Lunch with My Sister

Today is my sister’s 77^th birthday. We’ll celebrate next Tuesday and (as mentioned) with our special restaurant closed, will look for another choice at the little mall across from the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. We did eat there occasionally with my folks before discovering the now-closed Left Bank Restaurant, so there’s a little thread of tradition intact. 

 

Meanwhile, another poem I wrote on the occasion seven years ago:

 

The boat’s engine thrumming under my feet

The wind tussling my paltry strands of hair

The spray of mist on my face

as I ferry over the waters to Larkspur Landing.

 

Behind me the skyline of the city I have loved for so long.

To my right, the span of the bridge that I first crossed

            so many years ago to my awaiting destiny

To my left, Alcatraz, Angel Island, each with their stories 

            of told and untold suffering

one now a tourist’s delight

            the other criss-crossing paths of hiker’s bliss.

 

In front, the waters part like a modern day Moses miracle 

All around, above, below, the unfettered feeling of freedom

  speeding across the Bay to lunch with my sister

     on the occasion of her 70^th birthday. 

 

 

We have known each other longer than anyone still living and here we still are. 

I’ll order a Jacques Pepin sandwich at the Left Bank Restaurant 

where we often ate with our parents. 

We’ll remember my father ordering his de-caf coffee, 

my mother shameless flirting with the waiter. 

We’ll talk of our children and our grandchildren and spouses 

and maybe spin off

                         into the news of cousins, old friends and neighbors,

                                       the long parade of our mutual shared life.

 

Then we’ll each turn back, me south, her north

       to our still unfolding lives

              our next steps on our mutual paths. 

 

I took my own advice from this yesterday’s post and watched the Mary Oliver documentary. A beautiful portrait of a beautiful soul. 

 

Today is my sister’s birthday. Since my Dad died in 2007, I began the tradition of taking her to lunch at the Left Bank Café in Larkspur. When parents got older and refused to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (wisely so), we would meet there for lunch. He and my mother would pick me up at the Larkspur Ferry and drive the short distance to the restaurant, where we each ordered our favorite dishes. So when he passed, I’d meet my sister there to carry on the tradition, either biking to the ferry and then to the restaurant or occasionally biking all the way there from San Francisco. 

 

So while I was arranging this year’s lunch meeting on the phone with her, I looked up the restaurant to make sure they were open on a Tuesday—and they were closed! Permanently! A bearable loss, but a loss nonetheless. Taking Ms. Oliver’s advice from yesterday’s poem, it appears that it’s time to “let it go.”

 

On the occasion of my sister’s birthday and the recent documentary, I share here a poem I wrote back in 2006, when my folks were still with us. I guess I arrived early and was waiting for them with a new Mary Oliver book with me and then wrote this poem. 

LUNCH WITH MARY OLIVER

 

Two hours of cycling through the fog,

Winding through the hills of Marin.

Just at the Larkspur border,

The sun emerged.

Perfect for my sidewalk lunch at the Left Bank café.

 

I quickly ordered my meal

and browsed through a new book of poems

by Mary Oliver.

How happy I was, edging to the state of gratitude that Ms. Oliver

sings so constantly and eloquently.

And it was just at that moment of euphoria, just as I was nodding in 

agreement with her praise of the world, 

that my ear caught the voice

of the woman at the table next to mine 

dining with her two friends.

 

She was telling them about her Pilates workout

And her friend who sailed to Costa Rica

And the new insulation in her house.

And on she went,

and on,

and on,

 like an out-of-tune oboe 

circular breathing through a themeless melody. 

 

My iced tea arrived and she had yet to take even an 8^th note rest in her Symphony of 

Small Talk.

 

 

Then came my hearty whole wheat bread appetizer 

and her friends had still not gotten a word in edgewise, 

sideways or 

through the back door.

 

The waiter brought my Jacques Pépin roasted eggplant sandwich and the

Vapid Wagnerian Opera about Nothing droned on with nary a change in chord.

My French Fries served vertically in a coned napkin were powerless to stop her

And by the iced tea refill,

 still not a hint of a cadence.

 

How I wanted to shout, “NOBODY CARES ABOUT 

YOUR FUCKIN’  INSULATION!!!” 

like a thunderous timpani 

announcing the final chords

           of a concert that never should have been.

 

But instead, I just finished the last leaf of arugula on my plate 

and stared at the empty chair opposite me, 

wondering what it would be like 

             if Mary Oliver was sitting there having lunch with me.

what kind of conversation we would have. 

And how she would react to this radio tuned to the wrong frequency. 

I pictured her eating thoughtfully and then looking up with a wide grin and announcing,

 

“Just listen to the rustle of those eucalyptus leaves in the wind.”

 

 

 

Swimming in the Black River of Loss

 

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

And the black river of loss

whose other side

 

is salvation, whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

 

You must be able to do three things: 

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

 

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go, 

To let it go.”

 

-       Mary Oliver: Excerpt from In Blackwater Woods

       

Yesterday was Mary Oliver’s birthday. Had she stayed with us another seven years, she could have passed into the other world in company with Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem. Though I don’t know if they ever met, she had much in common with Mr. Berry, both being poets who held the sacredness of the natural world in their trust and praised it with their words. While not an active feminist in the manner of Ms. Steinem, she certainly represented the autonomy and independence the feminist movement strove for, fully claiming her full humanity in a female body and choosing to love, without fanfare, another independent woman, Molly Cook, for their decades together. 

 

The above excerpt was from an early poem and a good reminder to Buddhists who view non-attachment as being aloof from this impermanent world, which becomes just another kind of armor for the heart to avoid the grief of loss. Here Ms. Oliver suggest attaching yourself deeply to the things you love like a limpet clinging to a rock, even as you know you will lose them. Love as deeply as you can and when the time comes to let go, let go with grace and acceptance. 

 

That sense of having loved beyond reason is somehow connected to our deep disappointments with the world, the betrayals that arrived unexpectedly when we spoke out on behalf of what we hoped to protect, the surprise we felt that others couldn’t see our outrage and complaints came from love, the surprise we felt when we finally understood that that indeed was and is their source. So as we travel onward, we need to slowly let those go as well, to unpack those needless rocks in our backpack and set them firmly but gently on the trail. We will always remember where they are and how they weighed us down, but we don’t need to carry them anymore. 

 

So thanks to Mary Oliver for this and other reminders as I hope to step forward lighter than before, with all my old and new loves settled into my very bones. The fires and black river of loss lie before me and I step forward anyway. 

 

PS Tonight I will watch the documentary about Ms. Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. Check it out! 

Book Report

Amongst a thousand things that have me worried, the old idea (for new reasons) that everyone should stay in their corner with their tribe is disconcerting. The new reasons are understandable. We need to find people who share our experience or race or class or gender or sexual preference or age group etc. to feel more understood in a world where such groups are often marginalized or disdained or dismissed. The rise of affinity groups, women’s groups in the 60’s, men’s groups in the 90’s and more created safe spaces for people to share their experience. They can be important steps towards claiming one’s place in the world and feeling the support of like-minded people. 

 

Yet at the end of the day, we all have to share space on this tiny planet and figure out how to be with whoever happens to board the bus. In my field, the current mis-thinking is that one group can’t sing the songs of another group without being called out for cultural appropriation. Not that such appropriation isn’t real. The entire history of rock and roll where white folks rose to the top on the shoulders of black music often without payback or acknowledgement is just one of many cases in points. But the cultural sharing that has Americans playing taiko, Japanese playing bluegrass, Canadians playing gamelan, Indonesians playing jazz, black artists singing opera, white folks singing the blues, is proof that we are all deeply connected in our psyche’s foundation, all dancing together in what Carl Jung called (110 years ago!) the Collective Unconscious. While being mindful of the reality of power dynamics and histories of marginalization, we should not only refuse to stay in our own tiny corner, but actively cross the tracks to the many other sides of town. *

 

This on my mind having just finished a book that did precisely what I mentioned in the post Unthawing the Frozen Sea. When I finished, I just sat there longer feeling the echoes of these deeply inspiring and courageous characters I had just spent time with, deeply touched and moved by their stories. The book? The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I had seen the movie (which I loved) but never read the book. After finishing listening to The Calamity Club, her latest, it felt logical to read her first book. 

 

When I mentioned I was reading the book, many of my friend’s reactions was typical these days. “Oh, that’s on the bad list, this white woman writing about black people.” How often that happens in our confused contemporary culture. Even a hint of cultural appropriation and the discussion is closed down, the book or piece of music or person dismissed. (Just happened with people writing about Gloria Steinem’s “white feminism.”) Gone is nuance and complexity and changing perspectives and the conversations we actually need to have. 

 

Ms Stockett was well aware of the leap she was taking daring to try to capture a black person’s experience. But isn’t that all of literature? Yes, some get it wrong, bringing too much of their assumptions to the venture, but some are extraordinary in their ability to imagine the other. Men who write about women, women who write about men, black authors writing about white people, white authors writing about Asian people, 20^th century people writing about 12^th century people, young people writing about old people. In Arthur Golden’s book, for example, he crosses three lines as a white man writing about a Japanese woman Memoirs of a Geisha during the 1930’s through 50’s.W.B. Yeats was 28 years old when wrote The Song of Wandering Aengus, his extraordinary poem about an old man. 

 

As a reader far from the culture of Mississippi in the 60’s, I’m not qualified to speak about what details Ms. Stockett may or may not have gotten wrong or what assumptions she brought into her writing. But I felt her love for people on both sides of the tracks and her determination to uncover their deepest humanity, alongside her rightful impatience with those determined to bury such humanity in both themselves and others. How I loathed both Ms. Hilly and Minnie’s husband Leroy, how I loved Minnie and Abileen and Miss Skeeter! 

 

I’ll close with the classic end to the read-out-loud book reports we used to do in 5^th grade: 

 

If you like great characters, a compelling and suspenseful story, people who find their inner courage and undergo big and small transformations, all told in eloquent and colorful language, then I suggest you read this book. 

 

*  When people have been defined by others and their own voices shut down, it is understandable to be skeptical of such line-crossings. My hope is to hear from people who live across the tracks while not forbidding such needed line-crossing. It is a great evolution in culture that more and more previously marginalized authors get to tell their own story in a white male-dominated publishing business— from earlier authors like George Eliot, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Wolfe to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison to more contemporary authors like Khaled Hosseini, Isabel Allende, Elif Safak, Orhan Pamuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Haruki Murakami, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, Yaa Gyasi, Britt Bennet, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tommy Orange, Louise Erdrich, Sally Morgan and so many more. 

What If?

What if I took the world off of my shoulders for a bit and let it just be, horrific flaws and all? What if I put down my trumpet and let someone else blow it for me— and feel just fine if they don’t? What if I let people be exactly who they are and give up reforming them or wishing them (God forbid!) to be more like me? What if I asked questions in conversations, wholly listened and ceded the floor? What if I relaxed desire and ambition so that each thing that comes my way is a gifted enough? 

Might these be the themes of the 4^th Act of “My Life?” 

 

 

Good Kin

Yesterday I listened to a talk by Wendell Berry where he made the connection between kin and kind. Today I was about to write a little piece about my name when I discovered I had already done so, some five years ago. Here’s what I wrote then: 

 

Oct. 31, 2021—When my grandparents arrived at Ellis Island more than a century ago, they might have carried the name Goodkinsky, shortened to Goodkin or perhaps, Goodkind (the version adopted by my Aunt Flo). I’ve never loved saying my name, the harsh consonants of the paired d and k in the middle like sharp stones interrupting some melodic flow. But last night, I thought about “good kin” and extending my sense of connection far beyond my relatives, felt a certain destiny in my inherited name. My Uncle Harold always told me that family and loyalty to family was everything but failed to mention that our job is to extend that sense of family to include all people and yet further into all animal and plants and even rivers and stones and stars. And indeed, when putting together my 70th birthday slide show and revisiting the photos of so many people I’ve met in my teaching and travels, I felt that satisfaction of feeling akin to such a rich mix of people. All the diverse nationalities, races, religions, economic status, genders, sexual preferences, languages, the whole nine yards of things that people use as an excuse to exclude and dismiss becoming the very fabric of the sense of kinship I cultivated with all of humanity (minus those with the content of character that harms and hurts, though even those somehow having to be included). I now can see my life as my attempt to live up to my name, to see the goodness in my kin and to feel an ever-expanding kinship with all of creation. And then further, taking my Aunt Flo’s version, to myself try to be always one inch more good and one inch more kind until the inches add up to a worthy length. 

 

That’s pretty much what I would have written today. Though there is certainly a great deal of unkindness within blood families and relatives, the assumption is that we are obliged to take care of each other, to be kind to our kin. The Oxford English dictionary traces “kind” to qualities like “compassionate, loving, full of tenderness,” notes “mankind/ womankind/ humankind” connecting those qualities with the greater human family and includes “godcund” as an obsolete Old and Middle English adjective that means "divine," "belonging to God," or "proceeding from God." It’s a short leap from Godcund to Goodkin and I don’t claim any of it personally but happily accept my name as a reminder that we are all gifted with a divine nature and all that remains is to recognize it and act accordingly. 

 

In his book There Is No Other, Ram Dass tells a story similar to my Uncle Harold story above. His father was praising him for a book Ram Dass had published that was selling very well but criticized him for charging such a cheap price for it. Ram Dass asked his father, a lawyer, about a case he tried for his Uncle Henry and asked him if he charged him a lot of money for taking on his case. His father replied, “Don’t be an idiot! It was Uncle Henry. I didn’t charge him a penny. He’s family.”

 

Ram Dass countered, “That’s my problem. If you can find me somebody who isn’t Uncle Henry, I’ll rip them off.”

 

We are all kin to each other. So we might as well be kind to each other. 

 

The Gods of Small Things

 

“When we win, it’s with small things and the triumph itself makes us small.”

                                                            Rainer Marie Rilke

 

This line is from Rilke's poem The Man Watching, that goes on to suggest that we instead should choose to fight the unbeatable forces worthy of our efforts. The poem ends: 

 

This is how he grows; by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

 

The perfect description of me playing Bach or Chopin on the piano, of trying to stay above water in the swirling sea of a masterful jazz quintet, of trying to affect change while the wolves of Wall Street run wild without restraint. You get the idea.

 

But sometimes it feels GREAT to win with small things. Like wrestling with the techno-demon of online UPS payment and hitting the walls of the voice-mail maze trying to get help on phone. I finally called one of the 22 UPS stores in San Francisco and pleaded for help, but of course, it’s not their department. However, an angel named Anthony said that if I wanted to come down, he would see if he could help me. 

 

So today our errands found us in that corner of town, searching for a new spout for our leaky kitchen sink. On the slim chance that Anthony would actually be working and would have time and inclination to help me, I popped in. And there he was and off we went to the computer while he accomplished what I could not. No logical reason why it should work at that moment since I had done many of the same steps many times over, but I think the techno-gods were too embarrassed to not work for a UPS employee. And so after literally hours of my thwarted attempts, I successfully paid the $25 bill. Ah, sweet victory! You would have thought I scored the Super Bowl touchdown and clinched the NBA championship with my last-second three-pointer!

 

And so I continued to hang with the god of small things. Figured out my non-functional left hearing aid simply needed the little cap and dot replaced— and it worked! Looked at sink fixtures at one place and had another angelic soul tell us we could get the same or better for 1/4^th the price at Costco. Bit the bullet and entered that extraordinary land—only the second time I’ve ever crossed its threshold. (I'm sure a post will follow soon about that!)

But shopping there meant becoming a Costco member, which was as easy as signing a little paper form and paying them some money. NOT!!!!! Of course, we had to download the app, make a password, enter the code, do it again, and then again, listen to the spiel of the deal where Karen’s brother would get $40 off if we did it this way instead of that way, back to the app and the maze of prompts and by the end, exhausted, we finally walked out with our membership card and a new (and much cheaper, but good quality) sink fixture. 

 

Then off to the automatic car wash and another drama that is too trivial to even go into, but suffice it to say, it involved driving home and discovering the car had not been cleaned, driving back, getting the manager to let me go through again without paying and finally emerging with the “small thing trophy”—a clean car! 

 

Tonight is the ultimate test as our usually trustworthy TV suddenly won’t open Apple TV (while I just got a notice that the monthly bill will be going up), Prime kept refusing to download the movie we chose, Brittbox has a little circle that stops the actions every 3 minutes and then starts again and then stops and then starts and then…  Small things all, but enough to derail the human nervous system and get us shouting at machines. So tonight, o gods, in keeping with the victories of the day, let me win!

 

Then tomorrow back to the greater Gods of Bach and Chopin.