Elinor Nauen

So Johnny's in the hospital, his reaction to a routine-ish prostate biopsy was to bleed uncontrollably for two days, somewhere in there making it to the ER & being admitted. Many procedures & guesses—this was unusual. Not a good thing. Complex & common is as bad as you ever want your loved one's health crisis to be.

A huge shoutout to every single person at NYU Medical Center, from the medics (actually from Mt Sinai) to everyone in the ER, like the guy from Huron who hung around & chatted about South Dakota to me & basketball to Johnny, the nurse who found me a sandwich after we'd been there 8 hours, the doctors who invariably acted like they had all the time in the world to explain, which they did clearly & patiently, the wonderful, beautiful, kind, fun nurses who leapt to wait on Johnny (& me!) hand & foot—mood lighting! pineapple flambé! It was more like being at a spa, except for the suffering. Even the guys who took him from the ER to his room were totally chill. Do they pipe pot into the ducts so everyone is high 'n' happy?

Update: He's home! And fine! Now I'm fighting my feeling that he was safer confined to his bed, surrounded by doctors & nurses. Read More 

1) Woman on bike runs light. I am in crosswalk (my light, not even blinking the countdown). I point out that it is not nice, or legal, to run people down. She screams, Donald Trump is president & you care about getting hit by a bike? She continues to scream till out of earshot: I'm watching you! You had better never  Read More 

I was fortunate (thanks to my connections to the South Dakota mafia) to be in the studio audience last night for Van Jones's CNN show called The Messy Truth. The best thing he said was while all this recent activism & resistance is great, where was everyone when it would have meant something? While most of the people at the March probably voted, he said, did they volunteer at phone banks, go to swing states, raise money?  Read More 

Tomorrow I'll pick up again with the Dark Years diary, but now I'm sitting here crying about the death of Mary Tyler Moore. I'm thinking of how my late dad loved to watch her in the Dick Van Dyke show, his sweet crush, shared I'm sure by all the men of the day, and obvious even to very young Elinor. I don't have any special insight about her as an actor, just admiration for the way she let my generation see that it was possible and fun to be a spunky, single career woman. She opened the door & we shoved on through.

I bet she was a good friend. No higher praise.  Read More 

Thanks to Todd Colby for recommending the remarkable Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, by writer & intellectual Jean Guéhenno (1890–1978). I don't think it's melodramatic to see the parallels to what's going on right now in America, judging by a couple of excerpts:

Yesterday's barbarian is merely today's celebrity: people want to see the circus.

Stupidity and hypocrisy reign triumphant—the Moral Order, the virtue of the rich. The bourgeois ladies are rejoicing. In the market, they won't have to compete for chickens with  Read More 

The day began with my rabbi reciting the Pledge of Allegiance & quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel: Today we are praying with our feet. And I thought, everyone should be out here, no matter what their politics, to stand up for human rights and love.

And that was the kind of day it was: mellow, determined, kind-hearted, excited. I liked the young man whose sign read: Marching for my mother, my sister & my niece. I said: And for yourself. He thought for a moment & then smiled big. And many, many other signs of hope & peace.

So glad I joined millions of people in hundreds of marches around the world.

And now? As someone somewhere said: "One day to mourn, one day to march, then the work begins." Read More 

I have mixed feelings about it. Will t.Rump & his merry band give a hoot or will they see it as a waste and diversion of our energy, time, money? He certainly appears impervious to public opinion. And will it galvanize us to devote energy, time, money to stopping his plans or will folks feel like this was it, this is what they did, this is all they need to do? I know people who fall on either side of that line, so it's hard to say. All too many people think reposting witticisms is activism.

Part of my reluctance is Read More 

Conversation


I sometimes think other people see things that I don’t.

Yeah? Like what?

Oh, stop signs.

This is my itemized list, which I tried to get Con Ed to pay for, of my losses in the 1977 blackout.

My indignant letter:

As stated in "Your Rights as a Utility Customer" insert with my most recent Con Ed bill, I am claiming damages in amt of $_________ for food that spoiled July 13–14. Itemized list follows. And if you appreciate my prompt payments so much, how abt returning my deposit.

Pretty sure I never sent this.

Why in the world did I have a gallon of milk in the house? Read More 

In case you can't read the small print, this "multi tool wallet" has a bottle opener, scraper, 3 wrenches, standard & metric rulers, Phillips & flathead screwdrivers, & a tape cutter—all this and a "high strength stretch strap" to hold your money. It was $11.65 (with tax) at a truck stop (TA or Travel America) at the O'Donnell Road cutoff, on the edge of Baltimore, where you catch the Chinatown bus back to New York.

Jealous?

Also, the taxi driver was speaking in a language I couldn't place. Not Latin, not Germanic, not islands... Turned out to be Yoruba, & he was happy to tell me about the 3 main languages of Nigeria (Yoruba, Ibo, Harussa), the many dialects, & that everyone speaks English.  Read More