PRACTICE – Growing Older – 20min

I’m looking at my ruddy face in a small, round, silver mirror. I look older than I remember. Thick eyebrows, salt and pepper hair; it looks the grayest to me right after a haircut. There is something about the way it lays across the black plastic smock, and falls in shredded pieces on to the floor. Accents of changing color. I don’t mind. It is my grandmother’s hair.

I have a little pouch under my chin. I hate to admit it. Blue eyes that used to be hazel. More blue with age. I don’t often look in a mirror. Once in the morning after my shower to spike my hair. I’m a fluff and blow person, not much fiddling around. I look in the mirror when I brush my teeth. That seems strange and I don’t know why I do it. I am looking into a mirror now. It was suggested in the Writing Topic on growing older; I thought it might push me (over the edge?).

The body gives out, breaks down. Elasticity is lost; wisdom gained. I don’t have a problem aging. Life is easier now than it was 20 years ago. I’m 34x happier. I worry that I won’t get everything done I want to do before I die. That goes back to the Bucket List. I don’t have any control over that. I am where I am. I’m in my 50’s.

Fifty used to seem ancient to me. Forty seemed ancient, too. I couldn’t imagine being 30. Decades have passed. The older I get, the more I know who I am. I have this theory about aging. I believe people become one of two things:  happier and more settled in who they are. Or angry and bitter. That’s black and white. I’m sure there is gray. It’s something I have noticed. And so I keep watching to prove my theory right.

Old, cranky, bitter, judging, hoarding, fighting imperfection, not able to accept that the body is aging. Graceful, happier, wiser, content with who they are, willing to not be perfect, to pass the torch, giving what they have to the next generations to come.

Maya Angelou turned 80 years old on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Do you think Martin knew he would not live to grow old? Or that Maya thought she would reach the age of 80? There were many articles written about her on April 4th. She is of the giving and wise variety. Yet she hasn’t shrunk from her responsibilities — as a woman, as a writer.

If Martin Luther King were alive, he would be one year younger than Maya. She was an aid to his cause, all those years ago. She still speaks for him through the way she lives her life. Think of everything she has seen.

I ran into a conversation between Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. Maya, one of Oprah’s mentors, was talking about living according to your principles. She is a Clinton supporter, and under constant pressure, remains loyal to Hillary. She has written a poem for her. Oprah is outspoken for Obama. They debate, have long conversations. They each stand strong, loyal to their candidates. They are respectful. They remain friends.

You can talk about spiritual principles. Or you can live by them. Talk is easy. Cheap. Principles are the hardest to uphold when we want something. Or in the face of adversity. Angelou said courage is the most important principle – because without it, you can’t really live up to the others. We might think we want to live at all costs. And then something comes along we are willing to die for.

If you think about Dr. King, he had an offer to go back to a seminary and teach for a year right before he died. He wanted to go. To rest. But he knew it would feel like he wasn’t fulfilling his obligations. So he stayed true to his vision. And went to Memphis to support the sanitation workers. He marched at the front of the line, even though he was tired, worn out. And he dropped his head in despair when a group of young marchers at the end of the line erupted in violence. Maybe at the end, he felt old. He was not perfect. He was human.

I started thinking about Maya Angelou and Martin Luther King and their great courage. I pale in comparison. When I look at what they have each been through, I wonder why I complain about the obstacles that fall my way. But I have learned not to compare myself. Not to anyone. Not to other artists, or writers, or teachers. My demons are mine. I earned every age spot, wrinkle, and wart. I’m not young anymore. Yet I am the most alive inside I have ever felt.

Growing older — it is harder to keep the weight off. I could lose 20 pounds. You can’t see that on a blog. My friends look to my vibrant Spirit. My family loves me unconditionally. So does my partner. The mirror tells me I look sad. Tired. But my eyes are bright. My heart feels heavy. It will not last. It will pass. When I think about dying, I think about looking down on loved ones, urging them on toward their dreams, smiling, holding the space. The way my grandmothers Ada and Elise do for me.

When I visit the South with my mother, we often visit gravestones under plantation magnolias in ancient cemeteries. The history is there. We didn’t create it. But we carry it. We walk among the dead, recall living memories. The pilgrimage, for me, is to pay my respects. To those who have come before. I am in the lineage of the Southern mothers, fathers, grandfathers, great aunts, and grandmothers whose graves I visit. They are not there. My memories of them are.

I drive past the homes where relatives used to live. Some remain in the family. Some belong to complete strangers. I don’t know them. I never will. But I have to bear witness. I don’t want the dead to be forgotten. I don’t want to be forgotten. I want to be remembered. And so I remember and honor others.

Visiting graveyards, a wrinkle in time. The living commingling with the dead. It might sound morose. But I don’t think of it that way. In Kit Carson Memorial cemetery, Mabel is buried not far from the black, wrought iron around the Carson plot. She would not be amused. The more I think about it, the more I want to be scattered to the wind, high over some tiny, rocky beach on the Oregon Coast. No gravestone. No marker. I want to be remembered as a free spirit. Though no writer ever feels free.

I’m staring in the mirror again. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

You are.

-posted on red Ravine, Friday, April 11th, 2008

-related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – GROWING OLDER and the post, 40 Years

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PRACTICE: Martin Luther King – 15min

I don’t remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., not like Jim remembers. Jim was in 4th grade when Martin Luther King was assassinated. He says he remembers Walter Cronkite cackling over a black-and-white TV tube. I can picture the television, set in a blond wood console with long spindly legs. I can picture Jim’s dad with his tortoise-frame glasses and Jim’s mom with big dark eyes and a small round mouth.

I’m feverish now, not dangerously so but enough that my arms ache as they hold the notebook and pen upright on my stomach, against bent knees. I’m lying down, not wanting to get up again today, although I know I will, eventually. Feverish, which seems like a good state to be in, a non-remembering place. I have blurry vision, and all I can say is, I was young young and innocent.

I would have been in Mrs. Salisbury’s class, or wait, she was second grade. She was tall and black and wore shoes I associate with nurses. I bet she remembers Martin Luther King as if it were yesterday, MLK-the-time as well as MLK-the-man.

They say, these days, I hear it on the news almost every day, that Latinos and Blacks don’t get along well. They say it when talking about Barack Obama and whether he’ll get the Latino vote or whether Hillary Clinton will. I was thinking about that in the bathtub this morning, trying to steam the sick out of me. I thought of a guy I knew in Malaysia who told a joke about crabs in a bucket, how some crabs were Malays, some Indians, some Chinese. It was a politically incorrect joke, the punchline being something to the effect that one of the nationality of crabs pulled down the others while another nationality got out of the bucket by stepping on the others.

It’s auto-discriminación. Self-discrimination, this so-called feud between brown people. You get stepped on enough by white people, you start looking for somebody else to step on. It happens around the world among people who are marginalized.

I remember South Africa and how the neighborhoods ringing Johannesburg went out in concentric circles based on color. Whites in the middle. Indian-White next. India-India, Black-White, Black-India, Black-Black. We get closer to the core the lighter our skin is.

I remember making up a story about being Italian. Italians were Europeans. Caucasians. It was a way of saying, I’m just white like you, a way of stepping on someone else’s back to get a little bit higher. Except I’m not just like you.

I don’t remember Reverend King, don’t remember where I was when I was seven and he died. Probably formulating my story, revising myself so that by the time I got to high school I’d have an alibi when the kids called us spics and called our school Vato High. Mom says she remembers. Her voice gets thin (and forgive my feverishness now — I really should be sleeping not writing) when she says, Oh, I remember it. Those were sad times, she says.


-related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – MARTIN LUTHER KING

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PRACTICE – Martin Luther King – 15min

I don’t remember Martin Luther King in 1962 or ’63 when I was 8 or 9 or 10. I don’t remember him when I lived in the South. I must have been sheltered from all the strife and unrest that was going on during those years. I would not have understood.

I do remember him in the early years of being a teenager in Pennsylvania. I remember watching him give his speeches on television. He was on fire. I watched the unrest, the riots, the musicians of the time rallying around his cause. It was the 1960’s in America. And unless you lived through them, it’s hard to describe what it was like. No one was untouched. Everything was polarized.

There was the essence of pop culture, the Brady Bunch, the Jackson 5, the Partridge Family, living right along side Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Janis Joplin, and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Burnt orange polyester bled into red and blue tie-dye. You had Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm (first African American candidate from a major party for President of the United States); you had Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant.

And TV news, it wasn’t spun the way it is spun today. I remember getting home from junior high and seeing black and white footage of Vietnam splattered all over the television. Gruesome images. We will never see a war the way we saw that one. Not the average person. Not someone like me.

I couldn’t watch. I wanted to cling to the things that gave me hope. I was caught in-between in the mid to late 1960’s: too young to be out there protesting, too old to not understand what was happening. And I was different, too. I never fit in to what it meant to be a mainstream American teenage girl.

It would take many years to grow into my own skin. When religion is telling you you’re a sin, and psychology sees a basic component of your identity as a sickness (as it did until the early 1970’s), you learn pretty quickly to fend for yourself. And live with big secrets.

It’s not like that anymore. At least, not for me. There are those who choose to remain closeted. But I have grown comfortable with who I am. There are many reasons for that. Lifestyles that are different have become strangely trendy. And my family is understanding, nurturing, and embrace me for the person I am (though back then, we just didn’t talk about it).

It was public support, paradigm shifts and movements, that taught me it was okay to question. And public figures who gave me hope. Leaders like Martin Luther King. For me, he was a humanitarian. Non-violent. Peace loving. Supportive of anyone who was different. He wasn’t afraid to ask the hard questions. He would no longer be silenced. And that’s what I remember.

When I listened to Enrique Rivera’s piece, I was moved to write about King. It opened me up to remembering that he stood for everyone, for the civil rights of all people. I cried the day he died. My parents probably cried, too. I’ve been thinking about those who lived by his side; many are still alive. They risked their lives, too. How many thousands of people did he inspire?

We had to read the John Lewis book, Walking with the Wind for one of Natalie’s retreats. He gave a riveting account of what it was like to meet Dr. King at such a young and impressionable age. I remember King was in a secret location, and Lewis walked through a dark hall into a small room to shake his hand. Later, as a Freedom Rider, Lewis would be beaten by a mob in Montgomery, and, finally, rise to the House of Representatives, representing Georgia.

I saw a documentary of an Iranian woman who worked in government under the Shah in the 1960’s, I can’t remember her name, but she recounted what it was like to run up to Martin Luther King on one of his marches and have him actually know who she was, to say her name, shake her hand, and know that she was fighting the good fight. She was on fire for human rights, too.

Last night I watched a PBS show about Temple Grandin, a 60-year-old woman with autism. When she was born, they blamed her mother, stating she was cold and unfeeling and that’s why Temple turned out the way she did. Turns out, it was Temple’s father who was cold and unfeeling, and her mother who kept her out of an institution.

Later, two scientists, working at different geographic places at the same time, unknown to each other, came up with the word autism. More research and they realized it was neurologically related, not anything to do with the mother, the family, or lack of intelligence.

Anyone who knows Temple’s story, knows that she’s now the rock star of the cattle industry. She went on to write books, to develop the squeeze machine, and to work on humane conditions and rights for cattle as they are led to the slaughter. If you can’t stop people from slaughtering and killing cows for food, you can at least create practical solutions that make the journey more humane. That was her thinking. I was glued to the TV. I couldn’t believe her story.

And that’s what Martin Luther King means to me.

When I think of him, I remember Katherine, the woman who ironed for my grandfather in 1963, and riding along to drive her home in the poorer part of town. I remember Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 Presidential Campaign. I remember John Lewis walking with the wind in his family’s shotgun shanty. I remember Temple, fighting for her cows. I remember the monk who set himself on fire during Vietnam. And in remembering all of them, I remember that part of me.

-posted on red Ravine, Friday, January 25th, 2008

-related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – MARTIN LUTHER KING

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WRITING TOPIC – MARTIN LUTHER KING

Planting The Seed, Lightpainting Series, stained glass window, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

 
 

When I walked out into the sub-zero temperatures yesterday to warm up my car, a piece by NPR’s Enrique Rivera poured out of the Alpine radio speakers. Rubbing my hands together, and pulling the end of a wool cap down over my neck, I stared off into the distance at a couple of squirrels playing tag on an old growth oak, and listened to Enrique Rivera.

His family is from El Salvador, and in his research he had stumbled on a yellowed piece of paper, a poem about red spring lilies that his grandmother had written for Martin Luther King. The discovery led him to contemplate King’s influence on the Latino community. As I listened, I thought about what Martin Luther King means to me.

I’m old enough to remember his speeches on TV, graphic black and white photographs in Life magazine, and the sad day in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (now the National Civil Rights Museum) when King was assassinated. Regardless of where you lived in this country, who you were, or what you believed, the way Martin Luther King lived his life, impacted your own.

I honor Martin Luther King Day by remembering the past, and pulling it into the present as a reminder. Not only the power of the March on Washington in August 1963, and King’s I Have a Dream address, but the efforts of others to bring to light injustices in the history of my own state of Minnesota (Clayton Jackson McGhie in Duluth in 1920 or the Mankato 38 in 1862). I remember my tumultuous teenage years in the late 60’s and early 70’s, the Women’s Movement, Stonewall and Harvey Milk. Or the efforts of women like Emma Lazarus. 

Martin Luther King brought awareness to all of our civil rights. That’s what great leaders do. He spoke for all of us. And reminded us that it is our silence that we should fear:

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

No one wants to be silenced. As writers and artists, we work to find our voices every day. Many who have spoken out or taken action against what they see as unjust, have paid a high price. Martin Luther King was one such man.

 
 

                   

 
 

For the Writing Topic this week, write everything you know about Martin Luther King. How old were you when he died, or were you even born? How does your family speak of his legacy; how did they see him in the 1950’s and 60’s. Is there any way that Martin Luther King has changed your life? How has he broken open stereotypes or paved the way for acceptance of your own differences.

 

Do a 15 minute Writing Practice that begins:

I Remember Martin Luther King…

Reverse it. Do another 15 minute Practice:

I Don’t Remember Martin Luther King….

If you get stuck, go to one of the links in this piece. Listen to Enrique Rivera’s commentary on his grandmother who was a writer and artist. Check out the links for Emma Lazarus, Stonewall, Duluth, or Mankato.

Think of conversations/controversies about civil or human rights in your own hometown. Your own family. What about those close to you, people you love, who live a different lifestyle and have opened your mind (and your heart) to a new definition of human rights.

Write everything you know about Martin Luther King.

-posted on red Ravine, Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 21st, 2008

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Nikki Giovanni – Hope at V-Tech

As a writer, there is much I could say about Virginia Tech. I’ve been at a loss for words. When I watched poet Nikki Giovanni close the Virginia Tech Convocation commemorating the deaths of those killed on April 16th, I knew it had all been said – I could choose hope.

Nikki Giovanni  has been a professor of writing and literature at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) since 1987, and is now a Distinguished Professor there. It is fitting that Giovanni, a great poet (one of my favorites who inspired several posts: Bookends, Balances, and Hard Rain & 3 Grains of Salt to One Ounce Truth) would end the VT Convocation with a poem:

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall, tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry. And sad enough to know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech.

It’s an odd synchronicity that April is National Poetry Month. Poetry distills everything down to just the essentials. It is sparse and moving. If you haven’t seen her read her poem at the Convocation closing, I recommend viewing the full video. It is powerful and inspiring: “We are Virginia Tech” – convocation poem read by Giovanni (MSNBC video)  

Since Monday, we’ve been blasted with issues of gun control, troubled youth, law enforcement response times, “Crisis in America” headlines, and self-directed media coverage. It’s depressing at best. But the comments Amelia made yesterday on red Ravine in Practice – No Topic – 10min brought Giovanni home to me  – we will continue on if there is hope.

Their optimism serves to remind me that writing is about the power of words – but writing is nothing without community. I want to focus on the positive. And write about what pulls us through. Not what tears us down.

In 1999, Giovanni was the keynote speaker at the University of Michigan’s 12th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium. The drive of her speech was that in spite of all obstacles, we sail on. We don’t get tossed away.

Maybe some of the grief we feel is that it could have been any of us. Our daughter, son, parent, sister or brother. In the larger human context, we are all Virginia Tech. But if we believe in hope, we can help each other sail on.

                                                

And you, in this next century, must continue to go on, whether the road is dark, whether you are confused. You must continue to try to go toward that horizon where you cannot see the end, where you do not know . . . if something will gobble you up. Certainly you have every right to be afraid. It’s a vicious world out there.

It’s your life, but you’ve got to do something with it. You might fall off the Earth, somebody might find the end of the Earth, you might fall. But if you don’t, you will have gone to a place few people have seen. You will have found something new. We can’t be cowards, we can’t kowtow, we can’t bend over because we’re afraid of what somebody will say or what somebody will do. All of you have the possibility to do something different and something better. You must sail on.

-Excerpts from Nikki Giovanni’s keynote speech at the University of Michigan’s 12th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium – “In celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., Giovanni tells students to ‘sail on’,” By Bernard DeGroat, The University Record, January 25th, 1999

-posted on red Ravine, April 18th, 2007

-related to post: Baldwin & Giovanni – On Truth & Love

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