Sunday, November 23, 2008

Grandmother’s Basement

Underground the temperature dips. We grow clammy and cool. Hot summer days it is a pleasure to retreat to the basement in search of the large rubber ball Grandma reserved for her grandchildren. It lives in a corner of the large landing that leads to other rooms equally intriguing, the playroom, for instance, with a fireplace and a lamp which doubles as a coffee grinder. The base has a drawer where the ground coffee falls from the grinder in the top half of the lamp—you turn the wheel on the side by hand and hear the satisfying sound of the beans crunching in the teeth of the gears. Banners and pennants from sports teams—Red Sox, Georgetown Hoyas, Cincinnati Reds decorate the walls.

Another room in the basement holds the root cellar where during the war years when everyone had a victory garden, Grandma did her patriotic canning. I love the photography equipment she keeps here—an enlarger, and hand tints to color in the pupils of her subjects’ eyes, the blush on the cheek, the color of their hair. Her paintbrushes sit unused on a coca cola tray. When is the last time she used them I wonder? Now she keeps hordes of snapshots in albums, kodachrome pictures of the family, in vivid color.

Everything in the basement speaks of a black and white era, especially the photo process. Our closest relatives in family films of move as jerkily as the silent movie actors like Chaplin not because of the speed of the camera. It is the unease of being observed closely, of being expected to move in a way that would amuse the audience. People move in fits and starts. We never know what to do when confronted with the movie camera. We look up with shy eyes, wave or gesture awkwardly. Grandma always shoos the camera away and turns quickly from it.

The exception to the black and whiteness of the basement is the ball. It is clear plastic, an early version of thick plastic polymer that slowly loses its air every year-- we re-inflate it with a hand pump used for bicycles--clear plastic flecked with many colored specks. The colored specks are parallelograms, and they make the thing festive and very desirable to us children, as desirable as the cartoon characters on Grandma’s band-aids she keeps in a small water closet off the kitchen. In that medicine cabinet are other alluring trappings of being sick and injured—St. Joseph’s orange flavored aspirin---as delicious as candy.

A perfect day at Grandma’s would begin reading the comics in the wooden chair with red and black cushions in the game room. Play checkers with your sister. Get into a fight when she tries to cheat.

No one could hear us down there. The grown ups were upstairs having cocktails or telling boring stories about their childhoods or arguing about the Yankees or politics, or Vatican II and Pope John the xxiii. Why would anyone want to hear the Mass in English?


After we got bored and Mom told us to go outside and play we found the ball and went outside to play kickball. By this time our cousins had arrived, all six of them, the children of Dad’s brothers—Philly, Joy, Amy, David, Ned and Susan, which combined with our five were enough to make two teams with the help of some willing grown ups. It was good to have Uncle Philip on your team. Dad‘s youngest brighter was funny, made us laugh. He didn’t mind playing kickball with us kids. Dad would stand in as pitcher, hurling the clear plastic ball over and over again, with the same dead aim as he bowled, right at the pins, or in this case, us children.



Friday, November 14, 2008

Heavy Lifting

At six pm exiting the subway a quicker
young person brushes past me in a hurry.
I pull on the railing one step at a time
but coming down, first one, then two, and yet a third
parent bear strollers lifting their heavy loads
to get to the train. Such are the jobs we do
as parents, getting our children from here to there:
to doctor, to grandparents, to pre school,
and then out of the stroller, not carrying
the actual child, but holding her hand
as she learns to look left and then right,
at the street lights, at the intersection,
at the junctions of her life.

After ballet lessons we always stopped
and had an orangina and a croissant.
Elizabeth would peel the fine layers of the pastry
one at a time letting the buttery dough melt in her
mouth until she had stripped the thing down
to its chocolate center. It was our Saturday morning
ritual. No heavy lifting required.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Lucille Clifton at Uptown Y



Lucille Clifton read poems from her new book, Voices. She talked about the importance of naming and knowing our own names.
We hear from the man on the cover of the Cream of Wheat box, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben. What if they all took a walk together?





Cream of Wheat

Link
sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they
walk in front remembering this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chefs cap
wondering about what ever pictured me
then left me personless
Rastus
i read in an old paper
i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son toward dawn
we return to our shelves
our boxes ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile i simmer what
is my name









from Voices by Lucille Clifton

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Thoughts in Autumn

The leaves collapsed into clusters
of russet, orange, and red darkening into brown
I learned to call maroon when I was ten,
and driving with my family in our car
to look at leaves and buy some apples
and dusky concord grapes that grow in the Finger Lakes,
our Umbria, our Grassmere, our nirvana of New York State.
It's one thing to go to school, your pencils new,
your shoes unscuffed and shiny,
it's another to see your children leave the house
and return you know not when

Trouble the Water


Kimberly Rivers and her husband Scott Roberts, living inside the storm, take us through their streets, their neighborhood. At one point we are with them when they are stuffed into their attic and the waters of Hurricane Katrina are rising. They are our tour guides to hell.

How distanced the early responders were to the poor, disenfranchised residents who were in need. How disgracefully all levels of government behaved. It is easy in hindsight to understand the neglect. But we are living in the moment in this film whose witness is a strong indictment against Bush whose war time priorities and incompetence kept him from saving those who were dying in the United States.

It will be hard to think of Bush as a compassionate man again when he turned a blind eye to the people of New Orleans. One of those displaced described her feelings: "It is as if we are not citizens."