—From EF—

I’m about to embark on a 5-day solo trip, the second one this summer, and probably the last for quite a while. This time it’s to Italy to see our daughter, her wonderful man, and spend time in their 14th-century stone mill house while it’s still their abode. It’s beautiful, and they put their hearts and souls into giving it better plumbing, heating, and electrics. (We think differently now from those millers of long ago.) But the time has come for them to say farewell to the twisty twenty-five minutes of driving narrow mountain roads it takes to buy an aspirin or go to work. I need to be there one more time—to hug Fra, celebrate Jo’s magnificent cooking, and put my bare feet on a flagstone floor that was crafted before Columbus sailed.

And I’m going alone. CB and I have traveled to Europe together more than a few times, but it’s not his favorite thing to do any more, and he’s happy to stay home and console the cats. I’ve prepared and frozen a large array of delicious dinners, things I know he loves, so I’ll still have a daily presence.

When Johanna relocated to Italy in 1998 I began what is by now a 26-year chain of transatlantic journeying, most of it solo. I love it. All of it, even the wild things like finding myself on the streets of Rennes at midnight without anywhere to go—Air France went on strike and my flight to SF was canceled. I’d thought I could hang out in the train station, but nope. By luck and grace I found a businessman’s hostel that was full up but they were just kicking somebody out for misbehaviour. They didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t a businessman.

There’s a beautiful little island off the northwest coast of France, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, and it has called me back for many many visits. Ten miles long and five miles wide, with sandy beaches on the east and wild rocks on the west, and over five successive years I managed to hike the entire perimeter, fjords and all, plus the north-south line and the east-west one. Alone. Well, not really. The earth there speaks to me.

I love the trains, and the old-style coaches best of all, the ones that don’t exist any more. My favorite train was the night train from Amsterdam to Paris. Each car had a series of small six-person compartments, three seats facing three, with a corridor that ran the length of the car. It was always a crap-shoot whether there was a jerk or two there, but over the years I learned enough tricks to have a good chance at having a compartment to myself, which meant being able to lie down flat to sleep.

I had a good friend in Amsterdam, theatre colleagues in Zurich, Johanna in Italy, and the stones in Brittany. For many years a rail pass was affordable and easy to use, and the idea of just being able to jump on a train at whim was a lot of fun. Once it got me into trouble, though.

In Amsterdam the day before my return, I had time to kill and hopped a northbound train to ride to the end of the line and back. At the northmost station I had urgent need of a restroom and made it in the nick of time. However, I had all my travel stuff with me and didn’t do due diligence in reassembling myself in the dark little cubicle. What I missed was, of course, the smallest and most essential bag, the one with my passport, money, and plane ticket. I ran back to the station, but it was already gone. I made a police report, and a sympathetic conductor let me back on the return train.

The next morning Theo took me to the Consulate, where I was told by a curt front-desk lady that I’d need fifty dollars and it would take three weeks for a new passport. She wasn’t impressed by my dilemma: “My plane leaves in five hours, and you really don’t want me hanging around your country with no money.” I sat down in a corner of the waiting room and prevented myself from crying. A kindly lady sitting nearby came over. “I heard your problem. Take this thirty Euros, it’s what I can spare. Good luck.” Just then the head consular official showed up for work, and listened to my story. He gave me five Euros to take to a place down the street that would make a passport photo, then manufactured a temporary passport right there in his office. I still have it. The face on that photo is a perfect blend of stress and joy, a fitting emblem for solo travel.

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—From CB—

I fart a lot. More than I ought to. I guess it comes with age, though I haven’t noticed it in other geezers. It may be that somehow you just don’t worry so much about it, or that it’s not as noticeable as it seems. True, you don’t want to add to usual complaints about the old: we’re either crotchety or spry, we’re forgetful, we’re stuck back in the 1900’s, we’re hanging on to milk Medicare. Indeed, writing a blog about it won’t win any friends, influence people, advance the career, or even get out the vote. It’s just one of the messy features of getting old instead of buying the farm, like so many of my friends.

Not that it happens all the time. I can sit through whole spans of time without the tell-tale tail blurt. I can go to concerts or poetry readings with confidence that I won’t disrupt proceedings with eruptions. Yet sometimes the bus comes out of nowhere when I’m walking or rising or just looking at the trees in the wind. Suddenly, I’m all too human.

It’s a sign of degeneration. Like the speed with which I type, it draws an unusual focus. It excuses me from thinking deep thoughts. It’s little different from walking over rutty ground: I once did it without thinking, but now it requires a focus on balance, like stumbling onto my legs learning to walk at eighteen months.

It depends so much on whether there are other people about. It’s expected of a baby, but you’re long since out of a diaper. And people proliferate: what once would have been a walk among trees, you likely encounters hordes of fellow humans, forming tours of tourists, wedding parties, or football teams on an outing. The populace proliferates.

All you can do is look the other way. You can look as if you were moved to ask, “Who farted?” but had the good breeding to pretend not to notice. But it takes you back to grade school. Next stop will be kindergarten’s nappy time, when you get your sleep-mat from your cubby and lie there twitching until it’s time to get up and fingerpaint.

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—From EF—

In December of 1967 we were rounding the last lap of our two years in Columbia, South Carolina, the first job after Conrad finished his PhD. That year a classic movie hit the screen wherein another new graduate was facing the prospect of his first job and was entrusted with the key to success: Plastics. Dustin Hoffman didn’t take that advice, and neither did Conrad Bishop. However, legions of movers and shakers took it very seriously, made obscene fortunes, and are now drowning all life on earth in an unending flood of plastic garbage.

The raw material for most plastics is petroleum. Since the awareness of climate chaos and rising temperatures hit mainstream consciousness, we’ve all been exhorted to do what we can to minimize a major culprit, the use of fossil fuels. Alternative energy sources are no longer a silly joke, and this is a danger signal for those whose revenues might be impacted. A high proportion of the oil pumped from the ground ends up being burned as gasoline for cars and trucks and power stations, but if that market slacks off because too many people are turning to wind and solar and driving less, new advances in the use of plastic are compensating.

We’re supposed to take comfort in the advent of recycling and the little triangles that tell us how to sort, but there isn’t enough money to be made in the products of recycling so the bins of stuff go where they would have gone all along.

I’m old enough to remember when buying a package of safety pins didn’t require tin snips to open the package. I also remember the gash I gave myself when first coping with the new hard-plastic shells that suddenly enclosed flashlight batteries, once they figured out how to weld the cover to the new backing that has a little hole to hang from a store’s hooks. I remember how recently the produce shelves started selling pre-washed salad in dishpan-sized hard plastic coffins. And now the meat departments display their wares pre-sealed in thick tough bags that have been vacuum-sealed, often swimming in marinade. The poundage of salty liquid sells at the same rate as the meat, and those who are supposed to avoid salt can simply not buy anything and save even more. When I searched long enough to find a package without marinade, I found that my kitchen scissors could neither penetrate nor cut that pouch. A clerk helpfully told me she uses box cutters.

Our local (wonderful) non-chain independent market changed hands recently. Now marinade pouches gleam like polished Buicks on the shelves, and many of my favorite little dodges for making rice into a tasty main dish are gone now, replaced by more pre-processed convenience meals—packaged in plastic, of course. And many of the friends who’d kindly fetch me bags of chicken necks for stock don’t work there now. Fewer men are needed when the distributor delivers the product already cut and packaged—in plastic. How nice. It stays fresh longer, and if it doesn’t you can’t tell anything from texture or smell any more.

I’ve seen the claim that what shows up on the grocery shelves is mostly controlled now by only four or five giant corporations distributing things under a variety of sub-labels. Kroger, Safeway, Vons, Albertsons, Pavilions, Ralph’s Pay Less, Pick’n’Save, Fred Meyer—that’s all Kroger wearing different hats. Try complaining to that monolith about plastic packaging.

OK, all you FB activists, if you know about any locally effective movements to pressure for less plastic, please share. I talk to the folks behind the counter at my stores, but they shrug and tell me it’s delivered to them in the plastic. Not their fault, nothing to be done.

Anybody?

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—From CB—

Don’t take this as expert opinion. I’m just your average dumb assertive citizen.

We’re mostly a nation of immigrants. This comes up in political debates on immigration, but otherwise not. But to my mind, it has multiple ramifications.

Immigration is not easy. Until this era of air travel and instant communication, it’s meant cutting ties with friends, family, and the culture that you’ve grown up in, You don’t understand the language, and you don’t understand the jokes.

Nor do you flee your home to “seek a better opportunity.” More likely it’s to save your family from starvation, enlistment in an army or a gang, or being shot in the street. Coming to this country, you face an absolute unknown: you may have family here or find help through an agency, but more likely you’ll face an unknown language, hostile people, and a future that soon proves to be a toss-up.  

It results, naturally, in clannishness, what my grandpa, who was Germanic, accused Norwegian farmers of—he avoided specifics. But you want to be with your own people, people who look and talk like you, out of safety concerns. Does that result in racism? Of course it does.

These thoughts come about largely because we’re the richest country in the world, certainly the most powerful, yet also the most fearful. What dominates our politics?—who can raise the most fear. If it’s not fear of invasion, it’s fear of change, fear of the new, fear of the absence of fear.

The other thing that flows from the trauma of immigration—not only from that, of course—is the rage that comes from the frustration of hope. We’re told from childhood that the future has all possibilities, that we’re in the land of opportunity, that all it takes is hard work. Then you find yourself compared to others, find yourself accused of racism, sexism, exploitation three generations back, and accused of stupidity for backing Trump, who at the very least is likely to shake thing up.

I’ve seen in social media lately lots of posts that sound left-wing, saying that anyone who votes in the coming election is a fool, that it’s only a plot of the international order to perpetuate the intolerable status quo, that we all need to get our souls readjusted to support the perfect candidate, who doesn’t exist. I resist that. Over the years, I’ve voted for many severely flawed individuals, some like JFK who was elected, some like McGovern, who wasn’t. In all, I’ve never voted for anyone who might deliver pie in the sky. I wish I could. Maybe some day…

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—From EF—

I took a trip to the Midwest last week, the provocation being a high school reunion of the class of 1957, and I spent five days being a weaver. Each day was centered on a different part of my life, and weaving that yarn into a pattern was intense and beautiful. My core is still humming.

I was born in Brooklyn, not the Midwest; my mother was “sent east” to deal with my unplanned arrival. I was eleven days old when my adoptive parents picked me up at the hospital and handed me to their housekeeper to make the plane ride back to their Indiana home. (They had driven to Brooklyn, but a three-day car trip back through February ice was not a good idea for a newborn.) I landed, grew up amid cornfields nine miles from Valparaiso, and never knew that my birth-mother was less than a hundred miles away in Wisconsin.

I had a hard time with my adoptive mother, and my real bond was with the surrounding woods and fields where I roamed freely as a wild little girl. This trip was a reunion with my classmates, yes, but much more with the land that had always welcomed me. On the first day of my trip I was driving down the old country road toward a childhood neighbor’s home and was a bit unsettled by the number of semi-suburban new homes that had popped up. Then I found John’s address by a familiar driveway, turned in, and was immediately in a different world—enclosed by a long narrow corridor flanked by tall sunlit trees. I stopped the car for a minute to breathe the cool clean air that I remembered so well.

I spent the day was with John and his family, who still lived on the farm that had been my own family’s closest neighbor. During a road-trip stop in 1995, I impulsively dropped in on him for a brief afternoon chat. He stunned me by saying that his parents knew that my home life was painful but had no way to intervene. What he told me was life-changing: I hadn’t made it up, it was real and witnessed. Last Thursday was a long afternoon lunch shared with his wife and younger daughter, trading stories of those years, and fond memories of those now long gone.

Friday was spent with the couple who bought my old home years ago. It has been beautifully renovated and is brightened by the energy of their two children. I got the grand tour of the house, and then we went out to walk the trails that they’d cleared and marked in the woods. I took them to the site of the old apple tree that had been my favorite refuge, held safely in her branches. In her old age she became sickly and was taken out, but in 1995 I was given the opportunity to dig for her roots. I brought back with me the glowing reddish chunk of heart-root I’d found, oiled and smoothed, and all four of them took turns holding it close. They plan to plant another apple tree.

Saturday was the reunion, about thirty of my classmates gathered in the sunny meeting-room at the back of a pizza parlor. They knew I’d tried to come last year but got re-routed to St Louis by a storm that closed O’Hare, so this year we made up for lost time. Sixty-seven years re-sculpts faces and bodies, but it was fun putting the puzzle together. I felt welcomed now in a way that had never happened in the fifties, and I had fun being somebody who could now hug and laugh. My coke-bottle glasses, braces, and panicked introversion were long gone.

I then drove on to visit my one high school chum and convey the greetings from the reunion she had planned to attend with me. Her bones suddenly said “no” and now she has three screws bridging a spontaneous fracture and is in a rehab facility. In spite of the pain she could give a good hug, and we traded stories for a few hours—wishing it could be longer. When we were in school, neither of us had known that the other was suffering abuse. Life is strange, but we cherish and celebrate our long friendship and the amazing lives we’ve led.

Sunday I was with my brother and his wife, who have welcomed me into their home as many times as possible since we found each other through DNA in 2018. Dan is three years younger than me; I was the “oops” and he was the welcome result of marriage. Time only sharpens the many traits and quirks we have in common, and our visits are a celebration. He reminds me that no, I wasn’t ordered on-line and delivered in a box, I’m real and have blood family.

Monday was a whole day with Flora, part of my life in theatre since 1967. She was a mainstay of the ensemble we were part of founding, Theatre X, and is known and beloved by Milwaukee audiences for the many roles she has played and created over the following decades. It was the kind of quiet lovely day that only happens with decades of closeness: breakfast, a second cup of coffee in the living room, a walk in the nearby wooded park, my making myself at home in the kitchen preparing a huge Salade Niçoise, an evening reading our current novels, punctuated by scenes from the Men’s Gymnastics.

Tuesday I returned home, to a delighted CB who appeared to have thrived. If anything, he looked stronger and livelier than when I left, and he’d eaten every bit of the multiple meals I’d cooked and frozen for him and for our son’s two-day visit during my absence. We both had agreed that the risks of my absence were worth taking and could be navigated OK, and that was true. What was woven is warm, lovely, and enduring.

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