Two more weeks and a birthday

Were he alive, my dad would have turned 101 years old today. When I hold my memories of him up to the light, I see so plainly the ways he tried to make the world better, easier, kinder for those near him or far. He started out as a prosecutor, like the little girl above, before he became a judge and eventually chief justice. Today, honoring his memory with unalloyed hope, I pray we'll be able to say the little girl in the picture, whose own birthday was three days ago, grew up to be not just a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a senator, and a vice president, but also president of the United States. 

Whatever you may think about Kamala Harris's candidacy, she is a far superior option to the felon in orange make-up who is running against her. Vote Harris/Walz, and then vote blue all the way down the ticket, too, because only then will you have a chance to fight like hell for the battles crying out to be fought in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Vote for the other guy—who is really only a feeble and demented propped up Trojan Horse meant to usher in the real Project 2025 implementer Vance—and the centuries old, admittedly imperfect, yet still stubbornly hopeful American democratic project, not to mention Trump's openly threatened "enemies within," will be dead. 

Nicole Wallace said on TV last night that girl dads might be the secret sauce in a Harris/Walz win, that they don't want to see their daughters suffering under the Republicans' outlawing and criminalizing of life-saving reproductive health care that has already caused hundreds of thousands of women and their families untold pain. I hope she's right. I suppose it's too much to extend that hope to the idea that every man or woman who loves a woman or girl will do the right thing at the polls on or before November 5—but whatever, collective thought is a powerful driver, and hope is free.

In celebration of my dad's birthday, here he is in May 1946. He was 23 years old and working as a clerk of the courts in Spanish Town, Jamaica. This photo was taken the year he met a young postmistress who would one day become my mother and three years before they would wed and leave our little island for London, England, so that my dad could study law. Till the day she died in 2015, almost twenty years after my dad left us, my mom kept this photo of him between the tattered pages of her bible.

Four Days in LA

My week in LA that went as well as I could have hoped. My new subject and I forged a warm connection in person and made a good strong start on the book. Little by little the narrative arc is coming into view. I think I have decided on a first chapter, centered on an event that chronologically occurs in the middle of her story, but it brings together all the threads of the book, so perhaps I can start there and hopefully engage the reader, then return to the beginning, working my way back to that climactic moment, then moving beyond it. I do worry about stealing a narrative high point that could help pace the middle section of the story, but there's a lot that happens in my subject's life after this event that will be equally as compelling, if told right. I just have to figure out how to tell it right. I started this post on my phone while at the airport in LA. I'm back home now, listening to tapes to get my subject's voice in my head and reflecting on the work we've begun. I have many more interviews to do, but now my subject and I have identified the people I need to talk to, who can help to widen her story's lens.

The first morning, she was very apologetically running late from an early meeting. While waiting for her on a bench outside her office building, I snapped the selfie above at the same moment that my daughter texted me. 

My subject arrived soon after, and we went inside and set up for our morning session. Later, when we were heading out to have lunch, I laughingly shared what I'd told my daughter and confessed my abject avoidance of stairs. "The irony of you and me together," I said lightly while climbing gracelessly into her car. "What do you mean?" she said, looking at me sincerely. "I'm an athlete. I definitely understand injury." By then, I had already seen that she was as kind and considerate a human as she'd appeared to be back in July when we first met on Zoom. And how lucky am I, because now I am working with yet another subject whose energy I will enjoy channeling in the coming year.

__________

A big part of why I wasn't nervous on the morning I was to meet my new book subject was because the night before, I had been enfolded in the most generous and non-judgmental atmosphere. I'd arrived in LA on Monday afternoon, and faced with a free evening, I texted my friend Elizabeth Aquino, mother of beautiful Sophie and her princely brothers, Henry and Oliver. Elizabeth and I first connected in this virtual community in 2009, when she was blogging at “A Moon, Worn As If It Had Been A Shell.” These days you can find Elizabeth's exquisite writing about life’s vicissitudes here. She and I met in person a few years ago when she was in New York with her youngest Oliver, and the three of us went to breakfast at Sarabeth's on Amsterdam Avenue. Our connection was immediately easy. We bare our souls here in ways we don't often speak, and so when we meet in the non-virtual world, we discover that we already know each other in a deep way. The moment I hugged Elizabeth and Oliver back then, I realized I already loved them.

Still, I wasn't sure Elizabeth would be able to meet up given the last minute nature of my text, and the fact that I didn't know how far away from her my hotel was. She's in LA proper and I was in Valencia, and I had no mental map of the distance between us. But Elizabeth texted me back right away, eager to meet up, which made me eager too. I quickly assessed that getting to her would be akin to getting from Harlem to Brooklyn to see my daughter, so I jumped into an Uber and was on my way to her home. I was thrilled that I would get to meet Sophie, and I would also see Oliver, as we’d made a plan to have dinner at the restaurant where he works. "Oliver was excited to hear you were in town," Elizabeth said, and she can have no idea how much that touched my heart. I also met Carl, Elizabeth's partner, who is just the gentlest and kindest of men. Elizabeth, Carl, and I sat and talked around her green mosaic table that I've seen in pictures on her blog. Elizabeth also gave me a tour of her home, an artistically nurturing space, filled with visual and literary treasures. 

When Sophie got home from her evening stroll around the neighborhood with her lovely caregivers, I was able to hug her gently, moved by her great presence, her dark eyes taking me in, allowing me. Soon after, Elizabeth, Carl and I went to dinner, where the servers treated us as if we were special guests, and Oliver kept checking on us, and the chef and everyone else came by to talk to us and tell us how much they love Oliver. How could anyone not love Oliver! 

Oliver and Elizabeth drove me back to my hotel after he got off shift. I loved hearing him talk about the dreams he holds, and I would bet on that kid every day of the week. All these people are the reason I woke up the next morning feeling as if the world is a munificent place, where the only harsh judgment of me is my own. As an unwitting antidote, Elizabeth and her beloveds gave me a gift heading into my first interview with a new subject. I felt grounded. Filled up with love.

 

Conditioning

My husband did flowers for church today. They are in celebration of the tenth anniversary of our beloved rector, who we call Mother Mary, taking the helm of our little activist community. The sun was on the blooms as they rested in a bucket of water yesterday, being conditioned, and I snapped the picture. I love the colors. 

Speaking of being conditioned, the candidates on the right are promising us fascism if they win, and a bloody siege if they don’t. They are promising purges of government personnel and military round ups and concentration camps and deportations and executions of enemies—yes, they’ve used these actual words—and yet the race is still deadlocked. How can this be? Now Trump is planning a huge Madison Square Garden rally in New York City to echo the  Nazi rally of February 20, 1939 that took place there. The man is telling us everything we need to know about what’s coming if he wins.  It will be enough of a hellscape if he doesn’t win but at least then we’ll have a fighting chance to slay this beast of evil at last. 

I’m traveling to Los Angeles this week to start work on a new book project. I’m as anxious as can be at the mere prospect of packing, during which I will have to contemplate every occasion of showing up. I have only vague clues as to what strands of my history converged and tangled themselves such that I should feel this way. I confessed to a friend yesterday that it feels like a mental illness how excruciating it is just to make myself appear. She understood completely. I hate that she also struggles with this conflicted sense of being but in that moment, she reached out a hand to me, graciously and without judgment, and I felt comforted, seen. 

Restoration

My friend Janice drove into the city and we met up at the Arthouse Bar to sip margaritas in the balmy New York night and catch up on our lives. That was our sidewalk view. We had the best time, dissecting recent happenings and internal evolutions of self, talking as mothers do about our children, and enjoying the whimsy and soul baring made possible by going on three decades of friendship. We did bemoan the fact that our little circle of friends who found one another when our kids attended the same grade school, did not survive the covid years entirely intact. Though we still text one another in frequent bursts, we gather as a group hardly at all now. Some of the mothers still get together one on one, or in threes or fours, but seldom the whole posse anymore. One friend in particular has drifted farthest away. Her first grandchild was born on the day in March 2020 that covid lockdowns went into effect, and to the rest of us, it seems she has fully disappeared into that enchanted country. 

I see Janice much less often, too. During covid, she retired from her job as an art teacher and moved upstate to make her beautiful ceramic sculptures full time. Another one of the group, Isabella, bought a country house upstate with her husband, and now spends her weekends there. She usually comes back to the city on Mondays for her therapy practice, and we occasionally meet for dinner on a weekday evening. Some weeks she stays upstate, as the covid years normalized talk therapy via Zoom. Isabella still prefers to see clients in person at least some of the time, but she now has options that allow her to enjoy the changing colors of the trees in beautiful New Paltz, a bustling college town with al fresco cafes, wine bars, farmers markets, and a lively student vibe. We've visited her and her husband there, and grilled lunch on their patio while looking out at the woods. It was charmed. Another of our group still has not quite come back from covid quarantines; she is nervous in crowds now, so it was an act of love when she attended my daughter's wedding unmasked. 

For my part, work has sometimes been all consuming, though I do look up from my screen and allow myself to touch the nostalgia, the ache I feel for the greater connectedness of our pre-covid days. Maybe I'm just imagining that it was so. Or maybe we all just got used to being at home more, to being in a little bubble with immediate family. Maybe we discovered the joys of being still, not having to show up anywhere, of unstructured time to fill as we chose. And yet, I miss my friends. I miss the gathering of women, sometimes with our husbands and children, the pot lucks with mismatched hand-made crockery, the rooftop evenings basking in the pink orange glow of the setting sun. I miss the New Years eve nights around tables laden with food, watching the ball drop on TV, then texting our children and other beloveds in the minutes after. I realize we're all in a new stage now, and life may simply be asking me to practice acceptance of our respective journeys.

Still, Janice and I agreed that we two Taurus women together, old friends meeting up to share hearts in the New York City night, was a kind of spiritual restoration.

Happy birthday to our firstborn

We love you so much, sweet boy, forever and ever. That photo is from his wedding day. I woke up this morning remembering when he was 3 years old, and used to say to me, "Am I a sweet boy, Mommy?" His face was so earnest. It touched my heart that he wanted to be seen thus, by me, and I told him, "You are the sweetest boy, my love." And he was, and is. 

Here's one of my favorite throwback pictures of my three: my son, my daughter and their cousin/big sister Leisa. They were five, seven, and nine in this photo. My niece, who grew up in Jamaica, spent every July with us in New York, and all three kids decamped to St. Lucia with their grandmother in August. It's why they are like siblings today. I sent this photo to the family group chat yesterday. My son noted that the number on his shirt is the age he is turning this year. Until he said it, I hadn't even noticed that, but that makes this summer of 1998 photo worth reposting today.