Lie down
To slide into shadow
And learn
Water lapping
Sounds midnight blue
And smells of stones.
Category: Uncategorized
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Sometimes I love female vocalists and songwriters like Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Phillips, or Kate Bush, sometimes heavy metal, like Sisters of Mercy, sometimes The Pogues or The Rumjacks or The Chieftains, sometimes Brian Eno, sometimes Curt Mansell. sometimes Enya. Depends on what story is running through my head.
At the moment I’m feeling angry and patriotic and perverse, so below is my day’s favorite song, “What Was Your Name in the States”, sung by The Rumjacks — an Australian band. It makes me think of my city’s early days, that somewhat mythical time when California — and especially San Francisco — was where you escaped “the States” in the east and remade yourself.
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…in 2023.
Venice: One of the oldest, most beautiful, most fascinating tourist traps in the world. A city impossible to modernize, navigate or map, where you can safely get lost and where police work consists of giving directions to wandering tourists in the dead of night. Rococco, slightly vulgar and brightly painted in places, laced with canals and bridges, gift shops bristling with expensive masks and tschoskes, piles of muticolored cannoli in the windows of cafes. Excellent food, but it’s not a good idea to ask for a table too close to a canal.Florence: Unlike Venice, a working city where people live that still functions as a working city where people live. Car horns honking among the ancient buildings, traffic lights, Vespas… Somewhere in the many red-to tan warrens of old buildings is the pensione where I stayed as a student, part of an old Medici palace, but damned if I could figure out which one. “I don’t want to constantly be visiting cathedrals” Michael had warned me before we left San Francisco, but he couldn’t seem to pass a single one without wanting to go in to look around. We stayed in an ancient building which had for a while been a 20th century monastary, now a hotel. Ours was a spacious, windowless suite with arched frescoed ceilings and a modern kitchenette so some past monkish resident (I pictured him as an earnest young man in a brown cassock and horn-rimmed glasses) could use the microwave to heat his solitary dinner in between meditation and prayer.
Pompeii: A sunlit walk through what amounted to a graveyard. The most haunting sight for me was not the plaster casts, but the beautiful black concrete floor of a villa’s courtyard, flecked with silvery chips of mica and as smooth and polished as it had been before the eruption. This was, we were told, so that someone carrying a lantern at night could easily navigate by the lampight catching the mica. I imagined how familiar, even comforting that pattern on the floor would have been to a resident over two thousand years ago. Then I imagined the skinny, battered feral cats who infest Pompeii running and stalking across it in the empty city at night.
Capri: Another joyful tourist trap. Stunningly well-dressed and wealthy tourists, scarily narrow roads, many fat, indulged and calm stray cats, especially the one that decided to sit and groom itself in the middle of the road while our macho, burly, Mastrioni-like guide pleaded with it from the driver’s seat. “Oh, kittykittykittykitty…” (After a minute or two of this, the cat, a long-haired gray tabby, glanced at us and magnanously strolled out of our way, tail in the air.) Getting up before dawn to see the Blue Grotto, eating an incredible arugula salad for lunch, drinking wine on the balcony of our hotel at dusk. A few mosquitos, but the wine and view were so good we really didn’t care.
Rome: More honking cars and vespas among ancient piles, occasional Roman era rows of cordoned-off ionic or corinthian columns, nighttime streets filled not just with tourists but with students, and so many gelato shops, pizza shops, olive oil shops… The biggest , best change I noticed from my student days were the many young women I saw walking by themselves at night on the streets of Rome and yet unmolested and unharassed by obnoxious men. Charming residents eager to show off their city, who confidently answered “yes” if we asked if they spoke English, then offered incomprehensible directions in a version of it we could not understand. Art museums where, quite possibly, my artist great-great-grandfather, a successful 19th century artist, sat and sketched copies of Renaissance paintings. The closer one got to the Vatican, the more serious young priests one saw with briefcases, usually walking alongside older men in black cassocks. The young nun in the Vatican shop who, except for her habit, looked like every other young woman working in a tourist shop, obviously bored and tilted forward, her elbows on the counter as she scrolled through her phone.
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I made it my business, from middle school on, to learn about both the Civil War era and the Third Reich.
I read everything I could about these eras because it apalled me that both the Southern Confederacy and the Third Reich were based on brutality and dehumanization. How did Germans and southerners justify it to themselves? How did it get to the point where people — who could otherwise be personally kind and decent — believed destroying other human beings, either through slavery or simple extermination, was not just okay, but moral and just?
This led me to read as much as I could about propaganda and how it normalizes atrocity.
Which led me to be alert when I saw how dehumanization worked around me, whether among my neighbors justifying the My Lai massacre (“They were all COMMIES, so…”) celebrating the deaths at Kent State, (“They were all HIPPIES so…”) or dismissing the murders of civil rights workers (“They were all TROUBLEMAKERS from the north so…”)
Now I hear “They are ILLEGALS, so…”
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..a boy whose schtick was that he wasn’t one bit romantic. He “warned” me about that early on. “You should understand,” he said, settting his jaw grimly over our Sweep-the-Kitchen pizza at Friday Frank’s, “that I’m not romantic. Girls need to know that before they get involved with me. I’ve learned…” He trailed off, his eyes fixed on distant vistas and remembered pain. “It’s just best you know now.”
I gravely assured him that was okay. I wasn’t ‘romantic’ either.
Then I went home with him, looked at his bookshelf, and saw he had every Michael Moorcock novel ever written, including the Elric novels. Considered explaining the term “Byronic” to him, then decided against it. He was a computer science major and didn’t really need to know.
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I say “thank you.” Sometimes, for the neighbors who feed the cat while we’re away, that includes chocolates or some other present.
In a larger sense, “gratitude” is the sense that you owe everyone a measure of good will and respect. — a low-key awareness of both is what makes any society work. Humans are social creatures. Most of us could not function if it were not for the efforts, seen and unseen, of other humans around us.
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…Americans to worry about the future these days. Our current president.
It’s not just that he’s without ethics or empathy and is in obvious cognitive decline. It’s not just that he is deliberately aping a certain European leader from the first part of the 20th century — spreading inflammatory lies, rounding up members of a vulnerable minority, attacking academia and the media, calling for the arrest of political opponents, threatening to invade neighboring countries, shipping people off to foriegn concentation camps and, most recently building one here in the Florida everglades…
It’s that, for the sake of pushing their own agenda, the political party backing him have decided to pretend not to notice. I know not all of them are stupid or uneducated or racist, so I wonder these days what fairy tales they tell themselves when they look in the mirror. -
…is one who can share a passion and spark a desire in at least some students to know more about what is being taught. Those are the teachers who can truly change the way you look at the world. I’ve had a few, most notably an English teacher I wrote about earlier, Miss S.
Another was Mrs. M., a middle-aged, dark-haired teacher. When I look at yearbook pictures of her I’m struck by her beauty. For us, of course, it was hidden behind the regulation short perm and cat-eyed glasses worn by women of that age in the nineteen-seventies.
Only long after she was gone, when I taught English classes myself, did I realize how much work Mrs. M. had put into striving to wake up the pointedly bored teenagers in her afternoon periods. She even read us some of Richard Armour’s Classics Reclassified, a funny take on assigned reading materials. “Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of ‘Moby-Dick.”
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— as in being put under general anesthetic and cut open — was when I had my wisdom teeth removed as a teenager. It was done in the local hospital instead of the dentist’s office, and since this was a small town, the anesthesiologist was a family friend. I remember, just before he put me under, thinking how odd it was to see Dr. Mino in whites and a mask instead of a polo shirt and slacks, bantering with the nurses instead of sipping a martini on our patio.
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…writing. Occasionally, I pause to dabble in hypochondria. (What’s that red spot on my cheek?) Apple, arugula and goat cheese sandwich for lunch. Daily walk during which I visit my favorite cheese shop and try a sample. Look in the window of my favorite donut shop and promise myself a donut in a week or two (boston creme) . Look in the window of my favorite cookie shop and and promise myself a cookie (The Harvey Milk looks good) Look in the window of my favorite cannoli shop and promise myself a cannoli (Like them plain). Wander home. Play Sims 4. Fix a healthy dinner while listening to news. Eat dinner with husband . Promise husband I’ll make an UNhealthy dinner next time. Read a novel or The New Yorker. Go to bed and make a point of thinking, not about what I heard on the news, but my sims. (Will the evil Felix Horn evict his obnoxious stepsister and her family from the estate now that his father has passed away?) Sleep soundly.
Wake up. Coffee in the morning…
Pam Troy 