Respect

The word for today is RESPECT. Not the R-E-S-P-E-C-T kind, not the angry, you owe me kind, but the kind that comes from somewhere deep inside, the kind you don't have to ask for, the kind you can't stop. The verb RESPECT means "to hold in esteem or honor," "to show regard or consideration for," "to refrain from intruding upon or interfering with."

I'm writing about RESPECT because I just watched the tribute to Michael Jackson that was held at the Staples Center today. Since his death, and often during his life, Michael Jackson has been the subject of 24-hour cable news fests. His life has been examined in ways, that, thank God, most of our lives will never be. Along with the great RESPECT we as a populace had for his talent, for his ability to perform, we collectively had no RESPECT for his privacy, for the part of him that he did not want to give over to the public.

In the days since his death I have not been compelled to write about Michael Jackson. I was not attuned to his incredible success in the 80s. Sure I liked his music, sure I saw some of the groundbreaking videos on MTV, but his persona, his pyrotechnics, his over the topness, never resonated with me. He became the stuff of tabloids and Entertainment Tonight. He was lost to the currency of serious culture. Until his death.

Since his death, I have begun to wonder why the news of his death hit our collective culture harder than John Lennon's, harder than Jerry Garcia's. It hit on the scale of Elvis's. People cared about who this man was to them. And he was different to everyone except in one key RESPECT. Almost everyone responded to his music with joy. He was an entertainer; he spread joy, and spreading joy is truly work of a higher order.

As I watched and witnessed today, the word that came to mind was respect. His life, his legacy and memory were treated with the utmost RESPECT. He was acknowledged as a man who wanted to use his gifts to bring the healing power of love to the world. I listened to everyone from Rev. Sharpton to Brooke Shields to Magic Johnson to Rev. Martin Luther King III to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee pay homage to the man. I listened to Jennifer Hudson, Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, and his brother Jermaine sing to us because he no longer could.

I just thought of the song "Wanna Be Starting Something." I never paid attention to the lyrics. Here's the last verse:

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl
No one can hurt you now
Because you know what's true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you

After I watched the memorial I went to the coffee shop to write this blog entry. Michael Jackson made me want to start something. I hope he makes you want to start something too.

Flashback

The word for today is FLASHBACK. A FLASHBACK can be a device in a story that includes an incident that happened before the present time of the narrative; a FLASHBACK can be a spontaneous hallucination induced by drug use; a FLASHBACK can be a recurring image of an old traumatic experience. The local classic rock station uses the term FLASHBACK to label a chunk of programming devoted to music from a particular year. I'm at the tail end of the baby boom, so the musical FLASHBACKS I listen to go all the way from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The Beatles to Pearl Jam--that pretty much sums up my reference points for pop music.

Whenever I go into the Whole Foods, the soundtrack is full of musical FLASHBACKS. Their marketing department must figure that customers will buy more products if they're grooving to a particularly fine musical FLASHBACK.

Sometimes I tell people that once upon a time I was a lawyer. Once upon a time I was a lot of different things, but lawyer is a very difficult identity to shed. I remember (a memory, not a FLASHBACK), my father and other relatives telling me that in law school you learn how to think, as if all the other forms of higher education taught something not quite as valuable.

Recently, I met a man who is a trial attorney. He invited me to come to a deposition with him, and out of a combination of curiosity, intrigue and (yes I will admit it) interest in this man, I went. I had not been to a deposition in almost 20 years. I got dressed up in lawyer clothes, heels, pantyhose, a dress and a linen jacket. I heard myself clip clop along the cement sidewalks, trying to keep up with my friend, trying to be with it. We got to the deposition (he was deposing the defendant's expert witness) and he introduced me as his partner, assistant, or colleague (I really cannot remember).

My friend is a middle-aged white man, the opposing attorney was a middle-aged white man, the expert witness was a middle-aged white man. The only other woman in the room was the court reporter. I flashed back to my time as a young associate at an insurance defense firm. I flashed back to all the times I sat in the name partner's office waiting to discuss my research on a case, while he took phone calls from his colleagues and recounted his son's feats as a hockey star at Boston College. I flashed back to the performance review another partner conducted with me in the car as we drove back from a deposition in Boston--the only time he could spare. I flashed back to the horrible degradation I felt, to my inability to function in the male lawyer world, for my inability to know myself, be myself, speak up for myself. All I could think to do was leave. Within two years I did. I left the firm before the firm could ask me to leave. I landed some part-time work with a legal services organization; later I used my skills in social services.

When I am with my lawyer friend I FLASHBACK. I FLASHBACK to a time when I did not know who I was. Then I come back. At the deposition I realized that I am no longer a 30-year-old junior associate; I am a 50-year-old woman, who has had some real accomplishments in the professional world, who has spent an enormous amount of time and energy learning to understand and live my values. I am no longer intimidated by white men in suits.

I am even thinking of taking the bar exam next winter. I'm thinking of how I can use my dormant legal skills to advance my values. I'm thinking of how I can live in the present, move forward, and not be detained by the power of a FLASHBACK.

Date

The word for today is DATE. DATE can mean many things, a small dark fruit that grows on a tree, a specific moment in time and space--the time when food will perish, someone will graduate, retire, get married, celebrate his or her birth. A DATE can refer to an appointment between two people, colleagues can have a lunch DATE, Barack and Michelle (our POTUS and FLOTUS) have DATE night. This is the kind of DATE I'm thinking of.

I had a DATE on Saturday night. I knew it was a DATE because the man, who is also a neighbor, kissed me on the cheek and said "I can kiss you because we are on a DATE." When we arrived at the restaurant for dinner he said, "this is our first DATE." We had taken long walks and gone to a baseball game together, but I guess those didn't qualify.

I've gone out to dinner with male friends on weekend nights, but it's been a long time since any one of them specifically called what we were doing a DATE. In fact, I'm more accustomed to my friend who makes it clear to me that we are not on a DATE, we are just two friends having dinner together. Even the men I've known who have been interested in getting physical, didn't want to use the word dating; they were even more emphatic about not using the word relationship.

I had fun on the DATE. The man I went out with isn't like most of the people I spend time with. He's pretty straightforward and uncomplicated; he doesn't analyze or overanalyze his emotions. He said right away, "I'm not looking for anything serious, I'm dating a lot of people."

So now I am challenged. Can I adhere to casual dating etiquette? Since I know I am not the only woman this man is dating, there are lots and lots of things that I will not do with him, there are lots of feelings that I will not let myself have. I can go out for dinner, I can go to a ball game, I can go sailing or hiking, I guess I can even have some fun. I hope we have another DATE.

On Sunday I had tickets to a concert. I had asked a friend, a man I do not DATE, to go with me. At first he accepted, but then he changed his mind. Sunday came and I did not have anyone to go to the concert with. I did not have a DATE. I asked a series of friends, but we've been having a cold spell here in Chicago and the idea of going to an outdoor evening concert did not appeal to anyone I approached.

Once again, I would have to go on a DATE with myself. I got in the car and drove to Ravinia, where the concert was being held. I tried to breathe deeply and make that small lump in my heart and throat go away. I didn't want to feel sorry for myself; I just wanted to go and enjoy the music. As I was about to enter the concert grounds the friend who'd cancelled on me called. He'd just received a call from another friend of his who was at the concert. "Call her," he urged me, "she said you should join her and her group of friends on the lawn."

I called the woman and navigated my way towards her party via cell phone instructions. Soon she said, "you're wearing sunglasses" to me over the phone, and I knew I'd found her on the Ravinia lawn. Her friends had gone to enter a drawing for indoor pavillion seats. They won and we packed up the food and blankets they'd set out on the lawn and took the seats of our good fortune.

I didn't have a DATE. I had the company of a warm and welcoming group of women. I had wonderful seats. I listened to Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patti Griffin and Buddy Miller. I remembered listening to the music of the three female artists over the last 20 years, through a lot of heartbreak, loneliness and hope. I remembered that I once had the kind of female friendship that exists among the women I had just met. I looked at the faces of the women next to me and I saw closed-eye contentment, satisfied smiles, authentic tears. I was in the right place at the right time. It was a very different kind of DATE than the one I'd had the night before. But I was just as glad to be there.

Link: The artists performed this song as the encore last night. Here's a version they performed in Roanoke, VA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Rx6DcEly0

Perspective

The word for today is PERSPECTIVE. Actually, it has been the word for over a week and a half now. I have been carrying the word in my head, letting my thoughts ruminate, writing different phrases for this blog in my head, but not putting anything down or out into cyberspace. From the PERSPECTIVE of anyone who may follow this blog, it would have been reasonable to assume that I had abandoned it. I HAVE NOT.

When I looked PERSPECTIVE up in the dictionary, the first definition concerned depicting spatial relationships on a flat surface; it is a term that concerns art or drawing, a representation on paper or on a canvas of how someone sees a scene. In Webster's New International Dictionary Second Edition there is a wonderful diagram that depicts ground planes and picture planes and base lines and horizons. But the PERSPECTIVE that I'm interested in is "the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance," or "the ability to see all relevant data in a meaningful relationship." (Random House Webster's College Dictionary)

Maybe I have been putting off writing about this because it all seems too complicated. It is just as complicated to explain a mental perspective as it is to depict perspective on a flat canvas. I am trying to get the curves of my thoughts into the flat forum of written expression.

All I know is that I see what I see and I hear what I hear and I believe what I believe. What shapes my perspective? What is the ground upon which I stand, the place from which I form my view?

Not surprisingly, these questions came up in the context of a family visit two weekends ago.

I felt that I had honored my father in my last blog post, so I asked him to read it. After reading what I had written about him, he said "Amy, that's all nice, but I feel like I'm reading about a fictional character. That fellow you wrote about, that's not me."

I have been working on memoir pieces for the last several years, so this piece of feedback was more than a bit disconcerting.

"What do you mean Dad?"

"I never felt apart. I didn't feel different when I went down to Charlottesville. I felt anxious, but not because I was different; I felt anxious because I was doing something new. I thought we're all just people, I'm a person meeting other people."

"Ok," I said. I took a deep breath. I was as open as I could be to his PERSPECTIVE. "Maybe I was projecting," I continued. "Maybe that's how I would've felt. Maybe you're just a lot more well-adjusted than I am. Thanks for the clarification."

My Dad walked back from my sister's den to the dining table.

Later the same evening my parents started talking about how my father had never dated
anyone other than my mother. My parents have been married for more than 54 years. The fact that my mother had many boyfriends before she met my father, and that my father was not as popular with the opposite sex, has become part of the family lore.

"But Dad," I said, "didn't you date someone at law school. Didn't you date a non-Jewish woman. Isn't that why your parents wouldn't go to your graduation?"

"Where did you hear that?" my sister asked. My mother repeated the question. My father, after a long silence, said he never dated anyone during law school. I felt crazy. I felt like pieces of information that I had taken as facts, facts upon which I created a story, a story upon which I based my PERSPECTIVE, all of it dissolved and I did not know where I was or what I was looking at. I could not trust my PERSPECTIVE.

"I know I heard it somewhere," I responded. "Someone told me this, maybe Nana told me." Nana, my grandmother is dead.

"Maybe Nana made it up," my sister offered. "Maybe Nana made that up because it sounded better than saying her son didn't invite his own parents to his law wchool graduation because he was ashamed of them.?"

What, I thought to myself. Who made up what and why and how was I ever supposed to figure it all out?

"Well, there was someone I met once," my father acknowledged, throwing out a small fact, so there was something real that my grandmother or I might have based a story upon. I didn't ask for any more information.

When I got my bearings, as I left the family gathering and drove home to my own apartment, I realized that everyone has his or her own PERSPECTIVE. As a memoir reader and writer, I am learning this. Ultimately, no matter how much research I do, how many other people I consult, the only story I will be telling is my own. That so much of my understanding about life may be based on my own distortions of other people's stories is disturbing. The only thing that is comforting, is that most likely my approach is not that different from everybody else's. Let me know if I am wrong. I am truly interested in your PERSPECTIVE.

Apart

The word for today is APART. This word interests me because putting a space in it makes such a difference. APART means separate, distinct, isolated, independent. The words "a part" usually mean "a part of" something bigger, a part of a whole, a part of a community or family.

Earlier today I felt APART. I was planning yet another MoveOn political event and I wasn't getting the support I wanted. One of our council members left for a rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon; another is visiting family in the Phillipines; another needed to leave with her husband to pick up her daughter from college in Washington, D.C. It seemed as though everyone, APART from me, needed to be somewhere else, not at our event.

I wished that I could be somewhere else, that I did not have to lead our council's meeting with a congressional staffer. I wanted to close the door to my APARTment and be APART from the world. Of course, I did not do that. I showed up, I helped the other council members who showed up feel a part of a movement. I did my part.

Because of the way MoveOn works, I often do not know who will be at our meetings. Two men attended who are with the American Muslim Task Force. One of the gentleman has lived in this country for over thirty years and yet he, and other people from his native Pakistan, are treated as though they are apart from the rest of us, different, not to be trusted. Although MoveOn is not a "civil rights" advocacy group, I listened to his complaints about the lack of change in the Obama administration's treatment of detainees and alleged terrorists. I tried to think of other organizations that would be more helpful.

Somehow our conversation turned to the former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. "Ramsey Clark is my role model," said the gentleman. "I love that man. He came with me to visit a detainee being held in jail in Virginia." "I love him too," I responded. The gentleman and I were both holding our hands over our hearts. "When I was a little girl I received an autographed photograph of him. I still have it."

Some people set themselves APART because they are exemplars of truth, justice, and integrity, regardless. To me that is what Ramsey Clark stands for. His photograph has personal meaning to me because I almost met him when my family took a trip to Washington D.C. during the Johnson administration to visit my father's law school roommate, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.

APART from his time in law school and the army, my father, who turns eighty this Sunday (and who is my hero when it comes to integrity), has lived his entire life in what is known as the NY metropolitan area. I have to admit that he has a pretty good perspective on things, despite living so far APART from the rest of the country.

I often think of his time at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. It was the early 1950s. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, NY who got on a train and found himself in the midst of an institution designed by Thomas Jefferson (yet another man who had many parts to his life). After law school my father had difficulty finding a job. Even with a degree from UVa., he was still a Jew, the well-heeled NY law firms found reason to hold him apart. Eventually, he became a corporate tax attorney and spent his career as an executive for a large railroad and a retail giant. He done good.

My father was held APART, kept out, because of his religion, and maybe for other cultural reasons. But he was and is smart as hell. For reasons I never understood, throughout his entire life he held himself APART, from organized religion, from civic, cultural, and political groups. He has always been a very independent man.

I keep looking for the balance between the space in the word. Often I'm APART; yet I yearn to be "a part of." I want to feel together with something, someone, with myself.

In honor of togetherness I offer this adorable but hokey song from my '70s adolescence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEWU25aN67U&feature=PlayList&p=91541ADE5F0B295A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=39

Margin

The word for today is MARGIN. I was thinking of writing about the word marginal, but I decided to stick with the noun. As a writer, the MARGIN I think of is the space that surrounds the print on a page (these days either a paper page or a computer page).

There are many other margins. The word is used in business in ways I find too complicated to explain here...to describe the difference between the market value of collateral and a loan or the amount provided as security or the point at which a business barely covers the cost of production. It is 7 am in the morning, and this is making my head swim.

MARGIN also means the limit beyond which something (usually abstract) ceases to exist, such as you have reached the MARGIN of my patience or tolerance. To me this sounds mean, a more distinguished form of time's up, too bad, so sad, or something like that. I have reached the MARGIN of my bank account; I have reached the MARGIN of my sloth. What happens when we use MARGIN with something concrete? I have reached the MARGIN of having clean clothes in the closet, food in the refrigerator; I have a one day's MARGIN of cat food or medication. There is a thin MARGIN between sanity, eccentricity and insanity. I haven't heard the word used that way, but I suppose it could be.

But let's get back to the page, which is where I feel most comfortable, because written words are my security. Since I was a little girl, I have noticed margins. I noticed the layout in books and magazines and how the amount of white space on a page gave the words a different impact. When I was in high school and college (a prehistoric time before desktops and laptops and cell phones), we produced the school newspaper by doing mock layouts on pieces of paper; we pasted columns of text on blank paper on top of a lightboard. White space was like one of the ten commandments.

Subconsciously, I knew that playing with margins was the stuff of poetry. (How unpoetic) Playing with margins is part of the whimsical intentionality of poetry. T.S. Eliot wrote that when the lines run all the way to the right the result is prose.

The margin is where the written word ceases to exist, and when words cease to exist, I am in dangerous territory. Or maybe if I can stay present in the emptiness, I will be in the purest territory imaginable. Maybe there really is life in the margins.


may my heart always be open to little

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

ee cummings

Better

The word for today is BETTER, as in I feel BETTER, or this book, movie, recipe is better than that one. BETTER involves a comparison in which one thing or person is assigned more value than another.

I've been thinking about this word because I've been thinking about relationships, about whether any of my romantic relationships have been BETTER, more satisfying, than others. What I came up with, what I focused on, was that the last relationship in which I felt truly loved, was oddly enough, one in which I thought I was BETTER than the other person, BETTER than my partner.

I thought I was BETTER than he was because I had a steady professional job and he didn't; I had a car and he didn't; I rented a little house and he rented a room; I had credit with a bank and he had credit at the corner store.

For all these reasons, and because of my education and my upbringing, I thought I was BETTER than this man. I don't know how he dealt with it; I don't know how or why he put up with my attitude. I was mistaken; I still had so much to learn.

During my formative years, I was indoctrinated with the idea that I was BETTER. At college I learned that my classmates would do great things--we would be leaders in science, industry, academics, culture and government. I learned that I was different from other people, I was above them, I was BETTER.

Sometimes it seems as though I have spent the last twenty-five years losing everything. I have not actually lost everything, but I have lost a lot of my preconceived notions, a lot of the rigid ideas I had about myself and about other people.

The idea that I was BETTER kept me safe, kept me insulated. I had a reason to be separate; I had a reason to be apart. I had a reason not to open myself, not to be vulnerable to the myriad of people and conditions in the world.

Now, I don't measure myself by my job (I don't have one) or my house (I don't own one) or my car (I am grateful for my 10-year-old Honda Civic). I don't have a partner; I don't have children. All I have are my heart and mind and soul and a little bit of integrity. I have a small community of friends and neighbors and a family who, though they may be frustrated and bewildered by me, have never forsaken me.

None of these things make me BETTER than anyone else. They just make me feel a little BETTER so I can get on with my life and share whatever gifts I have with the world.