Looking Back

The river in summer

In midstream

I look back

    Japanese haiku

 

Matilda and daughter Iona, 1920

Eleanor Bailey wrote:

   Recently while going through some old postcards, I found one postmarked April 8, 1925, from Matilda Cox to her five-year old grand-daughter, Hettie Bailey. The Cox and Bailey families lived just a mile or two from each other. They didn’t have telephones, so postcards were a common mode of communication be it near or far. It read: “Dear Grand Daughter you are invited to come out Friday night or Saturday Morning and bring papa mama Charles Chester and the twins and stay for Easter be Sure to come. grand Mo and Po to Hettie.” How thrilled the five-year-old must have been when she received the card from her grandmother.

I came across an article about queer activist Sarah Schulman, above, in New York magazine and realized I had seen her speak at IU Northwest about “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community responsibility, and the Duty of Repair.”  She seemed particularly eager to hear students’ opinions of her book and what, in their opinion, constituted harassment.  Author Molly Fischer identified the book’s central insight:

    People experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them – they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation.

The key distinction between conflict and abuse: the nature of the power relationships.  For example, what might be simply a disagreement among colleagues or associates might constitute harassment if a superior in a position of dominance is the source of the discomfort. In the classroom Schulman has a “no censorship” rule and students are encouraged to debate and critique one another in any language they feel appropriate without the need for “trigger warnings” that the forthcoming subject matter may be disturbing to some. Needless to say, Schulman believes universities college campuses should be forums for open debate on controversial subjects.

 

I knew about novelist David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page tome “Infinite Jest” but little else until viewing “The End of the Tour” (2015), about Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky spending a week with the troubled novelist who later hanged himself. As portrayed by Segal, Wallace was a rather pathetic, albeit talented, figure most comfortable with his dogs or, his one social outlet, dancing at a Bloomington, Illinois, Baptist church.  Part of a “New Sincerity” school that regarded banality as truth, Wallace during a Minneapolis stop admired the Mary Tyler Moore statue, visited the Mall of America, and took in a “Die Hard” movie.  Throughout Wallace is wary that Rolling Stone will portray him as ambitious or a sell-out.  When asked if wearing a kerchief on his head were an affectation, he replied defensively that it kept sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t want a TV in the house not because he was a snob but out of fear he’d never turn it off.  He wrote: “What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is "all it does"—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.”

David Foster Wallace gave a memorable commencement speech at Kenyon College titled “Thoughts on Living a Compassionate Life.”  It opened with a parable about two young goldfish being asked, “How’s the water?” and replying, “What is water?” Wallace left us this introspective insight:

    The so-called ‘psychotically depressed” person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote “hopelessness” or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

Alexandria, right; MaryAnn below

Alexandria Quinn wrote that Toni’s sister MaryAnn, who is battling cancer, was the strongest women, with the biggest, most passionate heart, that she’s ever known. She wrote:

    I cannot begin to express how much her passion and heart has fed my soul and the woman I have grown proud to be. She is unstoppable and relentless, beautiful and educated, loving and driven, passionate and stubborn. Times are hard: no one could deny that cancer is one hell of a battle. Even being exhausted and in pain, I had to tell her not to make us breakfast this week and to stop worrying about taking care of everyone else. She has still been making jokes and laughing at herself instead of getting down on herself and asking “why me,” blaming everyone and everything else.  She’s a fighter and is proving that through the toughest battle imaginable.  I love her to the moon and back. Lanes and Okomskis, 2019

Toni’s older sister was a risk taker who eloped while a senior at Little Flower High School and kept the marriage secret until she graduated.  She had four kids in quick order before a doctor warned her to cease or risk dying.  She waited a few years and then gave birth to two more daughters.  The first time I met her while dating Toni MaryAnn’s daughter Andrea cut herself trying some daredevil feat in the backyard; Sonny wasn’t home, so I drove them to the ER.  I was so freaked out by the bloody wound that MaryAnn had to calm me down.  MaryAnn’s kids, no surprise, turned out passionate and opinionated.  Family was everything to MaryAnn, and she loved nothing better at the end of the day than to tell or listen to family stories accompanied by much laughter.  In her sixties she roughed it in Thailand with her daughters.  Two years ago, she participated in the Eagles Superbowl celebration in downtown Philadelphia. Sonny, not one to give out compliments, admitted not long before he died, that he had hit a grand slam when he married MaryAnn.

This from Anne Koehler: “With my 98-year-old friend Babe Poparad who is still a crossing guard in Porter. Has a beautiful garden and shares her produce.  We are both of German descent and know how to milk cows but don't have any!!!!”