together you and me and anybody else who might be watching or listening along. This is where we step back out of the ellipses.

Because, I probably will cry tonight. Almost always do, don't I? And so do some of you and nobody's died of it yet that I know of, and the world doesn't end. There are people who should be here and they aren't, and people I wish I was with and I'm not, but this will absolutely do. Every year I read a classic  American short story aloud and hopefully we are all of us moved at least a little and distracted from everything happening out there and we get to think instead about kindness, and childhood, and memory, and friendship. We get to remember and be if not in love, then again in communion, which for now is near enough.

I will not tell you that any of this; the cookies, the story, the company, my rather rickety voice, the bookstore itself as both an idea and an institution and my other home for better than two decades, I cannot tell you that any of this either answers... that or that any or all of whatever this is still constitutes a bulwark against the encroaching dark, the very real dark, out there. I don't know that that is true. I don't know if or how I might still believe that. 

But for tonight, I want to. So here is my small music. Here is our little joy. This is the gift. Hopefully nobody dies tonight that we don't already anticipate! We will instead think just about... this.

The View From Her Chair

My mother put buttons in her lamps. Lots of buttons. She and my late father used to go to auctions. All the auctions. They bought a lot of what Dad called, “junk”: dishes and cutlery and furniture, collectibles, antiques, linens, ceramics, picture frames and… stuff. And, yes whenever she saw them, my mother bought buttons. Dad sold the things they bought to supplement his limited retirement income, first at yard sales, then from the building he put up to sell the stuff. They cleaned and polished and painted and made everything nice and then they sold what they’d cleaned.

Mother sold buttons, but she kept more than she sold. She’d seen a picture in a magazine or on tv of a clear glass lamp with buttons in it. It looked pretty. So she filled her lamps with buttons. 

What she did not see was that first the people making these pretty button-lamps put Styrofoam in the center and then scattered the buttons around the all but weightless middle. Not Mum. My mother filled her lamps with buttons. Hundreds of buttons — maybe thousands. Very pretty, but her lamps are heavy. Big lamps to start, then filled with buttons. I mean really heavy. Hard to lift heavy. I’ve carried good sized dogs and toddlers that weigh less than my mother’s lamps.

At some point someone pointed out her mistake. Too late obviously. The buttons were already in there. So many buttons. No point complaining now. Besides, might be quite valuable some day, all those buttons.

“Your inheritance,” she called them.

Actually she has used that joke a lot. She bought new chair a year ago. It’s a really nice chair. Just her size; like doll furniture. Little gray chair. Put a throw-pillow on it — with a brightly colored rooster on it, naturally. Loves chickens. Can’t have too many roosters. Rule of thumb. (On entering her house for the first time the boyfriend of her devoted hairdresser was once heard to remark, “Somebody really loves cocks!”) Now, I’ve sat on the new chair and it is perfectly comfortable other than how close it sits to the floor. Also the arms only come up to my hip not my elbow. I’m short and it’s still too low. Nobody sits in that chair. Like new. Just say you like it. It’s yours.

If you like something in her house — if you like anything in her house — if you admire a vase or a picture (or a button lamp) she says she’ll put your name on it. Be careful though, she may just make you take it. The Nurse’s Aide commented on the antique spoon collection. Went into a bag. Big bag. Went. Don’t protest. Let it happen. Mum’s ninety-two. Just do what she tells you. Take the spoons.

I know what I’m taking when she dies. I want her Tupperware saltine cracker box. It is perfect. Keeps the crackers crisp. She won’t let me have it yet. She likes saltines.  But she’s put my name on it. She goes — I get the Tupperware saltines cracker box, but not before. My inheritance.

Years ago a friend told me that as we die our things are drawn closer, as if by the gravity of the situation. What to do with that bureau -- which we none of us noticed an hour ago? Who will have my china? May we donate shoes? That chair’s like new. Take this. Counterintuitive isn’t it? True though. One would think the end is about letting things go but that is a function of living, or living well, in community, with love. Dying is about what we can reach, see from here, note, fix. Dying is a test of strength, it’s agitation; the body reflexively grasping to slow the inevitable losses. Dying is holding on.

More, when one is ill the scope of things narrows and it matters what is on the nightstand, when the one thing needed isn’t by the chair, that the lamp seems to move further away each day and that the switch isn’t where it should be. The scissors need to be — so. My glasses go — here.

From her chair my mother can see a fragment of leaf or a knot of lint on the carpet a yard away. Usually she notices these things again mid-stride while being helped back and forth between rooms. “What is that?” — dead-stop. This is how heels get stepped on. This is home healthcare bumper cars.

These things matter nonetheless. It matters that the flowers on the cup face forward when it’s put back on the sink, that she reads her newspaper with a bandanna spread across her bosom so as not to get ink on her blouse. It matters that her things are clean and where she expects them to be. There’s a tiny porcelain dish for her pills because she can see them in it and fish them out with her fingers. The pillows on the porch-swing need straightened. That is not where her slippers go, and the left shoe, it just stands to reason, should be to the left of the right one.

It may seem so, but honestly she is not being fussy. She used to be, you understand, fussy. Not now. Back in the day when she was working two jobs and cleaning other people’s houses and dorm rooms and looking after old people and raising her kids and other people’s kids as well, she was fussy about whatever she had the time and energy to fuss about. Hated dirt and disorder unsurprisingly as her days were spent cleaning other people’s messes. She fussed about our appearance and our manners and our intentions as every day she saw other people behaving thoughtlessly, being slovenly, making more work for women like her, more mess to clean up. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Didn’t see it at the time, possibly couldn’t have, being kids and therefore thoughtless, messy, greedy, selfish. See it now though.

And then everything slowed down considerably and her kids were grown and gone and eventually all of her old people died and then she was old and so was he and then he died and she was alone. “ Now I just clean to keep busy,” she told me at the time. It didn’t matter in the same way. Now it mattered because time needed to be made to keep moving. Muscle and bone mattered more than the specific use made of them. Just move. Get on with it. Go on. (Nearer the end and my mother sounds like Beckett suddenly.)

Asked her opinion of what’s to be done “after,” which is the word one uses rather than death, my mother says the most extraordinary thing. There are just the two of us and it is late, already dark for hours. We’ve watched a movie and made popcorn which was probably not a good idea for either of us. Maybe that’s a different night altogether. Nights smear across months and days fall into the same spaces that repeat like pill-cases — and who remembers before this was true? But then we are talking about death and hers specifically and what needs to happen then.

“Do what you have to. You’ll know. It’ll be hard,” she says. She knows whereof she speaks. “You’ll be fine.”

That’s our inheritance.

Who knows how long those buttons will stay in the lamp? Who will want that little chair? Won’t matter. Really never did except, however briefly to her and so to me, to us.

My house is full of books. These are my books. For years now, decades, the assumption has been that should my considerably older husband somehow outlive me (look at me — it could happen) he will ask one of my friends in the used books business to come out to the house with a truck and all the books will go. I’m fine with this. My books matter to me because they are my books. I have excellent taste. Some of my books are valuable of themselves but not many. A number are rare but none belong in a museum. I own books because I read books. I read my books. When I die my books will find other readers or they won’t. I won’t be here. I will not care. I did think my friends might be invited to browse my shelves and take a book in memory of me but now I write that and I blush. What a grim sort of wake that sounds! You know someone’s taking a Quixote they’ll never read because it looked pretty and it was getting late and oh, hell, just pick something. Shiver. No. Sell the lot.

And then my husband takes an unexpected sentimental turn in this our forty-first year together and says no, he would want to keep my books. He says that he would want to come and sit with them and remember me by them and I am more touched than I can possibly explain — but no, right?

And then I remember that I will not be here in this scenario. Exit, stage left pursued by bear. Gone. My books will cease to be my books the minute I cease to be. Then they will be his books and he can do with them exactly as he pleases.

All of the things, our things that are drawn up after us, the things we drag in our wake, what becomes the debris of our passing, matters now not then. This penknife matters to me because it is beautiful and practical and belonged to my late uncle and was given to me by my brother. The object is useful and pleasing but its only meaning comes from having been given away and remembered.

Is this all too obvious? Have I not said something useful even if I’ve said nothing original? 

The nature of my inheritance is such that most of it need never be stated at all. My inheritance, ours, is understood already or it’s wasted. It is in and of us, gifts from our mothers, memories of all those that raised us, made us, loved us, left us. Mustn’t waste it.

And in the meanwhile I buy more books and covet a Tupperware saltine cracker box, and wonder just how many buttons can be in all those big lamps. And now my sister in law Kris puts my mother’s slippers just so and cleans her glasses and puts them where they belong and turns the handle on the mug the right way as, unlike her youngest son, my mother is right handed.

“Do what you have to. You’ll know. It’ll be hard.” I will see to it. We will. We’ll be fine. Take this. Call it a gift. Our inheritance.