DEI: Definitely Earned It

Sometimes I look around myself, noticing the way the light falls in my house, and I pause to understand my privilege. My husband and I are both educated and employed, and we have managed to also educate our son and daughter. Both our children and their spouses are doing well in their respective occupations, for which I am thankful. I worry, though, that there are many in our country who resent that anyone who looks like me and mine should enjoy the fruits of our labors, no matter how hard we have worked to be here. By virtue of our skin color, now egregiously coded as DEI, the story currently being sold is that we deserve nothing that we have attained because we are simply not qualified. Our achievements are a chimera, a zero sum handout, denying others who are more deserving, who are not DEI. Here’s the thing though: They are using DEI as a synonym for Black. In fact, DEI—which everyone knows stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion—is meant to ensure that everyone has access to the rights and privileges of our society, including women, LGBTQ+ people, all races and creeds, disabled people, older people, everyone. But those who now bandy about terms like meritocracy and superior intelligence, seem to feel that only cis White men are deserving, and to be clear, only the ones with money, the tech bros who bent the knee and the ones in the Project 2025 club. These men are proposing and plotting to gather up all the goodies for themselves, women get back in the kitchen please, and Black and Brown people be damned. 

You know, I didn’t really mean to go here when I opened this page to write today. But Trump blaming the plane and helicopter crash over the Potomac on DEI was just so ludicrous and hateful and untrue that it set me off. In a moment when true leadership would have meant consoling the grieving families, the man spewed bile instead. He can’t help it, I suppose, but it didn’t even make sense. I guess I’m just venting here. I know I work hard to be where I am but I also know that life has given me gifts, like the grace of being born into my particular family, and the privilege of being able to do work I love. My husband and I, from the time we met, admitted to each other that we both secretly felt we were born lucky. It’s a mindset, I guess. If you believe a thing, you’re alert to whatever happens that confirms it to be so. And this is why I need to vent sometimes. So I don’t get all twisted up with bitterness. So that righteous and necessary anger will activate rather than stymie me. So I won’t miss the evidence of my good lucky life and so I can get back to the good mindset, right here in these rooms where light spills in and love still lives, no matter what’s happening out there. 

The rim of the world

My daughter, my niece and I went to Temple Court on Friday evening, and had a rather fancy dining experience under the auspices of New York Restaurant week. We chose the date because it was my mother's birthday, grandmother to these two beauties, and when the server asked were we celebrating anything special, we told him yes, my mother, their grandmother's birthday. And so he placed a lit candle on each of our dessert plates and we took a moment to be grateful that Lady Gloria had been ours in this life. and to imagine her playing bridge and laughing and being generally joyful with my dad and other loved ones in the next place.

As we all now know, the executive orders are coming fast and furious from the new regime, every morning a new rolling back of freedoms and privileges we took for granted. Inspector generals fired. Native Americans rounded up and declared non-citizens. All funding for medical research cancelled. All federal DEI programs abolished. All foreign aid frozen. I can't possibly catalogue it all here. But since I also can't seem to stop myself from bearing witness, I think it might be wise to make this space more private. I know the protection of that is leaky at best, but maybe it's something. Please email me (see previous post) if you want to come inside, out of the elements, should I decide to go ahead and close the door.

I took an Uber to our dinner date last Friday. I asked the driver if he thought New York City's recently implemented congestion pricing was having the desired effect of thinning traffic in mid- and downtown. He said for sure it was, and I could see he was right, because in that part of the city you could sit for half an hour on a single block, watching the lights change ten or more times, unable to move an inch because of traffic blocking the box. On Friday, however, we sailed right through every light, sallied easily down the narrowest side streets, and then my Uber driver said, apropos of nothing, "The new president is going to fix everything," to which I replied drily, "Not holding my breath, not a fan." Later, recalling the exchange, I felt suddenly chilled. That driver has my name and address and all my details. We are in an era of people being invited to snitch on other people, and what if he was a plant for just such an operaton? You see where my mind has gone? This is certainly not okay.

Toni Morrison wrote a letter to girls and women in the May 1985 issue of Essence magazine, and I am reposting a portion of it here, for my daughter, for my nieces, for all the women in this world I love, and all the women in this world who deserve to be loved well, who should not need a DEI program to ensure their ability to participate in the rights and privileges of their homeland, their world. 

Given the circumstances

I'm considering making this space private. If you'd like to continue visiting here, please email me at 37paddington at gmail dot com and let me know so that I can add you to the list of readers. I hope you'll come inside the virtual cottage with me. I do enjoy having you around our little fire. 

Moving on

The last line of this quote by Kiese Laymon, brave and bestselling author of Heavy, Long Division, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, stopped me cold.

"They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we've shown exquisite grace, an enemy we've tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die."

 An enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.

As Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii says in a short, fed-up tone when appallingly bad actors obfuscate and refuse to answer the questions put to them in confirmation hearings: "Moving on." Mazie Hirono has absolutely no fucks left to give, and I love that for her.

We keep on.

___________

I turned in the first two chapters of the new book I am working on. The pages went first to the editor, who apparently liked them, assuming that is what it means when she says they "are working." She helped me solve an issue at the end of the first chapter, which I very much appreciated. When it comes to love languages, I'm a "words of affirmation" girl through and through. The editor on my last book seemed to be cut from that same cloth. She was always sure to praise something that was done well while discussing what might be improved. This editor I'm working with now, who I also really respect, is more like Mazie Hirono was back in 2020 and 2021 when I was writing her memoir. Like Mazie, whom I adore, this new editor is all: No need to comment on what's working, let's get straight to the parts that need our attention. 

When it comes to love languages, my new editor seems more like an "acts of service" girl. That is also my husband's way of expressing care—to roll up his sleeves and solve whatever practical issue needs solving. So I'm somewhat familiar with my new editor's approach. She has a very monotone delivery, the opposite of my last editor's natural effusiveness, which was rather endearing, not gonna lie. My new editor is really good, too, though. I just need to ask for the feedback I need if she doesn't volunteer it. So toward the end of our call going over the first two chapters, I asked, "Do you feel that these chapters offer emotional resonance for the reader." "Oh yes," she said, "you delivered that." I exhaled then, because as I see it, emotional resonance is job number one. Everything follows from there.

My subject now has the two chapters. She is traveling overseas this week, and wanted to take them with her to read in her down time. I hope she will think the chapters work, too, and that they feel true to her experience. The first submission of pages on a book project is always nerve wracking. The waiting to hear back never gets easier.

(Update: She loved the chapters! She just sent me the most beautiful note! I’m screaming.)

__________

As of today, Dolores is all moved in to her new apartment. Her bed got delivered this afternoon, so she is now officially sleeping there. I need to back off from trying to be helpful. I'm learning that she is one for whom it might actually be overwhelming to have people hovering and offering assistance. I guess I just need to trust that if she needs something as she sets herself up, she'll reach out. 

My daughter, one of my nieces, and I have a plan to take her to dinner tomorrow night at a Tom Colicchio fine dining establishment that is participating in New York Restaurant Week, thereby bringing the experience within reach of our pockets. It's supposed to be a welcome to New York dinner for Dolores, but she will only be able to join us if her delivery of Ikea bookshelves arrives in time. If she can't join us, we'll still be celebrating, as it will also be my mom's 103rd birthday, were she still with us. We'll raise a glass to her, mother and grandma, still guiding us gently from the other side.

Meanwhile here is a picture of a puzzle I finished, my beautiful sun-hatted woman, and here, too, is a puzzle my husband built, a 3-D Japanese garden. This is what we do instead of watching the news. We meditate on constructing things, flat or three-dimensional, instead of trying to drink from the firehouse of bad actors trying to mow everything down. We refuse to drown.

Calling all the risk takers

My friend Robert made an important and persuasive argument on his Substack: “Don’t Disengage—We Need You.” His post is here. 

How is any of this real?

Many people have posted this image of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at the inauguration yesterday. They say her expression captures how a lot of us are feeling, but it is her necklace of cowrie shells that has drawn the most commentary. In African tradition, cowries ward off evil and call in the protection of the ancestors. I'm glad to have this brilliant and courageous sentinel of justice representing us in the ring, exuding her quiet power. Don't mess with the ancestors is what I say.

Yesterday was strange for me. I didn't watch the inauguration, but I was still disturbed, not quite inside my body, not quite able to process that our nation has arrived again at this pass. It will be so much worse this time. Already we have the whiplash of trying to track what else he's done in the few minutes that we looked away. He pardoned all the January 6 insurrectionists, emptied the jails of them. He cancelled all asylum appointments, signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship, and today is launching deportation sweeps in blue cities across the country. 

In all, he signed more than forty executive orders yesterday, including reinstating the Muslim ban and having the U.S. exit the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords. The lawsuits pushing back are already piling up. We all know what's coming. And for anyone who doesn't, the tech broligarch’s Nazi salute at the rally last night should tell you everything you need to know.

A bit topsy turvy

Michelle Obama let it be known that she would not be attending the presidential inauguration next Monday, January 20, which happens to also be MLK Day. I absolutely applaud her for this, for knowing that she does not have to put herself through that, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by her presence there. When they go low, she ... disappears. CNN wrote an eight paragraph story taking her to task, and not once did the story mention that Trump and Melania did not attend Biden's inauguration four years ago. 

Elsewhere in the news, Vance is complaining that VP Harris has not invited his wife and himself to the VP residence as part of the transition, and to that I say, why should she? Vance called her "Trash" during the campaign, or did he forget that? Besides, Pence and his wife didn't invite Kamala and Doug to the VP residence four years ago either. The hypocrisy and sane washing by the media of the incoming administration is just galling. I refuse to watch the inauguration next week. I won't give that one extra point in TV ratings. Instead, like Michelle and Kamala, I'm choosing to protect my peace.

Closer to home, we will have a houseguest for the next few days. Harper's grandma, my niece's mother in law, will be moving into an apartment across the courtyard from us, the one that used to belong to my mother, which she then left to her grandchildren. My niece is buying out her cousins and moving her husband's mother Delores in, because Delores doesn't like living in Dallas. She had moved during Covid to be near to her son, but she misses her hometown of New York, where she was able to get around easily under her own steam, no car needed. The timing worked out because the apartment was getting ready to be vacant again, with both my kids now married.

For the past week I have been letting in painters and glazers to spruce up the place before Delores arrives today. The painters are a mess, dragging out the job that should have been finished in two days to five days and counting, so that now Delores will need to stay with us until they are finished. I got her room ready this morning, and housecleaned a bit, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I want to make Delores feel welcome. She is a gentle soul, possibly quite shy. My niece Leisa texted that Delores cried yesterday about how much our family was doing for her, "and they don't even know me," she said. I texted Leisa back: "We know Delores. She is Grant's mom. Harper's grandma. She's family." "That's what I told her," Leisa said.

Delores shipped her belongings and they are to arrive in boxes tomorrow. She will have to receive them while the apartment is still in upheaval from drop cloths and plastic sheeting and furniture piled up as the painters finish up the job. I'm glad I didn't recommend these guys! I did recommend the glazer, who looked like Mr. Bean and did his job admirably within a day. Meanwhile Leisa is rubbing her hands together with glee. "We're gonna revive Grandma camp!" she told me on the phone yesterday. "There will be lots of hands to mind Harper in New York!" "You should talk to my children about giving Harper some cousins to join her at Grandma camp, like you had," I said. "No," Leisa replied, "I will not be doing that." Oh well. I suppose my kids are on their own timeline. But Grandma camp with Miss Harper? Bring it on!

More duality

My daughter gave me tickets to a Broadway play for Christmas, as she usually does, knowing how much I cherish this gift that is the experience of spending time with my girl. Last night, we went to dinner and to see the musical Death Becomes Her, which was entertaining, but we both agreed it was not our favorite Broadway experience to date. The plot was funny, but shallow, however the company of my daughter was sublime and so I wouldn't have missed the evening for anything. I won't go on and on about it, though, because as we continue on with our lives on this coast, our city in a snowy deep freeze right now, people on the other coast are watching their homes burn, watching whole neighborhoods become twisted steel and broken char, smoke and ash like a soup in the air. Whole swathes of Los Angeles are in flames, peoples lives are in shambles, the images on our TVs show an apocalypse. “It seems like the end of the world," our friend there, Elizabeth Aquino, wrote this morning. Her son Oliver has been going out to work at the restaurant; all week he has been feeding exhausted firefighters. On her Substack, Elizabeth posted these links if you want to combat the helplessness that I fear so many of us are feeling. May she and her family remain safe, may the firefighters be protected, and may all those in the path of the flames find a way back from this hell. Amen.

Incoming

Did y’all catch that press conference with the newly certified (and certifiable) red emperor today? Did you hear all the talk of annexing Canada, forcibly wresting Greenland from Denmark, taking back the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America? Hooo boy, it’s going to be a wild ride. I think we have no idea. 

 

Montego Bay

That jetty in the distance on the left is right next to where I almost drowned when I was nine. It is not a unique memory. My brother, my cousins, and I each recalled almost drowning as children at this beach, and we marveled that our normally careful parents thought nothing of dropping us off there on summer mornings when we were only six, seven, no more than ten years old. They imagined they were leaving us in the care of our older cousins, who were fourteen and fifteen and far more interested in the teenage friends who came to meet them on the sand than they were in supervising little cousins rambling about. The last time I almost drowned, beside that jetty in the picture, my brother noticed me struggling and dragged me in from the deep. That was the day I decided I needed to know how to swim and so I taught myself by dog paddling in the shallows until I could put together a good distance without touching the sand. And then I asked my brother and one of my cousins who could swim to flank me as I swam out to the raft in the deep part of the sea. How I silently exulted when I made it there and back without flailing. That night I was so excited I couldn't sleep. I could hardly wait to get back to the beach the next day to assure myself that indeed, I was now a swimmer!

Some vacation pics:

This lovely man was my view at breakfast.

My much-loved sister cousin was also on the trip, with her husband and two sons. They live in Virginia but we met up in Newark and flew down together. Her former high school compatriots flocked to visit her each day. She, like my mother, has never lost a friend.

These are two of my nephews, one from Fairfax,Virginia, the other from Kingston, Jamaica. I look at t this picture and all I can think is, the dudes abide.

Late afternoon on Doctor's Cave Beach.

My brother and two of his kids drove from Kingston to spend the weekend with us at the hotel. Saturday night nine of us played rollicking games of dominoes around the pool while a steel band serenaded us. My brother’s daughter grew up in Jamaica as I did, but she lives and works in Brooklyn now. We usually see her in New York these days, but she was home for the holidays, and it was fun to spend time together in Jamaica. 

My cousin and her husband and their boys were our nightly dinner companions. One day their family did an excursion to Nine Mile, the country village in the mountains where Bob Marley was born and is now buried. For my nephew the musician, it was a pilgrimage. At dinner that evening, he was all lit up recounting all he had seen and thought and felt standing at the birthplace and graveside of a legend. I’d chosen not to join them. There was a steep narrow path and many steps carved into the mountainside, and I knew I could not manage them.

I caught up with my brother over lunch. He was searching on his phone for a picture of someone that he wanted to show me.

My man captured sunsets and the movement of stars from the balcony of our room.

My nephew's hair drew much attention from fellow guests at the hotel.

I went home to Jamaica and now I am back home in New York. Twas a good trip all around.