Busy, Busy

The last couple of weeks, and now the coming week, are going to be very busy ones for me. So much is happening that I'm having a hard time keeping it all straight and recording it all in my three planners: the calendar on the kitchen wall, the pink planner in my tote bag, and Outlook on the computer.

I've been asked to serve on a steering committee for The Hetrick-Martin Institute to plan activities for their 30th anniversary year. We had a choice of subcommittees and I chose the Archive subcommittee. The idea of going through old papers and memorabilia intrigues me, and I liked the idea of interviewing alumni, former board members, and former staff. We've got a Yahoo group started so the subcommittee can keep in touch with each other, and I've suggested we do some of the interviews through StoryCorps.

This week, I have a conference phone call at noon on Monday for the Brooklyn Humanist Community. We're getting started with the incorporation process and this is the first step. At one I'll have an interview for a long-term temporary position.

On Tuesday I'm volunteering at HMI and then there's the BHC Board meeting at night. Wednesday evening I'm meeting with someone I worked with in the past, and I'll possibly write a grant for her start up organization. On Thursday morning I've signed up for a workshop on planning special events, through the Foundation Center.

By Friday, if I am not too exhausted, I might go and help out with the physical archives. Somewhere in there I also have to get medical clearance to volunteer with veterans in hospice, work on another grant with the War Resisters League, and arrange lunch with a friend.

I'm sure glad we are basically goofing off today, until the party tonight. It's Bruce's birthday and was our friend Tony's birthday on Thursday. So we've got a January Babies party for tonight, complete with a grab bag so everyone gets a small gift. Tomorrow I'm getting my hair cut, as it is approaching Lady Godiva length, and then on Monday the whirlwind begins.

Thinking About the Afterlife

Do I believe in an afterlife? Generally I answer yes. I've written an entire manuscript based on the idea that there is an afterlife and I have been in contact with the spirits of various loved ones who have died, or, as devotees of the afterworld prefer to say, have "crossed over." I had many experiences around ten years ago and for the next few years, that convinced me we do go on in some form or another.


I'm not sure exactly what to believe in terms of what that form may take. I have read quite a few books on the subject: Hello from Heaven, books by popular mediums such as James Van Pragh, Sylvia Browne, John Edwards, and Rosemary Altea. In fact I saw Rosemary Altea in person through a class given by the Learning Annex. I don't remember so much about the readings she gave but I do remember that at one point I turned my head to look at an empty pew behind me (the event took place in a large church), and saw what I can only describe as an ameboid blob of ectoplasm, undulating. When I glanced back a second time it was gone.


So I have to believe I have seen, felt, and heard the spirit world at various times,and yet now, all this seems so remote with the passage of years. At one point I was sure I would never be afraid of death again, but in fact that feeling has proven to be only temporary, and any alarming symptom still has the powerto send me into a panicked tailspin.


Still, some of the things that happened back then are extremely hard to explain. For instance, in 1999, everyone was worried about Y2K computer compatibility. There were dire warnings that our computer systems might all collapse bringing the end of the world as we know it, Bruce was using an old version of Quicken on our vintage Macintosh Performa, which has long since gone to computer heaven. The computer froze up on him and he rebooted, calling out to our deceased friend Richard to help him out.


When the computer booted up again and Bruce opened Quicken, it was suddenly Y2K compatible. I still cannot think of a sensible explanation for this. What could change the program in the blink of an eye? Bruce had installed no upgrades. Even stranger, Quicken remained Y2K compatible for several days and then reverted to its former self.


It was episodes like these that made Bruce into a believer. I had already been convinced by other events: dreams that came true, a New York Yankees hat sliding towards me at the North Sea in the Netherlands, bearing a strong resemblance to the hats Richard used to wear. So many things happened that convinced me Richard, my mother, and other friends who died in 2000 and beyond were watching over me and looking out for my welfare.


Yet now, it all seems rather remote. I still see some of the signs but have I grown cynical again? Perhaps I have. I do think of Richard when I see the numbers 7, 77, or any string of 7's. I know that in the numerology system, 7 is considered a perfect number, recognized by several world religions. I also know that in the Gematria, the number 26, which is my birthday and my brother's birthday, and which popped up so often in my mother's life that she became afraid of it and tried to avoid the number, has a special and very positive meaning. Twenty-six stands for the unpronounceable Hebrew name of God. When I see that number, I think of it as a sign from Mom and a special blessing.


And yet, in bed at night, sometimes when I can't get to sleep, I worry and fear death. I fear the dying process will hurt, at least in the beginning. I have seen that at the end the dying person sinks into a coma and there doesn't seem to be a struggle or pain at the moment of passing. But it is the ravages of loss of control, pain and debilitation that I fear most.


I also find the thought of the world"wagging on" without me disturbing. If I am conscious and watching from the other side, fine, but I resent the thought that the world will change, my son will live out his life, probably have children and grandchildren,and at some point I won't be there to see it any more. At least if I can watch and lend an occasional etheric hand, whisper some long-forgotten motherly advice in his ear..that might be satisfactory!


The thought that I could be all wrong and there might be nothing afterwards, just a blankness I can only imagine by trying to remember what the world was like before I was born, still haunts me even though I had so many experiences and so many contacts with the afterlife that I should be more secure in that knowledge by now. I don't know why. I had so many readings that rang true. A medium gave me accurate information about my paternal grandfather. She didn't even know my name, and he died before I was born so I knew very little about him. She could not have been drawing this information from my mind,because it was never in my mind to begin with. The only possible explanation is that she was truly in touch with his spirit.


So, why do I still have these doubts and fears?

"Milk"

This afternoon I met Jason in Chelsea and we saw "Milk." The price was high: $25 for the two of us, no student discount and no matinees. I don't feel gypped at all, though my wallet is considerably lighter.

"Milk" was excellent. Sean Penn did a wonderful acting job and I hope he gets an Oscar for it. As the film progressed, I realized that even though I'd known of Harvey Milk and his assassination, I really never knew the details of his life and what he accomplished.

After the Stonewall Riots, there were certainly the stirrings of a gay rights movement afoot, but Harvey Milk seems to have put it on the map. He brought the gay population of San Francisco together to fight against the discrimination, harassment, violence and even murder that dogged them, just because they were gay. He lost his bid for City Supervisor three times but came back again until he won. Because of his leadership, gays gained a voice and gained many rights they never had before.

Though I don't remember his activities and speeches per se, I do remember his arch-opponent, Anita Bryant, and her revolting, bigoted efforts to relegate gays to second-class citizenship as people who were not acceptable to right-wing Christians and to God. I do remember seeing buttons lambasting her with the slogan, "A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine," a parody of her orange juice ads years earlier (a day without orange juice is a day without sunshine).

The film delved into Milk's private life. Yes, it's a cliche that when a person becomes deeply involved in a cause larger than himself, his intimates often suffer. So Milk's lover, Scott, picked up on impulse in a New York City subway station in 1970, left him because he could no longer stand to be part of the political campaigning that took up so much of Milk's time and energy. And Milk's next lover, the passionate but emotionally frail Jack, committed suicide because Milk came home late from the Supervisor job one time too many.

I'm not sure at what moment I realized who Milk's murderer was going to be, but towards the last quarter of the film it became clear that another Supervisor was going to kill him, and the Mayor as well. Milk is portrayed as sensing in advance that he was not going to live to see 50, and that his death would be violent. He'd received death threats and he knew his stance as an openly gay politician was extremely dangerous. So we see him, at intervals throughout the film, speaking his story into a tape recorder, to be aired only in the event of his assassination.

Sadly, his fears came true, and he was murdered along with the Mayor. The candlelight march through the streets of San Francisco in their memory was a very moving scene. Jason whispered to me that he had tears in his eyes. So did I, and that doesn't happen very often.

Thirty years ago, just a year after Harvey Milk's murder at age 48, a teenage boy was beaten and raped in a New York City homeless shelter, because he was gay. Instead of acting to protect him, the shelter authorities blamed the victim and threw him out. Two gay men, one a psychiatrist, were appalled at this story and started a voluntary program to help LGBT youth who were not adequately protected by the system. From their efforts grew the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the home of the Harvey Milk High School.

A particularly poignant scene, for me, was the one where a gay teenager calls Harvey Milk and begs him to help. He says his parents are going to send him away to be "treated" for his "sickness" of homosexuality. The boy says he is going to kill himself. Milk tells him to get on a bus and get out of there, just leave home and head to a big city where he can find understanding and others like himself. The camera pulls back and we see that the boy is in a wheelchair. His situation seems hopeless, and Milk is forced to hang up the phone because a riot is going on in the street.

Later in the film, we learn that the boy got a friend to put him on a bus to LA, and he calls Harvey Milk in the middle of a referendum on Proposition 6 (the notorious attempt to strip LGBT's of their rights to housing and jobs), to tell him that he is doing fine, and that Los Angeles has voted the proposition down.

It's kids like that boy who show up at the doors of The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Seeing "Milk" has made me doubly proud to volunteer there, and indirectly serve the students at a high school named for Harvey Milk. My highest recommendations for this movie!

Inauguration Day

Yesterday was a day that will be in the history books: January 20, 2009, and kids generations from now will have to memorize it: the day the first biracial man of African-American and European-American ancestry took office as the President of the United States.

Almost 2 million people were in Washington D.C., filling the mall all the way from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. I've been in some pretty big crowds on that mall, at anti-war protests in the seventies, but this crowd of every color and every faith was bigger than all of them.

Jason and I watched some of it on streaming video. My computer was not cooperating. We kept losing connectivity every couple of minutes. Finally I shut down the streaming video and listened to President Obama take the oath of office over the radio. I noticed that it got slightly garbled, that Chief Justice Stevens mixed up the words a little bit and got the new President off track. They repeated the oath today, just to be sure.

I liked the inauguration speech. President Obama appealed to the virtues and values we all grew up on. He said we're going to get to work rebuilding America and that we're not going to serve narrow interests any longer. America is not just for the rich.

While he held out the hand of friendship to all nations, he also warned terrorists that they cannot outlast us and we will defeat them. Good strong words, and they are certainly needed now. Just because he is a Democrat and a liberal, there's no reason to think he is going to be a pushover when the nation is in danger.

I'm pleased, also, that President Obama mentioned that we are a nation of many faiths and also of some nonbelievers too. That's probably the first time ever that agnostics and atheists have been given recognition in an inaugural address. That is also a step forward.

We didn't have a television to watch the Inaugural Ball, but I enjoyed viewing the photos on the New York Times website. The Obamas are a beautiful and hot couple, and it's clear from the way they looked at each other and laughed together that they are deeply in love. It's got nothing to do with politics, but it was uplifting to see.

I've said it before: we've broken a barrier that many people thought would never fall down, and the excitement and joy particularly among African-Americans was similar to the joy when the Berlin Wall came down. We haven't abolished racism, that doesn't happen in one single moment. But we've grown up as a nation, and now, the possibilities are infinite.

I wore my Obama 1-20-2009 tee shirt and it felt so good to finally have a President who is going to lead us back to the path of goodwill, compassion, and common sense. To the rule of law, rather than to the rule of expediency. For so long, I was afraid to buy that tee shirt, afraid that Bush would be replaced by someone just like him. But that didn't happen, thank God.

The whole world was watching, and just about all of the world was very happy. Commentators kept mentioning that at such a difficult time, they had never seen so much hope.

Hope alone won't save us, but this man...yes, folks, this late-born Baby Boomer (our day is not over yet) has the power to inspire a new generation to work together. I'm excited to be here to see this and to have the chance to put my energies into the rebuilding we have to do.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Yesterday was a strange day full of ups and downs. It began on an unpleasant note. We could not use the kitchen sink because the pipes under the sink were leaking and a flood spread all the way across the floor. Bruce had to mop it up when he woke up at 5 in the morning, because the basin we put underneath the pipe was overflowing. A few hours later when I got up, the basin was overflowing again, and the linoleum was soaked. Water was spread across the floor and even reached the door of Jason’s bedroom. So, I’d made frantic forays downstairs to the superintendent, begging him to come and help.

Now, technically, he doesn’t have to do a thing. We live in a co-op so he’s only responsible for the common areas. If a leak comes down to our apartment from upstairs, it is his job to repair the damage, yet he has often been extremely slow to respond to requests to plaster our bathroom ceiling. We once had a gaping hole in our ceiling for well over a year because he just could not be bothered to come and work on it, and after a while I gave up trying. It took a great deal of persistence to finally get him to come up and seal the hole.

So, I didn’t feel particularly sympathetic to him just because he wasn’t really obligated to fix our leaking faucet. Besides, our apartment is directly over the Board president’s, and that gentleman doesn’t hesitate to complain if something from our apartment bothers him. Once he sent Stanley up to put little felt pads on the bottom of our kitchen chair and table legs, because the slight noise of our chairs being moved disturbed him. Truly, I would not want to put this man in bed with a pea under his mattress!

So I knew that if he got any water coming down from our apartment into his, he would be shrieking at Stanley to do something about it. Armed with that knowledge, I enlisted his wife in the campaign to get Stanley to fix the leak.

It must have worked because Stanley showed up at ten this morning in a totally surly mood. I didn’t realize that he would have to get all the way under the sink to fix it and install a new faucet, so I didn’t remove all the stuff from underneath it when he told me to. He threw everything out onto the floor, and then crawled under the sink. He wouldn’t speak to me and he went in and out of the apartment without saying a word. That’s his typical behavior but this time I sensed there was more anger behind it than simple indifference.

When he was finished, he left without even telling me he was done. I was left with the dilemma of deciding whether or not he deserved a tip. I don’t feel he deserves it, because he did not have to help out yet he agreed to, but then he was obnoxious about it. However, in pragmatic terms, it’s better to catch flies with honey, only in this instance the sweet stuff is green, begins with an “M”, and is not found in beehives.

Once Stanley left, I cleaned up the mess. There were sopping wet shirts and socks we’d left under the sink planning to use them as cleaning rags. But we’d never used them, so I felt no guilt about tossing them out. The rock salt I bought so I could scatter it like Janey Appleseed when I went out on icy days had fused together into one solid and useless lump, so I chucked that too. I tossed the water-damaged items also. I saved the sponges, since they’re supposed to get wet anyway, and left the detergent stains on the dark linoleum, to be mopped up another day. One thing I can say in favor of a leaky faucet, it forced us to mop the kitchen floor.

Once the entire cleanup was done, Jason and I headed out to the Museum of Natural History.

Mosaic, a Novel

Recently I finished reading Mosaic, a novel by Soheir Khashoggi. It bears similarities to Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, the true saga of Mahmoody's escape from Iran with her daughter, against her husband's will. In Mosaic, Dina's husband Karim spirits their two youngest children away to Jordan in the belief that he must do it in order to raise them with proper Muslim family values. After living in New York for decades, he's come to the conclusion that American values are flawed and decadent, and he must take the two younger ones away from their influence before they turn out like their teenage brother Jordy.

Like Mahmoody, the fictional Dina refuses to hand her children over to Karim to raise in a completely different culture. She fears for them, because they are American children in a country where Americans are not liked. Her husband's betrayal shatters her happy life and sets her on a dangerous mission to retrieve her children at any cost.

In her time of need, Dina reaches out to her two best friends, Sarah and Em. The three of them each have a "man" problem. Em, an African-American woman from Louisiana, has an ex who walked out on her and their son 15 years earlier, and has hardly ever contacted his son. Sarah is divorced from her Israeli husband, who refused to give her a get (a Jewish divorce).

Each of these characters is well developed and has her issues move to resolution. But in the meantime, Dina finds herself a professional rescuer of abducted children and travels to Jordan to try to get her twins back. Her in-laws are hostile and suspicious except for her sister-in-law. Karim is overbearing. He's the man and he fully intends to continue doing things his way, whether Dina likes it or not.

The attempt doesn't come off. John Constantine, the rescuer, spots trouble in the form of Karim's security men, and backs off.

Meanwhile, however, Karim is struggling with his own conscience. He'd like to feel wholly self righteous, and he'd like to believe he was acting in his children's best interest, but guilt nags at him. When he sees how unhappy Suzy is, he agrees to let her go home to New York with Dina so long as he can keep Ali. Apparently it is important to him to keep Ali safe from the pernicious influences in America that affected Jordan, their eldest.

The big secret about Jordan: he's gay. That's acceptable here, but in the Muslim world, it's an abomination, unnatural. Karim seems to think that if he keeps Ali in the Muslim culture he can save him from following in his brother's footsteps.

Without giving the whole story away, things reach an acceptable, even hopeful, conclusion, for just about everyone. I found this book a pleasure because it portrayed everyone as a three-dimensional human being with good points as well as flaws. Karim is no one-dimensional villain. He's wrong, by my lights, but he's a real person who can reflect and acknowledge mistakes. These are real people, everyone from his or her own specific background, and their differences make up the beautiful mosaic that the title refers to.

Mosaic is also the name of Dina's business, and part of the marital drift between Dina and Karim is her independence and success as a businesswoman. Karim sees it as taking time away from her family, and in fact he abducts the twins while she is out at work. Mosaic, the novel, raises relevant questions about male/female dynamics, Muslim culture versus mainstream American culture, and ethnic paranoia on both sides of the 9/11 divide. I recommend this book highly.

From Grandmother to Wife

I've been mistaken for many things in my lifetime. As a girl, I used to be mistaken for my mother by some of her friends. Apparently our voices were almost identical.

Maybe 12 years ago, I took Jason to the pizza shop just outside the Kingsborough College campus. He was seven at the time. He asked for some piece of candy behind the counter, and the proprietor pointed to me and told Jason to "ask Grandma." My hair was going a little gray but I didn't think I looked all that old.

"I'm Mommy!" I huffed. "Grandma is dead!"

Today, Jason arrived at his doctor's appointment half an hour after I received a call that the doctor would not be in today. They asked him, "Did your wife call?"

Not too shabby, in growing 12 years older, I have morphed from Grandma to his Mrs. How's that for growing younger?