a little red hen

"ella," lower case contraceptive pill, tip toes here

How far did I have to go to find this picture?  To the UK where ella, the new "You have five days to take care of your unprotected sex encounter" pill    is now available.  Approved this week by the FDA as available by prescription in the U.S., none of the stories about it showed what its packaging looked like.

Call me paranoid, but this seems just another symptom of how frightened officials here are about making this breakthrough contraceptive pill available.  If you don't see it, will it go away?  Please.

In a braver time for women who demanded control over our own bodies, there's  this heartbreaking pin in my jewelry box.  Every now and then it appears on my shirt.  Probably has no meaning for women with no memory of time before Roe v. Wade.   Each time I look at it, I feel the sadness of my own experience and exasperation about the unwon battle for reproductive justice.  A recent find of a hangar slipcover left from our son's wedding in New Orleans (the year before Katrina) moved me to think about writing a post, "Meditation on a Hangar." But celebrating ella is more upbeat and hopeful for the future of my grandchildren.

My English friend Gillian who lived downstairs in my 4th apartment in Manhattan in two-year span and the one I returned to after my own illegal 1957 abortion, would  entertain as she described the dime store wedding band almost slipping off her ring finger during her visit to the NYC Planned Parenthood (link not historical indicates the ongoing struggle).  Why were we laughing?  We had cried so many times.

That was New York City in the 1950s when the only way a woman could get a diaphragm was visit to a gynecologist for a prescription.  Expensive.  The cheaper alternative was PP.  Gillian developed a complicated story for the doctor there.  At the time, the gyn would ask the patient supplicant to see if she could use the device properly.  And so the ring began to slip.  Her story became more hilarious when she returned to PP for a new diaphragm the following year and saw the same woman doctor who remembered her.  Gillian was seriously challenged to update her marital story.

All this to say, I wish the organizations that support CHOICE would spend some of our support bucks on powerful imagery.  Then get a couple of those "girls" on the TV show "Mad Men" to appear in national advertising with one on their breasts. From what I can see here of the ella pill, that would be a fine design, surrounded by the message, "Five days to Choice."  Sure, you can think up a better one but will the orgs listen to old ladies?

UPDATE:  The one place that gets my money in this never-ending struggle is the Center for Reproductive Rights.  Check their site for all their important legal work that could use your support .

Roxie's Hippo and Healthcare Reform

What did you do yesterday while Congress dragged it out?  Stretching a metaphor, I  have been malingering like them by not finishing this knit toy for Roxie, our NYC granddaughter. 

By late December (which issue was the Senate on then?), all the separate pieces of the hippo had been completed.  Another  Susan B.  Anderson pattern in her itty-bitty toys book (something new after making two of her chickens).   Worked well with yarn from my over-large stash.  Tricky to knit the body as it narrowed down with few stitches left on the needles.  (This was November '09...had we lost CHOICE in the House?)

For the second time I used a rubber ball to weight the body.  Hippo is very solid as a result.  This is a substitute for poly pellets when making a toy for young children.

Carried it to North Carolina at Christmas when we last saw Roxie, sure I'd finish it then.  No...  not enough light, too cold--the very sort of lame excuses our congressional reps have been using to waste the taxes we pay them with this endless slog. 

Sunday, March 21, 2010, was so possibly auspicious, that I made my move.   In the morning and early afternoon I watched the proceedings (inside and outside, some more inspirational than others) on television and did embroidery on the hippo's face.  Not great but okay.  Ear attachment went better.

Dinner was at Rachel's, our daughter, where Judy, the other grandma, is visiting from Idaho.  Rachel kept us up with progress in D.C. on her Blackberry (no television here).

Back home to finish the hippo and hope that Congress  and I would both end before midnight.  That actually happened thanks to the determination of many, especially women, thank you.  Several are pictured here.

Nancy Pelosi deserves much more admiration that we have given her lately.  We also are reminded that the  sensible Democrats are the true picture of this country--every geographic direction, all colors and shapes, even a couple of southerners!

Checking email before bed, there was a request to support two women running races against blue dog Dems.  Five dollars each:  I could do that...you can do that!

How She Was Remembered in the New York Times

Who'd miss this obituary of Fran Lee, a feisty activist who died earlier this month at 99.  The 1972 photo by John Sotomayor was 3.5 x almost 5.5 inches.  My gratitude goes to New York Times reporter, Margalit Fox, for a very respectful, long obit on a woman she described as a "preternaturally outspoken consumer advocate."

Fran Lee had a career of questioning many problems under many guises--Mrs. Fix-it, Granny Franny--but was known best as leading the losing battle for a more stringent pooper-scooper law than New York City planned in the seventies.  Picking up the stuff on the street was too easy, she claimed.  Dog owners needed to collect the stuff at home!  Before strolling outdoors.  Watch her on this vintage YouTube interview.

She had science behind her, explaining that a tiny roundworm found in dog feces was a health risk, especially for children.  The City did enact a fairly strict law; the streets are cleaner over the past 50 years.  Except in Greenwich Village and some outer boroughs.  The relentless determination of dog-owners to make a better place for their animals has extended to the creation of "dog runs" in City parks.  The link here describes recent energy on the upper East Side about the surface of a dog run--petitions too.

To her credit, Fran Lee had energy for many other battles described in her obit from cyclamates to asbestos to curious homemade candles.  Starting as an actress, this "force of nature" left four boxes of material in the NYC Library Archives.   Her son describes hearing his atheist mother as he passed her bedroom  at night, as she railed about world problems, "God, when I get to see you...am I going to tell you a thing or two."

Reading about questioning old women (did I mention that the lively 92 year old who lives down the hall, called me--in a very pleasant way--a "rabble-rouser"), soothes me.  We should all have Margalit Fox to write our obits.

We came expecting the rain, but look...

When we told NYC friends last winter that we planned to visit Portland, Oregon, in December and January, they did not exactly support our plan.  "Won't it be cold there?"  Assured them it would be warmer than the City.  Wrong we were, as reported HERE.

Weather was not our prime motive for the move.   So it is a bit ironic that this winter, now happy residents of the Rose City,  we've been enjoying very, very lovely weather--mostly.  And New York City:  not so much. Excellent, graphic wintry photos arrayed on a post by  Chicken in Every Granny Cart,  Manhattan blogger and food maven. She is more good-natured than I ever was about work-required enounters with deep snow.

Maybe she's too young to have experienced the 1950s when women were not allowed to wear slacks in the office.  Actually, you'd skulk into the ladies' room and remove wet long pants  beneath your skirt before arriving at your desk.  Then have to put them on again, half-dry, to return to the streets and subway.

I'm sharing with you (sorry Kays in Toledo and NYC) my day on this past sunny Tuesday, temps in the fifties. After another visit to the dentist (future post) where I was distracted by windpower on a nearby building (electricity for four apartments), I stopped to pick up a brie and cucumber  on French bread from Addy's, one of the inspired food carts dotting most of Portland.  Yes, I've been here several times after the dentist--good distraction.

Hopped the bus home.  Encountered Ron, suggested we  share the sandwich  on the top of our building.  Sunny but hazy so could not see Mt. Hood in the distance but I enjoy the many bridges here too.  This one is the Ross Island Bridge. The sundial shows the direction of each of the distant seven mountains.

Of course it has rained a bit since then.  That's what we were expecting!

Super Bawl* Sunday: Ads a Feminist Could Support

Much chatter* about this year's TV ads accompanying today's football event, the yearly display of testosterone with accompanying rise in spouse abuse.  Women's Media Center has coordinated shout-outs to  CBS to dump the ad.  And been ignored.  Everything more you'd want to know appears in the blog,  The Reclusive Leftist.  She rightly nails patriarchy as the true source of the problem.

For image, I offer one  saved on my desktop for a couple of years--a poster on bus kiosk around New York City.   I'd support variations on it year round.  Living closer to the ground, so to speak, these days in Portland, Oregon,  I now start the day with the  local Oregonian delivered to my door in contrast to the national NY Times (read later when picked up at the front desk of my retirement community).

Locally Portland would seem to harbour more women abusers than back east (I doubt this) because the "small" incidents here are reported by the media.   In NYC only prominent men receive notice by journalists.  Coast to coast, however, they are always lightly punished. 

Writing to promote the "Geezers' Crusade" , David Brooks on the Op-Ed page of the Times, wants us to do more on behalf of younger people.  Would he support a movement by older people that demands  more visible signs of respect for women in every American city--bold ones like this poster? 

Could it happen in  your city?

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.

Bialy via PDX...message to New Seasons: bigger but not better

We first noticed them last winter at New Seasons Market on Division Street on our visit to Portland to find an apartment.  They intrigued us with their boldness, bialy's twice as big as those we knew from New York City .  Maybe, we wondered, it's about the West, the frontier, the big sky, etcetera.

Last night at New Seasons, we made our move and bought one--all nine-inches of it.  [Once again I've taken an unauthorized photo and escaped being admonished by New Seasons' very pleasant monitors.] 

We negotiated ingesting it this morning--before I had a chance to take its picture in our own environment.   "Not sure how to divide this thing," Ron said.  Yes, it took real skill to suppress memories of our old 4-inch NYC bialy.  Those are the ones described in Mimi Sheraton's, The Bialy Eaters, A Story of a Bread and a Lost World** which includes a recipe (for the brave and hardy) to make an almost-authentic Kossar's bialy. 

Sheraton believes that Kossar's is the only place to buy an authentic one.   To order some by mail, you go HERE.

Taste?  According to the bialy maven here (whose late mother came from Bialystok, Poland), "At best, I'd give it a D-minus.  But what can you expect?  It's made with cibatta dough, not sticky enough...needed NYC water."  We're guessing this New Seasons' product is known as the "Montreal bialy."  The store held cooking classes on making these last year, I heard.

Other efforts to re-create this delicacy are on the King Arthur flour site, a blog from a Virginia-based librarian, and a guy with great photos of the baking process--but the belly-reduction ad on his blog is definitely at odds with the true intention of the bialy--bulk up!

**Thanks to our downstairs neighbor, Elisabeth, for the loan of Sheraton's book (the hardback one with removable  paper cover featuring two bialys lovingly held by a woman's hands, inside pages are only black and white).  This is what authentic ones look like, color and shape.

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. 

And now I have knit chickens...

A few weeks ago, I went back to Close Knit, a favorite yarn shop here.  Last winter I bought Noro yarn and pattern there to make this vest;  finished when we returned to New York.  One of my more successful yarn projects.  It  helped that there was an already-knit version I could try on  to check out the fit. 

Knitting chickens, representations of them not the actual bird, has moved  along my plan to knit kids' toys.   First,  a yellow Polka-Dot Chicken from Susan B. Anderson's "Itty-Bitty Nursery."  I was going to give this to Zoe but decided to keep it.

I rationalized that her baby sister might tear it  and get into this bag of  beads used to weight the bottom.  Zoe shares my fondness for chickens,  chases  uncaged ones resident in the nearby schoolyard. Hope  they  make it through the winter.

Because she's partial to dots, I added them to another  Susan B. Anderson pattern for a striped chicken.  And produced this larger hen for her to take home.  On visits with us, she plays with the smaller one. Clara is the name she gave to  both.  Sounds  old-fashioned from a modern little girl.

 
Sent off this sweater for Roxie's Purple Bear that I made in August, just before we left NYC. I've started another animal for her,  a Hippo from Susan B. Anderson's new book, itty-bitty toys.  Did Susan and I meet at Knitty City?  I have a signed copy of the other Itty-Bitty. She is a very inventive designer who blogs here.

Feeling quite righteous because I'm only using yarn from my stash for these projects.   Found more funky chick patterns at Ravelry--that comes after the Hippo and another vest for myself, this time with Ron's yarn.

Recalling my hen obsession while she was in Paris, Maxine Levinson at Knitty City sent me a photo she snapped of a poulet store.  I lost it and effort to retrieve it via Google led to a blog called Paris Breakfasts.  Discovered many sides of  chicken enthusiasm among the French.  Something little red hens everywhere are trying to tell us?

Starting to use her as my avatar.  Please note the beaded necklace.

Posting less than I'd like because we continue to have a busy time in Portland, O, with taking classes, finding intriguing lectures.  This week the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard came through to promote his book, "Good without God: what a billion nonreligious people do believe."    Saw Philip Glass' new opera,"Orphee" and liked the music.   A group  sat in the lobby doing live blogging.

More  boxes await attention.   Though I feel frustrated about my ability to influence national politics, there are local issues to work on.  Oregon, like California, has votes often on initiatives outside regular elections.

The outcome of Initiatives 66 and 67  will have profound effect on funding for schools and social services.  "YES" is the word for the  January 28 election.