Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Love Letter

 “It takes only a moment to fall in love but a lifetime to prove that it was truly meant to be forever.”

I read this quote when you were sleeping beside me.

 It captured the way the last the 25 years have evolved and the possibilities of the open space waiting in the next 25.

I’m excited.

I had been thinking about our milestone for weeks, playing and sappily listening to our wedding song while I walk the dog.

The lyric – only you cared when I needed a friend, believed in me through thick and thin – gets me every time.

And it has left me anticipating June 7 in the same awe I felt on our wedding day.

This time nothing needs to be planned.

The peony bush gave us two blooms when last year it gave us none. It’s a sign that a season of loss is reversible, inevitable, and necessary to grow.

Love in 25 years is not sustainable through grand gestures.

It lives in remembering to cut a sandwich on the diagonal or putting the cap on the empty seltzer bottle.

It’s in me rushing to leave i-love-you notes on everyone’s pillows before a business trip only to get to my room and find one from you in my suitcase.

It’s in the joy of our children’s birth , the mundane of  changing diapers, parental problem solving,  and spirited hot-tub talks on society in crisis.

I hear it in  your ringing of the cow bell at FPU games and see it in the thumbs up from the sidelines to signal the boys are fine.

It’s in the breaking down and getting up and then wading in the depths of loss following jarring news on the other end of a phone.

 It’s in the slow walk down the hallway after the ultrasound showed no heartbeat. And in the trust of coming back when you walk out the door.

It’s in the crumpled- note reminder with the word “believe” behind a refrigerator magnet.

It’s the hand at my back to stay present and the deep need to not waste a precious minute of our life together.

Love has always been you.


Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Someone's Typing in Ukraine


I spent the weekend and my early morning hours this week translating broken English into Americanized social media content for Ukranian journalists.

Within two minutes of waking, I am carefully rearranging snippets of horror to help pierce the veil of comfort on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok with the visceral descriptions of war in a country I have never seen.

The dispatches are dark and heartbreaking.

14-year-old boy struck in the head by shrapnel bleeds to death when rescuers can't reach him.

Six-year-old shot in the family car

Mother of 12 and combat medic killed in fire fight

I learned an American journalist was shot dead while sitting on my couch well before American media could confirm it. It felt surreal.

Each day, I volunteer with an unlikely band of mostly American proofreaders brought together by a passion to right wrongs. We are teachers, former journalists and editors of various time zones using our language to help the journalists hiding in Kyiv and other cities under siege shout their stories to the world.

The news bulletins come across in chunks of Ukrainian text, another band of keyboard translators sift the content into workable English, and then I and the other proofreaders finesse the misplaced prepositional phrases, verb tenses, and nuanced idioms in the way only native speakers can.

There are shifts when news out of the war zone is non-stop and others that are slow. One proofreader tells Dad jokes in the chat room to lighten the mood, and others on the ground talk about the simple treat of neighborhood sushi before the war. And then there are the signing off salutations that reawaken the fear.  " Air raid siren, I have to go ...or I am going to try to sleep with the sirens and hope I don't wake to explosions."

While I write this the other proofreaders are online wondering if our group has been hacked by saboteurs or worse that something has happened to our Ukrainian friends because the news feed has stopped for more than an hour. 

Finally, a new post appears. 

None of us know what it says yet.

But we patiently eye the "someone's typing" bubbles, relieved for any sign of life on the other side of world.

Friday, November 8, 2019

Holyoke hears a “NO”



I picked up my packet at election headquarters in the morning.
It was T-10 hours until the polls closed and I was about to walk the ward I lived in dropping literature in support of a debt exclusion override to build two new middle schools.
City leaders over the course of decades had let the school infrastructure decay so badly there were roofs beyond disrepair, poor ventilation and air quality and classrooms dim and dull from no natural light.
It was easy to be outraged and it was the first cause I threw my heart into since supporting my husband’s mayoral campaign 14 years ago.
There was a track record of denying the schools since I had graduated in 1986 and the city denied helping the schools in 1991.
Could they do it again? Would they? I couldn’t stop wondering.
The ground-game in politics is always an opportunity to see an issue from the inside out. You knock on doors, give people rides to the polls, knock on more doors and make phone calls to deliver as much support as you can muster by talking for the most part to complete strangers. You don’t always like what you hear but the rudeness is almost never as sharp as it is on Facebook.
There was grocery guy, two-fisted with Stop & Shop bags, who curiously watched me crisscross his street with my handouts. I stopped and asked if he minded if I left election material on his doorstep.
“No. I don’t care. Go ahead,” he said and then he stopped to look at me more closely. “Wait. Is it about the schools?”
 “Yes. It is about the scho..”
He cuts me off.
“If It’s about the school you can save your paper,” he said, while his teenager stood nearby. “We don’t need new schools; we need new water pipes.”
I say yes and I think we need both.
He tells me not to argue, he just wants the pipes fixed first before he thinks about schools. We can just paint them.
And I think to myself paint doesn’t solve lead in the water, PCBs, and toxic mold and I move on.
On the other side of the ward beyond St. Jerome Cemetery a woman named Maggie waves me down after I drop my Yes on 1 flyer on her door. She is limping a bit from her knee replacement surgery and shows me her scars. She shakes the paper I gave her in her hand. “THIS is too important,” she said and sits back on her stairs.
 “This (vote) is about respect and dignity,” she said adding that she grew up living in Puerto Rico with nothing. Her “latrina” bathroom was outside.
 This is my house, we have a boat, we have a river to go to, she said. I love my house but “the way we talk to each other in this city about the schools” is so bad.
She shakes her head and tells me she is going to go vote with her husband when he comes home from work and before she reports to her overnight shift as supervisor at a hotel. We need to elect “leaders who have a heart, who talk to one another with kindness.
“That’s a leader,” she said.
 I start to think I might cry.
I circle back and stop at home where my own son is just waking up. I ask him to help me finish my list and without hesitation he agrees. The last time we campaigned together he was a baby in my arms now he is a willing 14-year-old and I am so proud of him for having the conviction. We hit the hills together and head back to headquarters.
“Why are people against this, Mom? Peck is so bad...don’t they get they need to do something?
I tell him about taxes and how people don’t want to pay them for many reasons and some truly can’t afford to and then about some others who are prejudiced – the kind of prejudice people share on local Facebook’s Hello Holyoke that comes in the many flavor-of-the-day phrases like ‘those kids’ or ‘these people’ who have no ‘family values.’ I didn’t have enough time to explain the racist and classist code phrases of the 21st century, the kind that indicts an entire population and stops short of using slurs so the utterers can throw up the argument – “that’s not what I meant or said,” or squeal, “don’t twist my words” when we all know the lingo and the ignorance behind it.
Next up I hold a sign at Sullivan school for a time while my phone alerts me to Facebook cowboy insults in tagged posts designed to demean, accuse and intimidate even at the 11th hour and even from people I once knew as friends.
Later in the evening I am in Lyman Terrace, a recently renovated housing project, knocking on more doors to ask if people voted NOT how they voted.
Walking through the courtyards on the back side of the new apartments, I arrive at Senor Santiago’s door. In broken Spanish I ask him if he voted to day.
 A votaro hoy?
No.
Por que? Es muy importante!
We laugh at my broken Spanish.
Senor Santiago didn’t know where to go to vote, he tells me. He asked at an agency but didn’t understand the directions. The last time he voted he did it for mayor at City Hall. I told him his new polling place and my friend with better Spanish said we could give him a ride.
At just before 7 pm we canvassed the last neighborhood on our list – Tokeneke. All of the elderly neighbors tell me they voted at 7 a.m.
In another courtyard, one guy is taking care of his sick mom. He is registered to vote but didn’t know anything about the issues or who was running and another mom just got home from work and is still making dinner. She might go. She doesn’t know. I don’t get a good feeling.
 Around the corner there are three moms in a row with school-age kids. They speak to each other in Spanish and tell their kids to get their shoes on and carpool to their polling place.
At one of my last doors a man says, “We don’t vote.” and shuts the door.
I am at 12,000 steps into my GOTV journey when I pack things in with my friend Rebecca.
What’s done is done.
The outcome as the votes trickled in was worse than I imagined. Only 7,000 people in a city of 40,000 people voted – a mere 4,000 said, NO to new schools and $75.8 M in state aid; effectively deciding for us all; effectively deciding to keep our children in crumbling and unhealthy infrastructure indefinitely.
No one ever surfaced a better plan.
It was the will of the people but it felt like most Holyokers had no will at all.


Monday, August 27, 2018

Senioritis


The Universe or God of Heat Waves must be smiling on me. I’m not ready for Finn’s senior year. I’m taking the school cancellation as a reprieve to collect myself. I’ve been in denial. Well not really, but I have been stuffing emotions like a chipmunk until this evening when at a stop light the dam broke and I burst into tears as Donna Summer sang McArthur Park on Sirius 70s on 7. (Don’t judge.)

Something about the cake in the rain and never having the recipe again pierced me to the core even though I never baked a cake in my life. I do eat them and I am pretty sure I don’t even know what that song is about but this is no time for metaphors.

My outburst happened before I knew school was cancelled. The same school I thought started Wednesday not Tuesday. The miscalculation left me running around erratically cleaning, going to Staples and otherwise pleading with my boys to organize their rooms because… SCHOOL WAS STARTING!

Anyway, I digress. This senior thing is hard; it’s happy and exciting and - sorry folks, pretty much worse than Kindergarten drop off.

I keep going back in my head to this woman I worked with 11 years ago. Finn was in Kindergarten and Dylan still working his way out of diapers. Every time I met her for a meeting at her desk she’d ask how the boys were and click her tongue, shake her head and say, “It’s going to go by sooooo fast.” My indoor voice would say, ‘Lady I just graduated from not coming to work with spit-up on my sweater to the handprint on boobs and backside stage and I probably won’t wear white pants for the next decade so can I JUST ENJOY THEM.’

In real life, I smiled and seethed in the same way you do when the total stranger touches your pregnant belly in the checkout of Stop&Shop. I’m not totally sure why work lady bothered me so. I suppose if I still worked with her I would have to grudgingly tell her she was right.

Wasn’t I just chasing Buzz Lightyear through the house? Running around every school morning with one shoe on looking for my work badge that Dylan hid in his toy box while shrieking we’re late for school, only to find Finn six feet up in the air in the front-yard tree waiting for me.
As someone who writes messages about change and transition for a living, I am not sure how I missed the transformation before we got here. There were visible signs after all,  like “Hey mom, you’re so short you could be my arm rest,” or when I would come home and not recognize the 6’3, 250 pound man in the distance walking the dog and think, “Who the hell is walking Snowball?…oh,  it’s Finn.”

The truth is, I have loved every beautiful, messy stage we have moved though together and I am looking forward to next steps. The things we do together as mom and son have evolved of course. I don’t have to get him off to school anymore; I do have to wait up for him and worry. We don’t watch Disney Channel anymore but I do get Twitter DMs featuring, SNL, Jimmy Fallon or some outlandish Trump tweet and I relish them.

And now that I’ve had time to think and he is not a senior in my mind until this Thursday, I’ve embraced the change. This year is another beginning – a time for big decisions and new choices – a time to fly solo and let go. I know he knows I’ll be cheering the loudest from the sidelines.

Ready or not, here we go!

Sunday, January 22, 2017

The personal is political

I didn't plan on going to the Women's March. I thought about it a lot. My mom went to Washington. My friends went to Boston.
I ultimately stayed home to not miss my boys' games.
Mother's choice.
I posted feminist memes as my own virtual march instead.
It didn't satisfy; so I jumped in my car and drove to Greenfield by myself.
When I got there I saw signs of unity, prayers for peace and pink pussy hats on men, women and children at the Town Common. More than 2,000 people, a few climbing trees for a better view, heard speakers saying "Women's Rights were human rights" and they meant it.
To quote a childhood book, I found a "wandering, lost good feeling."
For a minute I forgot about the common refrain I had heard since November. You know the ones -marching - this protesting - was stupid and worthless. It won't change anything. Get over it (liberal) cry baby, he's our president.
Be careful, some even said.
So let me clear up the misunderstanding.
I didn't march against the president.
I marched for us.
I marched for the 22-year-old jogger who was dragged by her hair into the woods and emotionally gutted and violated by a man who chose to attack her for no other reason than she was a woman.
I marched for the same girl who came reeling and dazed from an emergency room after downing a "currently" legal "morning after " pill so she'd have a choice.
I marched for the mother of boys she became and her need to teach them any day, every day that a woman is a human being and not a piece of ass.
I marched because gender violence is real and misogynistic speech from a person in power matters.
I marched for me.
And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

American Woman

I voted for Hillary Clinton with my youngest son at my side.
I wore my great grandmothers beads and my grandmother's LOVE pin. It felt  significant, special even. And when I think about it now, it still feels good. I voiced my opinion by ballot as an American, as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a person.
I don't ask you to share my viewpoint.
My candidate lost. Your candidate won. I accept that.
But let me be clear - I am exhausted by the calls to fall in line, to put our differences aside. Don't complain they say. Come together, they say. Get over it.

So I'm curious:

  • How does one get on board for a president-elect that gloats about assaulting women and calls his daughter a piece of ass?
  • How does one get on board with a "leader" that garners the endorsement of the KKK newspaper the Crusader?
  • How does one get on board with a movement flanked by grown men you actually know showing their fervent Trump support by posting  C-word memes, saying Trump that Bitch, or that they would rather sleep with her than vote for her?
  • How does one get on board with a leader who talks about the size of penis in relation to his hands on a national debate stage?
  • How does one get on board with a "leader" that said to two 14-year-old girls, "Wow Just think in a couple years I will be dating you."'
  • How does one get on board with a leader's proposed database system to track Muslims?
  • How does one get on board with a leader that is a plaintiff in 1,900 lawsuits and a defendant in 1,450 more?
I'm an American just like you. I'm not onboard with any of the above and I won't over look it. We have to do better for each other. The opportunity to unite is there for the new-president elect. I hope for you and for me that he makes the overture. 

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Gram's Window

I'm sitting on the floor of my grandmother's bedroom.  It is - after four decades - the final time I will step foot in her home since she died 9 months ago. 

The room is empty except for the memories rushing my brain. I rest my back against the wall where her bureau once stood. The window streams the evening sun across the floorboards. 

I hear us talking. I am little climbing up into her bed, the white bedspread with the bumpy thread design leaves little dotted imprints on my knees. 

I snuggle under the sheets made cool by the breeze flowing through the always open window. I can smell lemony Jeanate. My brother scrambles up the other side of the bed. Gram is in the middle. We are playing our math game. She holds up her hands, her engagement and wedding ring twist around.
"I have this many apples in this hand and this many apples in this hand - How many apples do I have?"
We fall asleep, three of us snug in the bed. 

The alarm buzzer rings.  The little golden clock reads 10:30 in roman numerals. She tiptoes to the bathroom. She is back in her white nurse's uniform. There's a kiss to the forehead. I hear my grandfather whispering he is mad we are in his bed. I can't hear what she says. I hear the door shut and she is gone into the night.

In the morning I see her back from the hospital, a giant vase of lilacs on the dining room table still wet with dew after she picked them on her way home from her 11 to 7 shift. 

 I stand up and walk to her window and lean my forehead against the glass. So much time has gone by. The back yard is now bare. 

I see a cookout with the family - all of my mother's brothers and sisters are around the table and my grandfather is at the old Weber grill, a bag of charcoal by its side. My gram is putting condiments on a tray in the kitchen. I am taking the white stones from the backyard path to the picnic table and using them to write my name on the blacktop. Everyone is laughing.

 I catch sight of the clothesline in my view.

I am 7 and flipping upside down, hanging from my legs while the metal hooks scratch the inside of my legs until  I dismount like Nadia Comaneci in the '76 Olympics.

I notice the wall against the neighbor's garage.

 "We triple dog dare you to do it," My brother says, backed by his friends who are smug because I am a girl and therefore unwilling to take a dare. I shimmy across the wall careful not to lose balance on the embedded stones and fall into the pricker bushes below me. I win.

I move back to the sunspot in the middle of the floor where the end of my grandmother's bed used to be. 

I am a teenager laying across the bed. She is patting my back. Telling me not to worry. This too will pass…she hums Que sera, sera…whatever will be, will be. 

I can see the bed again, she is reading a book and I bust in to show her my engagement ring…
I see my husband putting in her air conditioner… 
am laying my babies in the middle of her bed for a nap, flanking them in her pillows so they do not roll over…

One last time...I hear myself fling open the screen door and yell upstairs, "Gram, you home?"

I take this picture of her window so I don't  forget.