a little red hen

Loving To Read Obituary Pages

Where did the attraction begin?  In the 1950s and 60s, I worked in public relations in New York City.  Oh, there were so many, many daily papers that I had to read.  Mornings it was the Herald Tribune and the New York Times (image here from last week).

Not the tabloids, the ones whose big, bold headlines I'd see in the hands of subway riders and on newsstands. There was the Daily Mirror, deceased,  the Daily News, still flaunting its increasingly regressive conservatism.  In the afternoon, more that are history:  World Telegram & Sun, the Journal-American.

It was never a job requirement to read obits:  I just liked to read about the lives of others, see images of them from another era.  Ultimately, that curiosity led me to become a psychotherapist in midlife.  (I'll also be interested in your family's photos from the past.)

Reading about the deceased in the Times has continued.  Every now and then there's someone I knew or can connect to through people in my own past.  John Updike, whom I met briefly in a Harvard dorm when he came to borrow a tux from my then-boyfriend Christopher "Kit" Lasch.  I also have a letter* with Lasch's sketch of him; they were college roommates.  Most of the notable people from my era were men.  Rarely do I find a woman's obit except for a few, like my friend Barbara Seaman, who made significant contributions to women's lives with her first book, "The Case against the Pill."

Like Updike in the photo here, all of us smoked cigarettes (to be specific).  Somewhere in my stuff is a photo from 1954, my junior year at Oberlin.  I wear a short-sleeve gray cashmere sweater bought on sale in St. Louis where my family lived then.  In my hand, purposely, is a cigarette.  Updike died of lung cancer--Lasch and Seaman of other forms.  Did I stop early enough in 1968 when I was thirty-three?  Hoping so.

Back to my reading of obits--continued the NYTimes habit as we moved around.  Left NYC in 1968, continued to read the Times in Oberlin (faculty wife this time), and in Baltimore where we landed next.  Also read the ones in the Baltimore Sun once I had a sense of who was who in the community. Back to New York in 1995, still flipping to those back pages in the Times.

What about Portland, Oregon?  We've been permanently for over two-plus years. Why not read these too, all about everyday women and men.  Oddly, these are more satisfying. Years ago, I said to Ron, "Amazing reading obits in The New York Times could make you believe that women never die."  Surely among all those forgotten ball-players, forgotten Hollywood bit players, there could be a woman or two.  Rarely.

Women are a larger presence in the Oregonian.  I learn details of  their lives as working women in the Northwest.  Often there are photos of them both young and old like Ruth S. McDonald here who died at 89 last September.  Most are homemakers.  But there's more to learn here about Ruth's working life.  She was born in 1920, on a farm near Madison, Nebraska, town of about 3,000, whose largest employer is Tyson Fresh Meats.

She moved to Omaha, was working in the Blackstone Hotel as a waitress when she met her Army husband.  They moved to Vancouver, Washington, and both worked at the Kaiser Shipyard.  She had two sons, grandchild, great grandchildren.  Returned to waitressing at sometime in the 20th century, retired from Ye Olde Towne Crier when she was 70!

"She was a true professional who took pride in her work."  Donations suggested to  Sisters of the Road Cafe known for its programs of community-driven solutions to poverty and homelessness, and Bradley Angle, center for domestic violence survivors.  First time I'd seen organizations like these in the obits.  Think Ruth and I would have had some important conversations about tikkun olam (healing the world) if we had met.

*My letters from Lasch went to an archive at the University of Rochester.  To write this post, I saw the link for the first time and cannot figure out where and if the letters are there.   Have to ask my son, Nick, who is behind the curious small world story of how they landed there.  Another time will write about how little personal information Lasch seems to have made public as I noticed in a review of recent biography.

C-span panders just like network TV?

Sunday late afternoon and the Big Screen broadcasts.  Ron spins, I knit.  An intriguing interview with Howard Markel, doctor-author of "An Anatomy of Addiction:  Sigmund Freud, William Halsted & the Miracle Drug Cocaine".  Quite a title, fascinating book. I remember  the Halsted's name--a late 19th/early 20th century innovative surgeon at Johns Hopkins.  I had doctors' appointments in a building named for him when we lived in Baltimore.

Last summer when I read the N.Y. Times review , I was reminded about Freud's drug habit.  Earlier writers, many in psychoanalytic fields intent on preserving his image,  have downplayed this journey on the dark side.  As the Times' review points out, it was very dark:

Freud liked the stuff so much that between roughly 1884 and 1896, when he was in his 20s and 30s and in his major cocaine period, he tended on many days to have a red, wet nose. He gave cocaine to family and friends.

Also, famously, to a patient.  Much as I wanted to know more-- how Freud's habit did or did not influence his psychoanalytic theories, I was not moved to get the book.  Today's C-span expanded my knowledge, but reading the book is the only way my questions might be answered.

Another C-span Book review appeared on the screen.  Oh, Bill Clinton with his latest foray into how-many-ways-can-I-prove-I-should-still-be-president thorough his new book, "Back to Work."  Busy with my knitting problem, I stopped paying attention then started again when I noticed--how could I miss--that daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was his interviewer.  Odd, don't you think?

Perhaps this was a practice gig for Chelsea's coming appearance as a regular on NBC.  A number of journalists have commented on her hiring, not happy with her lack of background for her work.    John Doyle in the Globe & Mail, offers a Canadian perspective.  Noting American journalists' uneasiness with numerous recent NBC hires of relatives of political figures, he adds:

...a larger trend becoming evident here. It’s the same urge to hire celebrity names that compels sports broadcasters to hire ex-professionals to do sports analysis, instead of real reporters....the hiring of Chelsea Clinton is another sign of the terminal decline of network news. Thank goodness for newspapers. Right?

I should mention that the Clintons were appearing on the stage of the New York Historical Society which gave the interview a patina of dignity that it did not deserve.  Once again, as in those halcyon days when Bill Clinton was revealed as a philanderer, I felt sorry for Chelsea.

Immediately following, C-span proved that it may be in the same groove as NBC:  Truman Clifton Daniels, grandson of Harry Truman, was interviewed by Margaret Hoover, perky Fox News correspondent and great granddaughter of (ready?) Herbert Hoover.

He has published a book of letters between his grandparents and is Director of Public Relations at Truman College in Chicago, also wrote the 1995 book, Growing Up With My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S. Truman.

Could someone open the window?

 

Lydia and her Silverton dairy memories...

How perfect.  Today, a day late, I checked out Writerquake, the blog from Silverton, Oregon.  In another "Old Postcard Wednesday,"  Lydia shares the recent loss of a nearby dairy.  What about my own fondness for old milk bottles?  Quickly I dusted off some samples.

Last night we had dinner with two women who grew up on  farms in Iowa and Minnesota.  Both were amused by my fondness for the idea of chickens and open to the idea of hens as a metaphor for women.  Mine is the longing of a very, very urban person, I explained, and speculated there might have been a true poultry-raiser in my unknown, Polish-Russian family of origin. 

Milk bottles represent a similar mystery with their labels of unknown, long gone farms--

Little's of Hanover, Pa. Phone ME 7-5131...Bates Farm (now conservation property) in Carlisle, Mass...Riley in Pitman, N.J.  I have another, a half-pint (cream?)  from Bellach Farms, Inc in Brooklyn New York with "Deposit"  and "Registered" lettering. Historians (mine seem to be from 1930s and 40s) and collectors of milk bottles can reveal their respective time slots in American history.  The marbles in the Bates bottle belonged to our son, one very old was found in backyard of the house where he grew up in Baltimore.

"You can't beat our milk but you can whip our cream," with the picture of a baby stops me.  Is this some reference to the possibility of spanking one's child?  Fits with my view of Pennsylvania as a dark, over-churched place, resistant to woman's right to choose.  [Isn't it grand when almost any image or idea can be worked into one's personal ideology?  Right wing very good at this; may be something to learn more about.]

For some of your own--old or new--they can be purchased through Local Amish Farms in, yes, southeastern Pennsylvania.  Besides photos of many bottles still being produced, the site has extensive information about where to get home delivery of milk (not necessarily in glass), a social networking site for bottle owners--and source for the link above on "historians."  Less successful in finding academic-type text but did locate Janet Golden's "The Social History of Wet Nursing: from Breast to Bottle."   Seems the glass bottle was introduced in U.S. in 1868.

Forgot to point out to friends last night that I was wearing a new ring.  Drawn to earrings in a handmade craft store window, downtown on 10th around Morrison.  As I was buying the earrings, I noticed animal rings on the counter.  Same price, $16, as earrings for this rooster.  Small helpful gesture toward local economy.

Would have preferred a hen but males do continue to rule, right?

Vulnerability we all share...

Sunday morning and yesterday's awful event in Arizona very much on all our minds and in the papers on my doorstep.  Headline of the Oregonian "Arizona shooting shakes nation"  makes me feel much closer geographically than New York Times' "Congresswoman Is Shot in Rampage Near Tucson."  Living now in the western United States, in a state where a frontier ethic still resonates, I do feel closer to what has happened.

But gun violence has never been outside my American experience wherever I've lived.  One that is especially vivid occurred shortly after we moved from Baltimore (often seen as the number one murder capitol when it was not being outdistanced by Washington, D.C., the capitol itself) to New York City in 1995. We had an early introduction to the sound of urban gunfire our first year.

Must have been about 7 p.m. on a weekday.  What was that sound, "Car backfiring?" I asked Ron.  "Sounds like something else," he answered and moved toward the window where we looked down from 21 stories to Amsterdam Avenue.  "Oh, my God!" 

Across the street on the sidewalk along a massive housing project, a man lay in a growing pool of blood.  This was life in the big city, another big city replicated by ones across the country.  Was he shot by police or someone in argument with him?  I only care that he was killed by a firearm.

Today we will pick up a  grandchild for a concert of secular music at the Oregon Jewish Museum.  Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman who was critically wounded in Tucson yesterday, is Jewish.  I feel even more vulnerable as a Jew in what feels like the wild west.  The local gun awareness group is totally focused in guns being turned in for cash.  This is empty from my perspective.

Where is the national call against violence with guns and violence against women.  Why nationally has there been acceptance of the rage pouring from those who disagree with others. Progress will occur when Oregon, and the rest of the west, finally face their very long history of accepting the problems of untreated mental instability--and decide to invest in prevention and treatment.

[Please read this post from Reclusive Leftist for serious feminist perspective.]

 

 

 

 

 

Where I worked, in an earlier life...

Going through old photos, I found this one.  It gives me great pleasure to see my space again, to recall how I began with one unexpected phone call,  "My friend said a teacher you know said I could call you for an appointment."  It was an exciting time to be a psychotherapist:  the energy, altered thinking of the 1960s and early 70s had encouraged women to consider change in their lives.  I was ready to be a partner in their work.

My home was my office.  Here's one feminist therapist's setting--two chairs face each other for individual clients. On Wednesday evenings a circle of directors' chairs would be pulled into a circle from the other side of the room.  These were for the two women's groups I led back-to-back that evening--one for younger women, followed by an older group.   I enjoyed having clients bring in photos (there is a field known as phototherapy) to work with in group sessions and individual.  Writing this post, memory sparked by this unexpected picture, takng it further to recall the shape and content of my work, is in itself a kind of phototherapy.  [By looking for a link to use, I experienced a lovely memory of a workshop I attended led by Judy Weiser whose book and work is described.] 

The date of the photois 1985 and I'd been in practice for about nine years.  My office was one end of our long living room. Everything is familiar to me.  The oak washstand between the chairs held my business cards and clients' checks and cash.  No billing:  each session was paid at the end of the hour.  Fifty minutes usually ran to 55, maybe longer.

Behind my rocker, the one facing forward, is a plantation desk  We still have both pieces of furniture.  Next to the client's rocker is  a small display case for oil paints that came from a store owned by relatives of a long ago friend in New York.  The top was a piece of hard white plastic I'd glued on.  Never see material like that anymore.  Wish I still had this.  Across the room were two almost floor to ceiling drugstore walls with shelves and drawers.  We'd found this in an antique barn for $100 each.  "You have to take both of them if you want one," the dealer said.  Many books were kept for bibliotherapy, loaned to clients.

Do I still have my MSW diploma from the wall above the desk?  Probably not.  I'm sure my license to practice is gone.  If I had to work again--imagine at 77 having to figure out how to be an employee.  As today's older workers struggle to hold onto jobs, get new ones, I recall that ageist thinking by employers began long ago.  In 1963, I returned to New York City after three years in Albuquerque.  At thirty, my competitors for work were the twenty-somethings, newly out of college. 

One of the reasons I began my own psychotherapy practice in 1976, after receiving my MSW, was I was again an "older" job applicant, now even more ancient at 43 with two young children.  Even with much experience in several industries, I lost out both to younger social work grads and ones with doctorates--who suddenly wanted the jobs that only those with Master's degrees had filled in the past.  And every woman knows the drill:  when will you be getting married...married recently, when will you be getting pregnant...child at home, we're not sure you're dependable enough.

Nothing much has changed in the hard world of work.  If my luck holds, and Social Security does not implode, and the state of Maryland keeps paying out my spouse's retirement, and other things I do not like to think about too long, then I can enjoy my work memories and rock away toward my dotage.   But I worry about you--the price of a feminist consciousness.

 

 

"Color it orange" Craig Claiborne,1968

What's in your recipe files from the 20th century?  Mine are filled with yellowing newspaper and magazine clippings.  Many offer nostalgia more than usefulness like this one from the Sunday magazine New York Times.  Did I really think there was a place in my life for Bavariois a l'orange in December 1968?

Between my two pregnancies, 1968 and 1969, living in a little college town, cornfields of Ohio were an extreme change from Manhattan.  This may be the reason it seems odd these days when people in Portland wonder if I miss NYC.  No,  I know what it's like to be truly isolated as a young mother.  PDX is perfect for my old lady days--more accessible, delicious food in mid-priced restaurants/podcarts/farmers' markets, unexpected plays and movies, beautiful flora all around.  The natives' values and preferences are a bit twisted, from an East coast perspective.  Twisted is my preferred adjective rather than the less descriptive, much-repeated phrase frequently seen on bumper-stickers, "Keep Portland weird."

In Baltimore in the 70s,  I tried some French cooking, particularly bread.  It was in Oberlin, Ohio, where  I fell into bread-making.  I'd never seen anyone make bread but Ron had watched his mother bake, so I learned about kneading from him.  Because the town was in the midst of farm country, it was possible to buy 5 lb. bags of whole wheat and rye flour at the local A&P.  When we moved to Baltimore a couple of years later, I had to ask one of the last Jewish bakeries to sell me the same amount  measured into a brown paper grocery bag.

Though it was possible to follow the recipe in "Living on the Earth: celebrations, storm warnings, formulas, recipes, rumors, & country dances harvested by Alicia Bay Laurel" (still have my copy), my true guide was Dolores Casell's A World of Breads.  Corn-Rye was one of my favoritesalong with Cornell Triple-Rich--wheat germ, soy flour (think I had to send to Walnut Acres for that), and skim-milk powder.

Casella's "Easy Buttermilk Bread" (my note says "3 8-inch loaves) was my intro to buttermilk in baking.  My entire family devours the Sesame Corn Bread loaves (toasted seeds) made with it every Thanksgiving and sometimes in between--a recipe from an unknown magazine (Woman's Day) though I usually keep better records.

Here's Ron's photo from those byegone days--Rachel was born in Oberlin, where Ron finished his dissertation which meant we could move on to a bigger place--Baltimore, where Nick arrived 20 months after his sister.  Next:  the women's movent.  We were busy!

 

Bialy memories: Kossar's Bialy store, New York City

The other day Ron Bloom unearthed photos I took in the 1980s on one of our trips from Baltimore to New York to visit relatives and return home with provisions unavailable in what has been known as "Charm City."  Baltimore had its appealing qualities but "charm" was not one I'd identify.

Kossar's Bialy store (link has instructions on how to eat one!) has somehow stayed in place on the lower east side though the bakers have changed ethnicity.  As I mentioned on an earlier post, this is THE place for authentic bialys and we would fill our car trunk to enrich our Baltimore freezer with about 10 dozen--some to be shared with fortunate friends and neighbors, always plenty to last us till the next longing.

I offer this as a window into how deeply some are attached to particular food connected with memory.  This is Ron's, honed over many years in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn,(scroll down on the page)  a Jewish ghetto of an American style.

My own special food is tapioca (this public service link has recipe how to make it with real, not instant, pearls) probably tasted in a Manhattan cafeteria like Horn & Hardart (gorgeous photo of odd machine that delivered cocoa for a nickel in my memory--rather than coffee mentioned in copy.)  A far less emotion-filled food recollection than his.

What I Miss about Manhattan: The Voting Booth

Let's start with how disappointed we are that the state of Oregon uses mail-in ballots.  That little oval to fill in (blue or black pen suggested) led me to  obsess about getting it right.  Annoying.

Ron and I loved going to our polling place, meeting neighbors, seeing how the poll workers did their jobs (very efficiently).  We've heard that mailed ballots increase participation.  Really?  My impression is this approach encourages proliferation of damned initiatives like 66 & 67, started by people who want to override decisions by the state legislature.  Oregon and the state of Washington are the two that have mail-in ballots.

And the cost?  I've been trying to track this one down without success.  Must be enough paper consumed to pay all the teachers in my grandson's elementary school (where they could use a few more teachers and classrooms, thank you).  And  the photo does not include the hefty Voters' Pamphlet, all 91 pages of it! Trying to resist are the founders of the  No Vote by Mail effort.  Good luck to them! 

Since I first voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1956, it's been exciting to get in line--New York City, Albuquerque, Oberlin, Baltimore--to pull the lever and feel the surge of participatory democracy.  Not a feeling I get in my living room.  But another change, after much resistance, is coming to the Big Apple, a holdout from the rest of New York state.  Now, folks there will vote electronically, wait in vain for the old familiar  "thump" of the lever, the sound that lets you know your vote has been recorded. 

Continuing  "yarn in the public interest," I knit my smallest YES patch and attempted to write the letters in single crochet.  Whatever it takes.  Judged readable by the very upbeat couple at the Happy Swallow, a coffee shop on Belmont Avenue that's brought kolaches to Portland from Austin, Texas.  This is result of immigration (story here).  Many surprises in our new digs, caffeine-land PDX.  Creative people always thinking how to differentiate themselves from the gazillion other cafes.

Kolaches, clever little cafes--work better for us than mail-in ballots and/or electronic voting.

What I Did NOT Wear...till Portland

Have you read "Love, Loss, and What I Wore" by Ilene Beckerman?  An east coast woman, middle class child of the 1940s/50s, she speaks to how we once thought about clothes.  Her New York City life was much tidier, more elegant than mine yet there's a resonance.  Similar to the sense I've always had when meeting Jewish women around my age in different cities:  a vibe, often brief, that we share until I learn she's a Republican.

"I wore this black bathing suit when I went to Florida with my grandmother.  I was fourteen," Ilene reports.  The drawing on the facing page--I wish that were a skill of mine--tells me more.  While I never had a Florida grandma nor a black bathing suit till now, the pose is familiar.  Second position, the one we learned in ballet class.  That came along with the expected piano lessons that other first generation Jewish mothers like mine understood as required for our upwardness in America. 

Here then is my first black bathing suit.  Bought it maybe 15 years ago to wear to the beach, a place enjoyed by the rest of my family.  I have a purple one that is equally sensible and unused.

On our 1970s and 80s summer  vacations in Cape May, New Jersey, or on Cape Cod, I was comfortable under our generous green and white striped umbrella with my knitting.  Sometimes Ron coaxed me into the salt water which I reluctantly admitted enjoying.  He had been a lifeguard at Coney Island in his youth.  At the same time, after years of summer camp and beginner swim class, I was a day camp counselor (no water required) in St. Louis.

Yet, this very month I have dipped my toes in the excellent warm water of the pool at Terwilliger Plaza.  Four times so far in "Gentle Water Aerobics."  Chlorine not too strong.  Still have to master/mistress the dressing room thing.  Afterwards I put in some minutes on the treadmill, conveniently located on the way back to our apartment.

The first time into the pool, I recalled a suggestion sent me by Hattie when I mentioned my reluctance to take the water.   She likes trim Land's End  ladies' swim suits minus the skirt.  That would be my nod to the 21st century and thinking beyond how black makes me look thinner.  After diving into color and pattern in my Baltimore life, going back to New York City edged me toward, as Ilene B. would say, "...black is always chic--and makes shopping choices much easier."  Third stage retirement requires shifting...more to follow.

I'm not in Manhattan any more. 

DIVINE+Bergdorf Goodman+American Visionary Museum

An exhibition on loan  to Bergdorf at Fifth Avenue & 57th Street from Baltimore's American Visionary Museum... amazing space, near the Inner Harbor.  Bergdorf Goodman website does not indicate how long all this work from the Museum will stay.

Another Normal has taken terrific pictures  of all the windows.

Divine was made famous beyond Baltimore by the filmmaker John Waters.