Memorial Day

These are shots of the Buffalo Soldiers, who are a black contingent of the Rolling Thunder memorial.  They came down U Street to buzz the Black Civil War Memorial.  It was a pretty cool display.  I was more than a little choked up, thinking about the generations of my family that served this country.  I was particularly thinking about the generation that fought to be sent to war-- my great-grandfather wanted to go to World War I because he and his peers felt that their service would prove them worthy of "regular" citizenship.  Sent to the front lines, where they weren't trusted with guns, really-- just retrieving bodies and loading dangerous artillery, they proved their mettle with their bloodshed.  The French loved them for it, and erected a statue to them.  They were shunned when they came home-- not allowed to march in the victory parade and sometimes lynched in their uniforms.  My mother remarked on Sunday that they would be swollen with pride at Barack Obama.  I think they are really, really glad that their progeny is "true to our native land."  

Sound Advice

Here's some really stellar advice from eat, pray, love's author, Elizabeth Gilbert's mother:

Please do me this great service and please do me this great favor and please do yourself this great favor. And try to remember, 10 years from now, when you're second guessing this decision that you made, that you made the very best decision that you could make on this day with the information that you had today. As the years go by, you'll have more information and you might wish that you had done things differently. But just don't forget that on the day that you had to make the choice you didn't know and you only knew what you have now. Don't abuse yourself later for what you didn't know now.

I think of how hard women are on ourselves. This does deserve "in particular" qualification-- don't get me wrong, I know some guys who are pretty hard on themselves, as well-- but I find a particular brand of "not enough-ness" with my girls who are fabulous and wonderful and great in so many incredible ways that we will simply refuse to own. So please take the time to read it, remember it, and use it. Don't abuse yourself for what you didn't know now.

Pix

This is the picture that was on the cover of the program. I think it's pretty cool... I think of it as my grandmother's version of "the me that nobody knows." She looks like so many things all at once.

Let Us Now Praise Famous iPhones

My iPhone: 

I really love it!  Finding apps is so much fun... I've never ever been a techie or someone interested in things like this. I have three pages of apps and they rawk. My most used:

1. Facebook.  DUH.
2. Citibank:  Why don't all banks have iPhone apps?  It's perfection.
3. NYT Crosswords:  $9.99 but well worth it.  Unlimited access to puzzles, and it has to "unlock" to tell you the result.  The unlock is 24 hours after download, so it's just like doing the puzzles in the paper.
4. Wiki Tap:  just type in what you're looking for and you get instant info.
5. Flixter:  Movie listings in a flash.

I also have a lot of restaurant-related apps, and I'm glad OpenTable has one.  I just trashed a bunch of cocktail-related apps and kept one: Drunk-Dial, which is most logical and usable.  I like Sit or Squat, which found a nice clean bathroom for me three times while I was on the road last month.  And my new MidomiUltra app is the best:   hold your iPhone up to a music source and it tells you the artist & song.  That is truly amazing.

I haven't been listening to music as much, either... I listen to Rachel Maddow on the way to and from work; I also check out the Lost podcast.  I heard there's a Breaking Bad podcast, as well, and I'm thinking I should check that out.  I like the podcasts, but I wonder when I'm supposed to have the time to listen to them, especially now that I don't have the long drives to and from Brownland.  I don't spend all that much time in the car... I think I should start taking walks and listening to them.  

In Celebration

Here comes Mother's Day.

In the past, as the only adult female in my family without children, I would frequently take on Mother's Day organizing as "my" holiday. I liked to book a nice restaurant and let it do all the work; to me Mother's Day is all about champagne brunches and really good food, with a big present that is something my mother will enjoy immensely and/or never think to get herself.

We've eaten all over DC and in many places down toward where my grandparents live. There are four adult females in my mother's generation and there was my gramma. We have  a tradition of providing carnations of varying colors for those whose mothers were living and dead (a tradition I find morbid, but that's just me). There would be many bottles of champagne to drink and differing cuisines to sample. There would be many small people running around and lots of fun conversation; sublte tensions that come up in family gatherings over slow burns from years past; differing view points in lively discussions; lots of photo ops.

This year will be the first without my gramma, and the first year in a long time without a big shebang. In truth, I'd forgotten about Mother's Day, having been so focused on round trips to Barboursville (and all of the attendant items to bring with me), making various arrangements, and trying to keep my career afloat. I was reminded, however, on Wednesday, and hastily made reservations at a restaurant that I know my mother will love. And it was easy to get because it was just a reservation for two.

I don't like the sappy Mother's Day cards that are for sale this time of year. Well, I don't really like cards, period. I prefer to write my own sentiments. There are always sort of schmaltzy articles this time of year, too, about Motherlove and Motherwit. The Daily Beast asked a bunch of prominent women to write about their mothers. I appreciated Barbara Walter's piece, because she talked about hearing her mother's words come out of her mouth, both good and bad, and how she says, "I love you, Mom" silently to her mother every time her daughter says it aloud to her.

I thought that Maria Shriver's piece in the same compilation was weird. Her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, is the dynamo who organized and founded the Special Olympics. Lemme say that again-- The Special Olympics! It's a big deal. Maria Shriver talks about her mother and says how her mother lamented to her that she (Eunice) was not encouraged to run for office or be particularly politically active because her family was so male-dominated, as was common for the era in which she became an adult. Maria sort of carries that lamentation forward, and wishes that her mother was about 15 years younger, so that her mother could serve as her "chief of staff" and help her with all of her political responsibilities as Governor's wife.

I think that there is a tremendous temptation for younger women to lament the overt sexism that was much more the rule in days gone by. We want to point at women in our families, of past generations and say, "wow, she could have been x, y, or z in a different era." What about celebrating what they were in their own time? There are a lot of institutions and work roles that women occupied for which they are unsung, not the least of which being "mother". If you can't celebrate their vital leadership roles in women's clubs and charitable organizations, academic achievements, "amateur" research and "family" roles, celebrate the fact that they most likely consciously cultivated your success, as they saw (and in many cases actively worked on) the changing world.

My great-grandmother started a successful nursery school, only the second of its kind in DC, on the eve of the Great Depression. It would thrive for several decades and educate hundreds of children who would go on to become the civic leaders, doctors, teachers, lawyers and business people who helped grow the ever developing city. My grandmother taught at the same school, was an early shaper of the Head Start program's implementation in DC; she taught in DCPS and helped found child day care centers in Roxbury, MA, too. My mother taught Afro-American History (as it was called then) at UVa; founded a nursery school for me when I was child; concieved of and implemented a nationally recognized housing program that made over 2,000 people homeowners. Each generation in my family has had to take the bitter with the sweet, facing racism, sexism, and economic set back. Each generation has persevered, most successfully, because of the familial love that was the bedrock of its values. The women in my family have been lionesses in their respective eras-- active in so many different areas it's difficult to catalogue. I don't see them as lost in their lifetimes. Rather, I see them as examples.

My favorite freedom song that my mother used to sing to me at bedtime says, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round." The mothers in my family have provided ample example of that, to me.

Happy Mother's Day. You are each genius in your own time.

Blue Skies

Of course it poured today; one of the schmaltzy books I loved as a kid had the line, "it's always raining the day you bury someone you love."   

66W was treacherous; 29S was slippery.  15 was, well... 15 is always winding and somewhat dangerous, but also tremendously familiar-- 15 is only as bad as the driver in front of you.  I was armed with things for everyone-- extra tissue packs, a printout of the poem Joji would read, a hymnal for my mother, a curling iron.  I didn't have the final copy of the obituary, which was my reading assignment.    

I found a copy, at my mother's direction, on the table in the kitchen nook.  There were proofs of the version to be distributed tomorrow.  My uncle JB's unerring eye picked so many good pics!  One is of Gramma, alone, dressed in white, hand on hip, somewhere in Abidjan.  She has on what she and my Nana would've called "dungarees", a white cotton shirt, a pair of sandals, and big sunglasses.  She looks both apprehensive and self assured in it; I know that sounds weird. 

Another is her smiling and talking on the phone; legs crossed, she's wearing a romper/bathing suity fifties era thing, and her grin is huge.  It's a very young version of my gramma and she looks how I suppose my mother remembers her looking.  Another photo is her as a baby-- if it didn't have the fuzzy quality of 20's era photography you would assume it was my aunt Mary Ann.   Yet another photo was completely startling to me-- my grandmother looks over her shoulder at the lensman (grandaddy, natch) and the look on her face is startling.

I can see my mother and each of my aunts in her face.  In fact, the whole expression recalled my aunt Buffa immediately, but it was weird to see everyone else sort of sitting there, as well, in her face.  It's also startling because it's such a familiar look-- tense, questioning, interested, annoyed, something... anything.  

Anyway, I know it's annoying to read it and not see it, but I didn't have a scanner so no go on the pix.  

Maybe at a later date.

Selected Readings

Psalm 121

3 Ecclesiastes 1-8

The Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy, 4:6-7

The Gospel According to John, 3:15-16

The Gospel According to John 14:1-2

The Second Timothy reading says,  ... the time of my departure is at hand; I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

I feel like that says it all.