Silver

When the silver can’t be saved

I’ve lost my mother’s silverware. We just moved into a new house. We have an awful lot of stuff, even though we have pared down and pared down for almost a year. I gave away 25 boxes of books last summer, and I can still barely fit what I’ve got into my new garage-turned story shed. My daughter is a fiendish collector and I am too: snow globes -- action figures (particularly Star Trek). And cards. Cards from my friends and lovers, cards from my daughter and husband. Cards from my mother.

My mother was a collector too. Handbags, perfume, theater books, gloves, costume jewelry. She was something of a low-level hoarder. She held on to things hard, because she was often very afraid.

Troubled by constant and paralyzing anxiety that manifested itself most visibly as a fear of both people and machines, my mother was a genius in hiding: a woman afraid to talk to anyone but me and my father about her amazing ideas and insights. She hid in the hotel bathroom when I was 13, because she was terrified at the thought of speaking French to the maid (we were in Montreal for Expo 67). Yet her French was impeccable. She feared the telephone, and hated going to the doctor. Other than her family, she had no friends.

Yet, for all her fear my mother was no political conservative; she was fervently pro-choice, a card-carrying atheist, and a lover of rock and roll. When the Bill Clinton sex scandal erupted, she asked what remains my most favorite of her no-nonsense questions; “If oral sex isn’t sex, then what the heck is it?” A remote person who came off as snobbish when she was really just plain old frightened, she braved the subway to she take me to see the Beatles, and a few years later, went with me to Carnegie Hall where we heard Tim Buckley sing in a marijuana filled room.

My best adult memory of my mother is that whenever she boarded the bus after an afternoon tea or a cup of coffee, she would take a seat and wave continually til she disappeared over the hump that occurs from time to time on Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue.

I really knew that my mother loved me at those times. She felt most at ease, I think, saying goodbye. In the distance she could safely express what close proximity made her too scared to say.

So I wept when I realized that my mother’s silverware had gotten lost in the move. I don’t know this catastrophe happened. We’d had our stuff packed up in boxes for so long, it’s possible the box got given away by accident, got transported to the wrong storage facility or who knows what.

My mother clung to objects with a palpable terror. So I felt terror too, when I realized her silverware was gone. I had lost another piece of her. My scared brilliant mother, who died a little over 10 years ago. I think about her every day. I have never stopped missing her.

I went on line, and after looking at forks and knives til I went cross-eyed, I finally found the pattern. It’s buyable, if expensive. We can gradually replace the set, I think. And how lucky that my husband is willing to do that. How lucky that we are in decent health in a new house. How lucky that we have jobs. How lucky that I get to be a writer. Although I am no genius, my ideas are rarely secret. I tell them, and write them, and have often gotten to publish them. I am surrounded by wonderful friends.

Maybe you can’t save the silver. But if you have everything else, that’s ok. I love you Mom. Don’t ever stop waving.

LEH

Listening (and gifting) like Leonard

My father Leonard Hammer was an impossible person a lot of the time. Insanely conservative (by this I mean a Reaganite, and before that a Nixonite), my dad glared at men who didn’t wear ties (which was most of them), considered the Israelis an overwrought lot, and detested political radicalism (of the left). He and I did not get on a lot of the time.

But.

The man knew how to treat people to lunch, dinner and drinks. He loved much younger people, frequently spoke to his fraternity brothers at universities and conventions, and once helped a young NYC taxi driver, who seemed like a nice person, get a job in television. He helped, listened, encouraged, and always picked up the check with a bevy of much younger friends – who included, by the way female former secretaries, bank tellers, and salespersons, whom he had gotten to know during his travels up and down the East Side avenues.

“You work in a world I do not understand,” he told me repeatedly over lunch at the various clubs he belonged to. “But you are successful at it and I’m proud of you. I hope you’re proud of yourself. “ He always kind of yelled when he said that last part – which would explain why I found these lunches fairly embarrassing.

Now I am 56 and have many friends who are much younger than I am. Younger friends are amazing, because they have so much energy and ambition and their dreams are fresh and strong.

3 nights ago I had a friend tell me he was up for a possible new wonderful job.
“You work in a world I do not understand,” I said. “But gosh, I’m proud of you.” I spoke or rather, yelled, sagely, lifted my glass, and paid the check.

Oops! Am I really an old geezer like my dad? More like a geezer in training I figure, and a left leaning, Green Party sympathizing one at that. Still I had the opportunity to feel grateful to him for his skills at table. The way he made you feel you could order anything you wanted off the menu, the way he got the check and dealt with the wait staff. He always treated them nicely too.

I used those moves this week with my friend with the possibly new great job, and with two newly turned girl professors, and with two wonderful graduating students. I tell them all I’m proud of them, and I hope they are proud of themselves.

My dad really had a way with being generous and supportive.

Here’s to paying that gift forward.

But please, don’t vote Republican.

On Bob Fossil’s Belly

I have a giant crush on Bob Fossil. I LOVE him. If I could still bear children, I would want to make a big chubby Bob Fossil baby. Bob Fossil makes me want to get up and do my dirtiest silliest dance.

Who is this Svengali who makes a middle aged professor want to take all her clothes off, find a pole, and do a pole dance – assuming she doesn’t throw her back out in the attempt? Bob Fossil is a pretend fictional character from the BBC TV series The Mighty Boosh. He is an out of control, power-mad, probably homosexual nincompoop who runs a zoo and who doesn’t know the names for any of the animals.

He loves to dance, and make people watch him. He dances sexy, dirty, and ridiculously -- like he was a bad stripper, an aging disco queen, or a cage dancer from the 60’s.

Most importantly Bob Fossil has a huge, white, round belly that continually protrudes in obscene little sections through the gaps of a tiny, barely buttoned, pale blue safari shirt. The shirt has epaulettes. It wants to be a uniform, but that belly shines forth like a beacon between and below the shirt, reminding us that nothing having to do with the body can ever be “official.” The body is its own wild animal, and it cannot – literally—be contained.

Personally, I have always had a problem with my belly. When I became a fat child, the belly was the fattest part of me.

Now that I am a menopausal 56 year old, my belly has returned with a vengeance; the once and future fattest part of me once again reigns supreme. Lords it over blue jeans. Humps and jumps out of dresses, curls its lip and swells disdainfully over underwear.

Until Bob Fossil came into my life I could not make peace with the belly. Granted, I had refused surgery and the insane dieting of yesteryear, but I had retreated – as many women do -- away from myself as body, away from myself as sexual being into a low-level sense of what Muriel Rukeyser once called despisal. Despisal is insidious. You don’t entirely hate the way you look. You just feel a mild sense of nausea when you think about yourself. You avoid looking at your body whenever possible, and you regard all compliments as lies – albeit kind ones. It’s not a big deal; it’s just a little despair, a tiny daily dose of deep desperation. All because of the belly.

And then along comes Bob Fossil and his too tiny shirt and his terrible dancing. When Bob Fossil struts on camera with that bulbous belly birthday cake of flesh, I reach for something spacious in myself and find it. I want an invite to the tummy party he’s incarnating. Watching Bob Fossil’s belly makes me want to wear hip huggers, a very tight shirt, and a pushup bra, and a lot of eye makeup and super high heels. Because why the hell not?

Writers like Rabelais celebrate what has been called the “carnivalesque” body. Bob Fossil shows us what fun that carnivalesque body is to own because of the fun you can have with it. The way you can feed it, fuck with it, and flaunt it.

Excuse me. I feel a pole dance coming on.

Don’t Shoot the Chairman

“Are you a professor,” the nice lady at Borders said to me yesterday. I was buying Valentines’ presents for my husband and daughter, the Book Thief for her (she’s never read it) and Jesus in Islam for him (he’s interested in all things having to do with scriptural representations of the big guy [no he’s not Christian {he’s not Muslim either}]).
“They shot someone because they didn’t get tenure,” the lady said. She looked meaningfully at her colleague.
“In Alabama.”
The cashiers were both African American. I was and am white. Something passed between them, that I felt but couldn’t read.
“University of Alabama?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why’d they take it out on them?” She said.
I drove home in a hurry and went online. “Them” turned out to be the department chair and two professors, along with 3 others all sitting in a meeting where an assistant professor was informed she didn’t get tenure. I guess she pulled out a gun and shot them then and there. The assistant professor who was the shooter was a scientist. Her husband was waiting in the parking lot.
“Well!” I said to my husband, “she certainly knew how to handle a gun. She shot 6 people.”
“Crap,” said my husband also surfing online. “I think she’s Jewish.”
A lot of teachers in academics from lecturers to full professors to teaching assistants, say they hate the chairman and the administration. A lot of people say that the tenure process is completely unfair. This has been a line waiting to be crossed. Something is happening in the world of edu. We keep on saying it’s a refuge, safe space, but we know now that it isn’t. Something has to change. All of it has to. From preschool to med school.
The Montessori school knows it. Evergreen State knows it. And the Whidbey Island MFA program knows it. The school must change into something else.
When I was a graduate student a friend and I made up a hit list. We were filled with rage a lot of the time. Graduate school in the humanities was fiercely competitive and we all knew there weren’t enough jobs to go around.
It’s worse now.
“Do you tell prospective graduate students there are no jobs?” I asked a colleague a few years ago. “Oh,” she said. “I never even thought of that when I was in the PHD program.”
I did. I had to get a job. A lot of people in academics have to work. If they don’t make it in the academy, they have to start all over again. You are not an automatic hire in the k-12 system. It doesn’t work like that.
Should we abolish tenure?
Maybe.
But until we figure out how to make hiring and firing in education more honest and fair, until we figure out the whole nexus of what edu needs to be. We are going to have these horrible things happening. It’s going to columbine. It’s already happening.
Until our country supports education, it’s going to columbine. Until we take education seriously, it’s going to columbine. First it was students in high school, then it was a student on a college campus, and now it’s an assistant professor in the sciences for Pete’s sake.
It all needs to change. Now.
My colleagues at the Borders cash registers know something about being underpayed and undervalued. They condemned the violent act that emerged within what they and most people consider a space of privilege. But they also seemed to know that crazy stuff happens when you least expect it. In seemingly pastoral spaces. The unthinkable happens on the margins of what we think is possible. It continues to call us into awareness. We need to heed the call.

Luxury

On luxury

From: http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/luxury

Etymology: Middle English luxurie, from Anglo-French luxorie, from Latin luxuria rankness, luxury, excess; akin to Latin luxus luxury, excess
Date: 14th century
1 archaic : lechery, lust
2 : a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort : sumptuous environment
3 a : something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary b : an indulgence in something that provides pleasure, satisfaction, or ease
— luxury adjective

I am a person who has always liked nice things. My parents too. My dad went broke when I was 15 and he was 50, and he haunted the sales at Brooks Brothers ever after, made friends with all the sales personnel. "Is this GOING to go on sale?" he would ask. Yup, a man who liked nice things.

I follow in his footsteps. I have never liked hostels, camping, or badly made apparel, even when I was broke as hell and living in St. Louis. I shopped vintage, going out of business sales, and accepted all good hand-me-downs. Now I got some money, I still like the good stuff. I like silver, and turquoise, and pearls. Not diamonds. Not big houses. Trips to cool places. Smooth rides.

But I’m not here to talk with you about Cotes Du Rhone, the Sundance Catalogue, or perfume by Kenzo.

I want to talk with you about the luxury known as teaching well.

I am back to teaching full time at the university after about 4 years of teaching half time. Arguably university teaching is cushy, certainly when compared with k-12 teaching or teaching at a state college where the course load is high.

But I can’t get my work done. What’s wrong?

I realized today that the problem is that I’m an excellent, award-winning teacher.

I have developed a style of teaching that relies just about completely on interactions with students, and -- more often -- organized teamwork between students. Reports, games, presentations, group exercises. I like to assign writing every day I see my students. Sometimes students do in class writing AND hand in an assignment. That’s a lot of correcting. But it gives each student valuable feedback.

But I can’t do this now that I am teaching full time, because – I have to do this other stuff: talk to colleagues, go to lectures, make up proposals.

And my classes are too big to have daily and weekly presentations, writing exercises, and reports.

I’m not complaining, exactly. I’m just NOTING, as my mother used to say meaningfully. I’m just OBSERVING.

And here is what I am SEEING.

Most of the things that matter in the United States have become luxuries – practices and privileges ranked as excessive, delightful self-indulgent goodies that are grand and great but that we really, honestly, let’s face it, don’t need.

Medical care for one. Mass transit is another – from subways and buses to working, safe and affordable airlines to get us from place to place in our vast country.

And education is third. I’ve been reading all about Obama’s education general. He is going to fire bad teachers. Well, good for him. But tell me this. WHO can be a good teacher to a class filled with too many students? No one. What happens to the most skilled practitioner when, as Jo Scott Coe says, the caseload becomes exorbitant?

Good teaching becomes a luxury – that’s what happens. And education becomes a luxury too. Since when is one-on-one conversation between teacher and student something that we can no longer afford to be interested in? What about the seminar? The small class discussion? Why aren’t these considered necessary?

"Poo poo," say the college administrator and the district supervisor. "This is all about delivery."

What are we, rocket launchers?

We have on our hands a citizenry that no longer knows how to converse. Because we haven’t bothered to engage in conversation with students, or show them how to converse with each other. Argue, reflect, share, and compare notes in small, intimate company. We haven't done this for a very long time.

I’m worried about this. And even though I will have to cut down on my expenses next year, I am going right back to teaching half time.

I’ll do a better job. I just know it. The students will learn something. They will swim in the abundance of my attention and time. They will have the pleasure of conversation and exploration. And that’s not excess. That’s just the right amount of something we need.

Death

On death

3 of our 4 parents died during this past decade. My mother died right before her birthday in 1999, and I came to Manhattan to find my present to her sitting in her mailbox. That was a terrible time. She was mad I had converted to Judaism, and mad that I had moved to California. She was mad about other things. Sexual things. Things involving Karate. She was mad I started making poems again. Or was she proud? It’s hard to know even now. She did, however, always think I had good legs. And good legs are certainly something.

I did a better job with the death with my mother in law, who died of pancreatic cancer. She drove me crazy while she was alive. Brilliant, gorgeous, a yogini, and crack housekeeper and cook, she made me feel inferior in comparison. She yelled at me once for voting the way a friend did. And yet, she intrigued me. At times I understood her. When her final – really bad – diagnosis came in, I wrote her, and she treasured the letter. C… died ON her birthday – an honor reserved, according to Jewish tradition – only to the most righteous of us, the most perfect. Ok – she was that. On the night she died she sat regally on her sofa. I sat on one side, and her youngest son sat on the other. We held hands silently for a long time. She went out like a philosopher. She went out like a queen.

Last my father in law, the best of the 4: the most complete, the most accomplished, the most athletic, and the most – in every way – ALIVE. I stood with his body at UCLA hospital. The last time I saw him conscious I had the strong desire to hug him and say “I love you.” It was a good thing. I have learned the hard way to always listen to those instincts. What feels like the last time, maybe IS. And it was.

Other, more terrible deaths happened. My trainer – a gifted photographer, and former troubadour badgirl – D, died hidden away in her apartment. E.. -- brilliant, creative, funny, and very young – died of a terrible disease. I remember him looking at his father outside of MOCA, one pair of wry eyes looking into another. E… was just, or about to be, 13. An angry alcoholic, blocked semi-writer who loved Brecht but couldn’t write like him, died, forgotten – his daughter not speaking with him. And another writer, who loved Mark Twain and who battled racism at the university wherever he saw it, died too, as hundreds of former students, and current coworkers mourned.

There is flat death and there is death with meaning.

We wake up every morning now and know for sure there is no escape. The fantasy of life-everlasting is now lost to us altogether. This we have lost in the past decade. And yet, we have acquired a sense of urgency, as well as the hilarity that accompanies another day spent beating back the reaper.

We look at those much younger, and smile.

Menorahs

On Menorahs

The first time I lit a menorah was in the East Village, and I lit every candle to surprise the man who would become my husband.

I thought about all lights like birthday cake candles, and I loved the way the menorah looked glittering on the glass table in our loft on 12th street.

No, no he said, when he walked in the door. You light just one.

How disappointing!

I commenced study of Judaic traditions. My future sister in law had become FRUM, which is like the German word FROMM meaning pious. She had become an orthodox Jew and gave me a bunch of complicated books about Jewish ritual. I got to the part where you waved chicken over your head, and stopped reading. My friend Janie Glick, who lived on Central Park, did NOT – to my knowledge -- wave a chicken over her head in her penthouse, nor did my classmates from Nightingale Bamford wave a chicken over their heads to my recollection. The Jews I knew were sedate and extremely high-toned. Until I met Sy Metzger, whose family was – sort of communist, lived in Stuyvesant Town, and worked in the garment industry. They were very Jewish, but they didn’t go to temple or celebrate any holidays.

So the mystery of the menorah persisted for a long time. What WAS correct? Eventually I got married and had a daughter and the children’s books on being Jewish were pretty helpful. You have to light a new candle every night to grow the miracle. Hmm, I always thought miracles were kind of PRESTO like a magic trick, so this was a new idea.

But now that I knew what I was supposed to do, there was still the problem of the wax. The candles invariably went lopsided in their little holders. As it turned out, I was RIGHT to light them all at once, because the agony of lighting one more lopsided – oh my god it’s going to fall over and burn the place down — candle was very stressful. I battled the wax problem: I bought menorah after menorah. I made one out of clay (like the dreidel song!); I did a ceramics one at color me mine. It didn’t matter. Every model produced the same defective result. Wax dripping everywhere – the cleaning of the menorah with toothpicks, plastic knives, or -- as Janie suggested -- boiling hot water.

All futile.

Sometimes being Jewish is very frustrating. According to orthodox rabbis, I’m not even really Jewish (I converted with reform rabbis). That’s like being told your driver's license is only good in say, Passaic (not that I mind Passaic). I don’t have an automatic right to return to Israel – which has increased my already strong sympathy for my fellow wannabe returnees, the Palestinians. My daughter isn’t really “Jewish” either. This makes me furious.

On the other hand, my last name is HAMMER, so I kind of am a Maccabee already. And anyone can tell, you, I don’t like ANYBODY messing with my peeps, be they my family, my friends, my colleagues, or my students. One student likened me to Bat Man, and I suspect he has the dark knight in mind, rather than the pleasant guy we saw on the TV when some of us were young.

So I’ll light the candles, I’ll consent to my quasi-contested inclusion in Jewishness. But this year, I’m junking the candle wax. We have a recycled motherboard that is green and that you attach to a battery and you flick a new switch every night. So totally a Jewish nerd kind of thing.

Is it halachically correct???

Hell no, but neither am I.

So as I flick the first switch I will envision a world where everyone can return to the place they belong, in peace, freedom, joy, and light.