My Humble Thoughts on Student Protests at Columbia University
Have we forgotten Kent State?
Time and Distance
It’s been a long summer of hot weather and hot heads. Hot tomatoes in the garden. Hot, crispy lawns that are fighting back to go green again.
And now, 9/11. I almost feel embarrassed to post my trivial experiences from that day and the days following, but it’s like the Kennedy Assassination. We know where we were at the time.
On September 11, 2001, I was in the driveway of my sister’s home on Long Island NY, placing my suitcase in the trunk of her car. We were just about to leave for Islip airport and my return flight home.
Instead, my sister came outside to say that a friend called her and told her to put on the TV. The first tower had been hit. Chaos everywhere. Clouds of thick smoke, to be followed by unimaginable death, pain, and suffering.
We drove to Islip to see if we could learn anything about arranging future flights. As if there would even be future flights in the days immediately following the attack.
The airport was closed so we circled back and returned to stand in front of the TV, not knowing what to think. The who, what, and why.
For the next 10 days, I awoke at 3 AM to call American Airlines. Every night it was the same. Busy signals or long, long wait times. I didn’t mind waiting, but at 4 AM each morning, I hung up and went back to bed, my calls unanswered. Finally, I got through to ticketing.
Two weeks after 9/11, I returned home. As the plane descended towards my home airport, I experienced a brief event of confusion and fear. I looked out over the landscape and didn’t recognize where I was. Not even the expanse of the huge lake on which we lived.
The wheel wells opened, the tarmac flew up to meet us, and then, we were home. Safe.
I have never been able to remember the year that 9/11 took place. I google it every year. 9/11 will forever remain an event to be recalled with sadness for those who lost their lives and awe that such a thing could even take place.
To all the survivors, to all those left behind. May you find solace and even joy. Life goes on.
Make Beautiful Music
Last night I dreamed that I was getting married. My female relatives, young and old, were gathered all around me. It was a consummate summer scene in a fragrant apple orchard with vivid green grass and brilliant blue sky.
Instead of a frothy veil, I wore a simple crown of daisies in my hair. This crown was just like the one I had braided in my kitchen from a bouquet of Stop & Shop daisies shortly before I was married nearly forty-three years ago. This time there was no groom to be seen.
I innately knew that this marriage was mine alone.
I watched my sister approach carrying a banjo, in spite of the fact that she has never played a musical instrument.
She handed the banjo to me, in spite of the fact that I also have never played a musical instrument.
I sat down with this instrument in the midst of the wedding guests and looked down at the fretboard that crossed my lap. It was a light-colored wood that made me think of birch forests. Or maybe aspen.
I tentatively strummed across its taut nylon strings with my thumb, and was surprised to hear amazing music, so I continued to play. I played as if I knew what I were doing and the music kept coming, clear and beautiful.
The relatives moved in closer, surprised at my sudden talent.
And then it was gone.
I think that my dream means that sometimes we underestimate our abilities and our capacity for creating our own joy.
The banjo is a less respected instrument than guitars and violins and cellos, but it’s capable of beautiful music. Just because we’re different doesn’t mean that we can’t be beautiful.
This year, embrace your uniqueness and your dreams of the future. Don’t depend on anyone else to get you there or you may find yourself disappointed.
You and your path, like the banjo, might be uncommon, but they’re no 
less deserving of success. You can get there on your own. I know you can.
Happy New Year.
Thanksgiving in a Changed Land
In my youth, Thanksgiving was always a rock solid holiday in the United States. Norman Rockwell solid.
Family and friends sitting around a table with a roasted symbol of plenty in the middle. A home-grown turkey so big it filled the oven like one of those Japanese melons grown in boxes so they’ll be harvested square and stackable. Began roasting at 5 AM, vegetables simmering by 10, mashing the potatoes at noon.
As predictable as pumpkin pie.
Tepid hugs from ancient relatives greeting you at the door to see how you’ve grown. Young boys in white shirts, half untucked and soon to be smudged with lawn. Me, sitting at the empty dinner table, talking to no one. No expectations.
Multiple generations passing the cranberry sauce, eyeing each other up with unspoken judgments. A little bickering amongst the kids. He hit me first. The women, clad in calico aprons, doing the dishes after dinner. The men, buttoned up in hand-knit cardigans, tapping their cigarettes into beanbag ashtrays in the living room. Me, sitting at the empty dinner table, talking to no one. No expectations.
The older folks shaking their heads over Beatle haircuts. Football games on the TV. Not too much to complain about. Yet.
In ’65, Bob Dylan stood before us on a stage in Worcester, Massachusetts and sang “The Times They Are A’ Changin’.,” and the next time the curtains parted, the folk icon had gone electric. Tradition be damned.
Polarity in the country grew slowly and soon there was revolution in the air. Easy Rider hit the theaters. Janis Joplin played our college homecoming concert and I smelled marijuana drifting in the air for the first time.
A few days before Thanksgiving in ’69, we hitchhiked to Washington DC to join the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War. The air was crisp, the sky was blue, and as far as the eye could see, the crowd of students was elbow to elbow. I never got close enough to hear the speeches.
That night I slept on a cushioned window seat in a kind woman’s home. She served us lentil stew from a recipe in the New York Times cookbook.
I remember the kitchen.
I remember the kindness of strangers.
That Thanksgiving, my family didn’t discuss the Moratorium March. We didn’t even discuss the War. My father ruled the conversation with a cold, tight fist. Nixon was President.
We students thought we were liberal but most of us weren’t even close. I can’t pretend to have been an activist. I was caught up in a survival loop at home. My non-conformist ways began with baby steps. The first time I went without a bra, my mother cried. She needn’t have been so upset. My boyish chest wasn’t going to attract much attention.
There were many other causes still under the radar. At the time, I didn’t even recognize that my beloved godfather and his best friend were gay. It wasn’t until Uncle Joe was in his eighties that I was able to write “that letter” expressing condolences over the passing of his lifelong partner.
In 2000, Bob Dylan wrote, “Things have changed…”
Our own children were growing up, and we thought things were going along pretty well but— things have changed.
Now we are the older generation.
My father’s been dead a few years. My mother lives with dementia. I don’t even know if she’s aware there was an election.
I’m going to visit her across the country, but there won’t be a Thanksgiving dinner this year. Everyone’s gone and the house where we sat around the turkey in our tie-dyed t-shirts and peace symbols stands empty.
I’ll still be sitting at a table. Maybe making a jigsaw puzzle or playing dominoes, my mother’s two favorite activities. No expectations.
We never know what’s coming in this life.
Our country is in a state of radical change once again. Surely peace symbol bumper stickers will become popular again. We need some kind of symbol—some hope that it’s going to be alright.
I really don’t know what to think. I don’t know what else to say.
I hope your Thanksgiving is peaceful, and that you’re able to find a place of calm in the coming days.
Things have changed.
“Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.”
Bob Dylan, 1964
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Sit With Us App
The Sit With Us app was announced yesterday, creating a subtle but ground-breaking way for lonely teens to connect in lunch rooms without calling attention to themselves.
16-year-old Natalie Hampton designed the Sit With Us smartphone application in response to the feelings that she experienced when she spent her entire 7th grade year eating lunch alone. The app invites students to become ambassadors and indicate their lunches are open for other students to join.
A brilliant idea.
If you’ve ever experienced lunch room loneliness, the news of the app may have hit you right in the middle of your aching stomach. The same stomach that felt really sick every single day as you slid your cafeteria tray down the stainless steel counter, dreading the end of the line, knowing that after you gave your fifty cents or dollar to the lunch lady, you’d have to pick up that tray and join the crowd whose roaring voices were filling your head with fear.
I was one of those kids.
I attended a parochial school in a neighboring town for grades K-8, and then, because my own town had a public junior high that went up to grade 9, I was forced to make my transition to public school there. After that, I transferred to a public high school back in the neighboring town again for grade 10-12.
I ate lunch alone every single day for those three years.
I can tell you the colors of the matching Bobbie Brooks sweater and skirt sets that the girls at the popular tables wore as I inched my way to a place by the window. I remember their hair styles, their loud laughter, their Weejuns, their monogrammed sterling silver necklaces, their purses that held their rat-tailed teasing combs and packs of cigarettes. I can even tell you the conversations I overheard.
I did actually have a handful of friends—not at the same time, of course. But those friends had boyfriends or a lunch schedule that wasn’t the same as mine.
Every day my schedule placed me in the cafeteria at its busiest. By the time I lifted my tray from the counter and turned to face my fate, there were just a few single seats here and there.
The oak tables and chairs were lined up so close together that I had to lift my tray to shoulder height as I squeezed through the tight aisles. The sturdy old chairs had fifty years worth of bruises on their legs with lots of rough spots. They had seen a lot of abuse.
My goal each day was to carefully pick my way through the crowd to an empty space without getting a run in my nylons. About once a week, I failed. My stocking snagged on a splintered chair leg and I felt the hole in my stocking grow as its climbed up my leg leaving an ugly track of broken nylon and pale skin.
If I was lucky, my mother might have a spare pair of nylons at home but usually I had to wear the same stockings with the runs in them until she remembered to pick up a replacement.
We lived in a rural area of farms—no stores. I rode the school bus home and depended on my mother for the sundries of high school life. Nylons, binder paper and ball point pens.
It wasn’t so bad. I survived.
But the Sit With Us app would have helped.
Maybe you know someone who could use the Sit With Us app. It’s available as a download in App stores.
Sit With Us App
PNWA
