Elinor Nauen

Still not sure what I think or what to say. He's been gone so long (Hans Nauen 1906-1986) that any scrap of connection moves me utterly. As my friend Becky said, My eyes hurt all the way to my heart right now. We went to high school together, & when he died, Becky wrote me a note that means so much to me. He treated her like a person, she said. I send notes of codolence because that one held me up so much during my mourning. If there's a heaven Becky believes in, I expect she earned entree on that alone. In Judaism the highest good you can do is to bury/mourn the dead, because they can never return the favor. 

 

With so much trauma, anger, fear, resolve blooming lately, it gives me strength & hope—& sorrow—to remember & share my father's story. 

 

Sigh. It's been an emotional week. I'm glad to have my dad by my side again. 

The full headlines:

Europe Still Waits For Hitler To Gobble Danzig

German Refugee Family Finds Refuge in Sioux Falls

Hitler Horror Over; Life Bright

Hans Nauen gets job, works hard to polish his English [he was offended by that - he thought his English was excellent]

Refuses to talk of persecution

Refugees find it continally harder to leave Naziland

 

My dad, his "vivacious" wife (not my mom), & daughter had arrived in Sioux Falls 6 weeks earlier. He wouldn't talk about Germany because his parents & sister were still there, and "The arm of the Gestapo is long." None of them made it out. 

 

My wonderful neighbor Louis tracked this down & made a legible copy, so I was able to read this for the first time today. 

 

More to say but I can't right now....

Another attractively shabby wall, this one south of Delancey. I remember taking a Greyhound from San Antonio to Laredo, & wishing my job was driving back & forth on that scrubby 150-mile stretch. Not sure why I find this sort of landscape so relaxing & also so compelling. Maybe it stems from loving (& missing) the prairies of my childhood, where you had to look closely for the beauty. Anything you pay attention to enough is beautiful, right? 

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. 

~ Charles Darwin

 

Republicans.

The helicopters are still overhead. 

 

My guess as to what is going to happen is more cynical than my friends, a reverse from the usual that I can't explain. I'm thinking of a quote attributed to FDR, something he supposedly said to various activists: "You've convinced me. Now make me do it." By that I assume he meant that the bigger the clamor, the more organizations behind the proposals, the more likely that he'll have to give in to the people's will. Demonstrations are important but are only a first step. We have to go home & do community organizing, donate to orgs that are doing work we find important, contact our elected representatives & don't just holler on Facebook.

 

And that's what I wonder about. Are people in it for the long haul? It's not enough to say it should happen, therefore it will. Go and make them fix the things that are broken. 

I see many of my Facebook friends (& their friends) saying they're ejecting everyone who hasn't spoken up this week about what's going on with Black Lives & the police & demonstrations. I get that. You want to know who your allies are. (I most definitely have noticed the VERY few times anyone non-Jewish condemned antisemitism in the news.)

 

Part of me feels that it's not doing a whole lot & that if you don't already know where I stand, are you going to believe me if this is the first time I've made a speech on the subject? And if companies, cops, people aren't going to DO something, CHANGE something, is there any more to it than virtue signaling? Even the most fiery black man among my acquaintances is only now telling some of the harrowing stories from his own life. Would it have made a difference if he had said this before?

 

I donated to the Equal Justice Initiative. It's what I can DO. Do you also need to know what I think, when whites are being asked to listen? when so many others have been so eloquent, thoughtful, passionate? when I haven't felt that I had anything to add? 

En Garde

 

He waits, he pounces

like a kitten, serious, fierce,

comic. He explains

my explanation.

This is what they do.

One man runs for a bus & a woman plays

a small accordion on the corner.

Someone calls her by name

but she is dreaming in melody

drowning in tomorrows.

We have enough

to float us to the end.

Death is as competent as a pigeon:

one task.

That's all they have

to watch out for.

Broken glass in (apparently) Jewish businesses—Moishe's & B&H for two—is hitting me hard. I feel Krystallnacht in my guts. 

 

The quote in the second box is from Elie Wiesel: "I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

 

I decided that too, when I once long ago didn't speak up. It was at someone else's family gathering, & I let a racist uncle go on & on. That's when I realized there's always a valid reason to keep quiet: it's his family not mine, he'll never change, did I even hear what I think I heard. I realized those weren't in fact valid reasons, just excuses.

 

Since then, most of the time, I simply say that I don't want to get into an argument but I do want to go on record that I don't agree, & then I try to change the subject. That usually works, (no one has ever hit me or anything,) & a couple of times people actually heard what they were saying, what they had most likely been repeating without listening to themselves for years. These days, though, it seems way more discouraging, when people I would expect to act better don't, & no one seems to be willing to listen to a different p.o.v. 

 

And the helicopters, & the curfew, & how broken we are. 

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. 

~ John Dewey 

 

Uh-oh, we might be in bigger trouble than I even thought. 

This was all there was to it on First Ave yesterday at 7, but later, it got violent here as in so many other places. My family in St Paul, like us, heard helicopters & sirens, & they also heard gunshots & smelled the smoke from burning buildings. I'm going at this bassackwards — it's not about riots or destruction, it's about the murder-by-cop of a man in Minneapolis, following thousands of similar killings. It's about the fact that infant mortality is worse for black infants than 125 years ago. It's about so much I can't even start with a personal take: no lamentation, no breastbeating, no vows, no answers.

 

Right now there's a dozen cops on my corner, protecting the precinct up the block. Where were they when B&H was getting its window broken last night? 

 

I'm not comparing property damage to loss of life, & I totally get the feeling that if black lives don't matter, why should white property? 

Shavuot is the best holiday! We celebrate the gift of Torah, chant the book of Ruth, & eat blintzes. No matzoh, no fasting, no primitive ceremonies with branches. I have the day off except to note that I'm feeling exuberant right now. It's been a while since I felt unmixed joy & I'm stopping myself from adding any buts. 

Ron Poznicek, a high school friend who lives in San Francisco, is someone I admire a lot. He has painted—& improved—for decades, with his only goal, as far as I know, to do excellent work. This is just one of his many paintings that I love for its beauty & big-heartedness.

 

He is also a very nice person & has a twin brother. 

It's so quiet. Birds that aren't pigeons. Shaggy lawns. Urban life begins to resemble country life. Somehow it's still (& always) New York. 

Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:

And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. 

~ John Milton, from Lycidas

 

Can you find more beautiful lines in the English language? A poem of grief & elegy seems to be just the thing at the moment, doesn't it. 

This is a tough one. Gem Spa was always there, unchanged. Until they stopped selling newspapers & then what was the point. I would go there after a game to run into Ted & he would walk me home, talking. It was the landmark for everything else: "around the corner from Gem Spa," "across the street from Gem Spa." Everything essential disappears & you find out things carry on. But thinner. 

That was a long two months without my favorite restaurant. My soups aren't nearly as good as theirs, & I've missed their smiling faces. Go eat there! Help them survive! 

One Day in September 2019

 

I walked 14,028 steps

I deleted 307 emails

I took 6 pictures of my cat

I ate 4 vegetarian dumplings

I learned 4 sentences of Torah

I slept 7 hours

I had a dream that I forgot

I listened to Johnny laugh

I failed to get my 14-year-old granddaughter to say more than 2 words

I bought a Kindle version of Norse sages for $2.99

I walked to 39th & Lex & back

It was 85°

I bought 10 THC lozenges for $20

I am sucking one now

I racked up 278 points on Duolingo Norsk

I'm #1 in the Emerald League

In 23 hours, 4 minuts, & 14 sconds I will advance to a new overachievers' league

I am 89% happy

I kind of love that the East Village is getting decrepit. This is the Marble Cemetery, which is usually highly groomed. I love that things are getting away from us. It reminds me of how everything was wild & dangerous when I first lived here. I guess I miss that anarchy, before gentrification descended & cleaned everything up. I think of all the people for whom this neighborhood was the bottom—my neighbors Bobby & Lucky who lived on SSI, for instance—and how they could never live here now. I learned so much from their modesty & kindness & miss the days when I met people very much not like me. But very much like me because we were overlooked & for the most part poor. 

Here's my 96-year-old mother, still full of beans, though locked down in her nursing home in St. Paul. She's full of marbles too & has a will to live that may well mean I'll be a centenarian with a living mother. I said that to her once & she said, "Oh I don't know..." but she wasn't ruling it out.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. 

~ Rabindranath Tagore

  

This quote needs nothing from me.

This was taped up on my block, though not for long. It's the big local (& national! maybe global?) controversy: masks. Do they work? Do they exhibit our willingness to make a sacrifice for the common cause? Do they prove that we believe whatever we read? Do they work?? If they make it hard to run, is that a good enough reason not to wear them, while we tell ourselves we are still keeping our distance? How much distance is enough? 

 

So many questions & each question leads to another & each answer seems to be superceded soon enough. 

 

I want to stop everyone & ask why they are wearing or not wearing a mask. 

Anthem

 

Two songs I took to heart as a teen were "Angel of the Morning" & "Different Drum." Both songs about taking responsibility for our (sexual) choices, or that's how I read them.

 

I know now that "Different Drum," though sung by Linda Ronstadt, was written by a guy (Mike Nesmith of the Monkees!) who was dumping a girl: "I'm not in the market / For a boy who wants to love only me. / … I'm not ready for any person, / Place or thing to try and pull the reins in on me."

 

Merrilee Rush singing "Angel" (also written by a guy, Chip Taylor, who wrote "Wild Thing"): "There'll be no strings to bind your hands / Not if my love can't bind your heart." 

 

I believed them. I understood what those songs meant & what they meant for me. That I would always do whatever the hell I wanted.

 

 

Side note: Juice Newton (with whom I share a birthday) made the other big recording of Angel, which I also like.

They were giving out masks down by the East River (& a few other locations around town). We got there early but the line was long. To that truck. Oh wait, past the truck. To the corner. Oh no, around the corner. But once they started handing them out, it went fast & they're nice & light & don't fog up my glasses.  

 

I've taken to counting mask-wearers & mask-scofflaws, & it's pretty close to 50-50. I read that Dems wear, Repubs don't so here in the heavily liberal East Village, it would be quite the insult to yell an assumed political affiliation at the people who don't think it's their responsibility to flatten the curve. (Are we even still using that phrase?)

One good thing about going for so many walks is how much I see that I never noticed before.

 

My name is Michael and I do women's short haircuts 

when I'm not sleeping

 

I do things too when I'm not sleeping but that's rare these days. I'm with you, Michael!

A photo from a place I love, Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks. 

 

We can do this.  

 

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. 

~ Russell Baker

 

I would like to think that's not the case but it's true that we value things once someone else looks covetously at them, from pie on a dessert plate to a boyfriend. You don't know what you've got till someone else wants it.

Here be we in the eternal present. We all be Buddha now.  

 

Here be I awake possibly or maybe I be asleep. What does it look like to you?  

 

It may be morning & I need coffee. It may be evening & I'm done for the day. 

 

This is probably the best scrabble game I've ever played. 

 

AGONIZE, there in the upper right, got me 113 points; the Z was on a triple letter, & I made words all the way down. I was a hundred points behind & then I was back in it, but I don't care about that—Ann & I play all the time, & it doesn't feel like one wins & one loses, just one long endless game.  

 

It had great words like hairline & coronas & queue ("the letter Q followed by 4 silent letters").

Why I Am a Karateka, After 12 Years, When Everything Hurts & I've Suffered the Coup de Vieux (the Blow of Age)

 

I wear pajamas & go down on the floor

when the instructor says "stomach touch" &

then I do pushups.

 

I get bowed to & the color

belts have to know my name & I know if they don't.

 

I like to work hard at something I'm no good at.

I don't mind working hard at something I'm no good at.

 

I was the only one to do basic self-defense #2 correctly.

However, I switched my feet to match, so not only was I wrong,

I lacked the courage to be right.

 

The black belts laugh all the time.

We have to.

We make so many mistakes.

 

It was a typical class.

It was a terrific class!

As Sensai Albie would say:

That's one they can't take away.

 

The wood floor with 40 years of sweat & polish.

The big mirrors, where you can disappear.

My legless armless boyfriend Bob

that I can beat up!

I'm thinking how long ago it seems that people crammed together like this. It's only a couple of months but feels like 80 years.