Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Sentences seem like little bridges crossing a flooded plain. I step onto one and it feels shaky, incomplete. When I come to the end of it, I face anew the expanse of water with nothing laid over it and no materials. So I wait there, lonely and exposed, until something new comes to me.
–from an old journal entry
Two days ago, I was doing a phone consultation with a writer who, among other things, was writing about bees. When I looked up from my notes, what did I see in our yard? A huge swarm of hundreds of…bees. I’ve never seen such a thing. It was strangely beautiful.
As I continued my consultation, the swarm lessened and eventually seemed to be down to a few dozen bees circling like electrons around an overgrown rhododendron. When I got off the phone, I went out to look closer and saw what is in the picture here: an upside down bee cone. It was two feet tall and just as wide at its widest part.
Fortunately, our neighbor used to have beehives and had the right equipment, as well as the desire to have one again. So last night he came and dropped the cone into a garbage bin and took the squirming mass off to put in one of his old bee boxes.
He missed a few, but over the past two days they’ve disappeared, so maybe they’re all together now.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in whose works the kind of coincidence in my first paragraph here happens all the time. Maybe more is at work in our world than we know.
Here a picture of the bees’ new home:
I started reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera yesterday, as every writer should at some point during a pandemic. It is so beautifully rich in language and poignant and, what I didn’t expect, funny. Here are two lines from early in the book I thought especially evocative:
“In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”
and
“At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.”
Wow.
I keep a copy of this poem/reflection by my writing desk. It seems more important now than ever (an English translation follows the German):
by Jochen Mariss
Laß uns wieder lernen,
den Augenblick zu genießen,
zu nehmen, was ist,
mit beiden Händen,
hier und jetzt zu leben,
bevor wir das Leben verbracht haben
mit sorgenvollen Blicken in die Zukunft
und den Erinnerungen an die gute alte Zeit.
by Jochen Mariss
Let us learn again
to enjoy the moment,
to take what is
in both hands,
to live here and now,
before we have spent our life
in anxious glances toward the future
and memories of the good old times.
p.s. The photograph here is from Vigeland Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, and dedicated to those who are self-isolating with children. 🙃
STUDY that which you would like to see in this world—peace, truth, faithfulness, community, economic fairness, good government—and it will have a better chance of coming to be.
On this day of hope, let us all prepare our minds and hearts to work for a better world when we are free again.
Happy Easter to all!
In doing research for a new project, I came across this quote from Bertha K. Landes, who was elected mayor of Seattle in 1926, becoming the first female mayor of any major American city:
“I threaten to shoot on sight, without benefit of clergy, anyone calling me the mayoress instead of the mayor. Joking aside, I am fighting for a principle in taking that stand. Let women who go into politics be the real thing or nothing! Let us, while never forgetting our womanhood, drop all emphasis on sex and put it on being public servants.”
Although Landes cleaned up the city and had the support of important elements such as the Seattle Times, she was defeated in her reelection bid. The man who beat her, a political neophyte named Frank E. Edwards, did all he could to make the election about whether the city wanted to be led by a woman or a man. Sadly, his cynical approach worked, even among women.
I’m happy to say Seattle has a strong female mayor again (the first since Bertha)–and I hope that after November, we’ll have many more female public servants across this country. God knows we’ve had enough men who don’t know the meaning of “public” or “servant.”
Three days ago, the playwright Terrence McNally died at 81, a victim of the coronavirus. He had COPD and had lost part of both lungs to lung cancer, so he was one of the most vulnerable among us to this awful pandemic. He was also one of the most brilliant, creative, and loving men in our world.
I didn’t know McNally personally except that I once did a long, lovely interview with him over lunch at Portland’s Heathman Hotel. This was in the early 2000’s when I was writing regularly about theater for the Oregonian, including interviewing any playwright who came through town: Lanford Wilson, Romulus Linney, John Guare, Tracy Letts.
Wilson and Linney (who had been my professor for a class on playwriting at Columbia University in the 1990’s) were both warm and generous to me, but McNally was even more so. I had writing assignments to justify all of the other interviews, but not the one with him. Even so, he sat and answered all of my questions, treating me as a peer rather than just another interviewer.
Over time, I have watched many of McNally’s shows on the stage or on film. He had broad range and a big heart. But I didn’t know just how wide-ranging his work was, or how big his heart, until I watched the 2019 PBS American Masters program on him last night.
If you want proof that the jerks who say we should choose the stock market over the lives of older people as this pandemic continues to spread are sick and twisted, watch this program. You’ll find a link to it here.
What life and wisdom and love left the world with this man. How many others with these attributes we need so desperately right now are we willing to lose?