All posts by Gretchen

COVID relief

What a thrill! What a lark, to see those magical letters light-up my screen in green yesterday: C-o-n-f-i-r-m-e-d. I had scored an appointment for the first of my two doses of Moderna Covid vaccine. Tears not only welled, they rolled.

One year in to the Covid-19 pandemic. One year since I had been able to truly hug my beautiful young adult son. One year of knee-jerk reaching for my face mask each time I left my home. One year of hearing daily death tolls, daily surges, daily resurgences.

Though the tunnel remains long, there is light. My post-Covid wish list feels slightly more within reach, now. All because of those marvelous eight letters, confirming that I, too, would receive that shot in my arm, that shot at resuming a new normal.

Talking mayonnaise

I used to love mayonnaise. I lived by the principle that there wasn’t much that couldn’t be made better with mayonnaise. Well, perhaps there was one thing: my weight.

Breaking up with that creamy, fatty deliciousness wasn’t easy. Yet once I did, I never looked back. Now, I am able not only to mute the siren call of those eye-level jars as I head down the condiments aisle, I most often don’t even hear them in the first place.

Does that make the mayonnaise jars sad? Do they take it personally that I no longer stop, linger, and read their ingredients, carefully averting my eyes from the calorie-count? Do they wonder what they did wrong that made me turn my back on them?

Even if the mayonnaise jars weren’t inanimate, they wouldn’t be able to know what my thinking was. Nor can we know what another person’s thinking is when they no longer heed our siren call, avert their eyes from us, or simply move on from what was.

Each of us has our own path, our own stones to uncover, our own journey to navigate. Not taking it personnally when others’ paths don’t include us can be part of our journey down the aisles of life.

A patio by any other name

In Houston today, an elderly couple sat, seemingly elegantly from my street-level vantage point, at a small table on the second floor open hallway of a run-down apartment building and appeared to be relishing with quiet joy the crisp, sun-dappled afternoon breeze.

In Cabo San Lucas several years ago at one of the world’s most exclusive resorts, a young couple sat, demonstrably well-off, at a small table on a second floor patio perched above a posh spa, and jabbed their dainty forks into fresh ceviche washed down with champagne, and appeared to be bored by the breezes that carried soft stirrings of the Pacific and caressed them as they went through the motions of yet another afternoon in paradise.

At home, my bathtub–where bubbles frolic and lavender scents emerge–is more than eighty years old. When I am submerged in it, the sensation I have is no less embracing than the one I experienced at the exclusive resort in Cabo San Lucas.

There, in the sunken tub three times the size and one fraction the age of the one in my home, the expectations borne of promises of an otherworldly experience that couldn’t possibly live up to the reality of, at the end of the day, just another bath, deprived my immersion in this elegant, watery cocoon of any beyond-the-ordinary appeal.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

When beauty prevails

When all seems lost. When it feels as if America is convulsing beyond relief.

In 1918, when James Joyce was fighting poor eyesight to bring to life an entire city, Dublin, one loving letter at a time, the world was consumed by a fourth catastrophic year of World War One.

And, Monet was creating his take-your-breath-away water lillies.

In 1918, when Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly, and Molly’s lover, Blazes Boylan, and the terribly serious Stephen Dedalus, were being molded into shape by the sharp pencil in Joyce’s hand, the Spanish Flu was laying seige to countless communities.

And, Picasso was arranging shapes and colors and cubes in ways that stretched the imagination.

Today, when the remains of a U.S. Capitol police officer killed in the January 6th riots at the beacon of democracy lay in state in that same citadel, and political parties are warring and a pandemic continues to rage, somewhere a novel is being written that will change forever the way we read literature, and somewhere a painter is mixing shapes and colors and textures in a way that will chill and thrill and leave viewers awestruck long after those of us who live in these frightening, brilliant, saddening, exhilirating times, are gone.

In the end, beauty will prevail. So long as we release our demands on what beauty must look like, beauty will prevail.

Reckoning

Today, on the first day of Black History Month, I am reckoning. No, not exactly reckoning. Rather, I am beginning to reckon with the need to reckon with the tangle of my courageous, industrious Dutch settler ancestors and the blight on mankind that is slavery.

My tenth great grandfather held an esteemed position within New Netherland, and he was employed on behalf of the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch West India Company participated in the cross-Atlantic transport of enslaved people. The records reveal that much to be true.

My tenth great grandfather was also a member of the original Council of Twelve in the brand new colony of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of what today is Manhattan. He was a successful miller, and a successful miller in the 1640s, in order to feed a colony, would have required many hands. I am beginning to reckon with the realization that many of those hands might have belonged to enslaved people.

I am grateful to the New Netherland Institute–among others–for doing the painful, necessary work of bringing to light the role that the Dutch played in slavery in early America.

Pride in the resilience of my Dutch ancestors can absolutely coexist with acknowledgment of their likely violation of the inalienable right of each man, woman, and child to the dignity and agency of his or her own life. For the pride in my ancestry to find its rightful place, I need to reckon with the truth, as bent and crooked as the years may have left that truth. And the truth begins with a search. The first day of Black History Month is a fine time to begin.

Windswept cheeks–and other bicycle delights

Dawn broke crisply this morning on the Buffalo Bayou, a luminescent full moon mirroring the still-lit lights that line the shared jogging and bicycle paths. It had been weeks since I’d ridden my sweet Schwinn 10-speed through Houston’s early morning streets to access the meandering asphalt ribbons that trace the delightful if murky Gulf of Mexico tributary.

Such joy! Such abandon! Such oneness with the ebb and flow of life!

The only damper on my joyride was self-created: floating full of joy down a steep incline, I found myself suddenly anticipating the steep upward climb that was soon to follow. Just as quickly, I changed mental gears and stayed in the exhilaration of the moment, secure in the knowledge that the momentum I gained in doing so would provide just the thrust to lift me over the approaching rise. And it did.

When doing double-duty is too much to ask of one word . . .

. . . even when a hyphen is brought in to help.

I received early this morning a push notifiation on my phone from The Washington Post, the BBC, and The New York Times respectively, all to the effect that a dose of a COVID vaccination was proving a certain percentage effective. The first alert to arrive, from the Washington Post started with the unfortunate lead words “Single-shot” followed by “Johnson & Johnson vaccine . . ..”

As a society, we are presently in the midst of a gun epidemic piled atop a virus pandemic. Certain elected officials in Congress are claiming their right to carry guns where none rightly dared, while on the other side of the political divide, constituents are demanding the ouster of those lawmakers who cite, among other things, the extension of their 2nd amendment rights.

No sooner had I written a menatal email to the editors of The Washington Post, pleading with them to replace the word “shot” with “dose,” then, right on cue, the notifications arrived from the BBC and The New York Times, leading with the words “one-dose” and “single-dose” in lieu of “one-shot.”

In the context of the present moment, an early-morning news headline that leads with the hyphenated word, “single-shot,” is simply asking too much of the word, shot. Just because the word can do double, triple, or even quadruple duty–as an injection, or even a jigger of tequilla or a wild guess, in addition to a bullet discharged from a gun–doesn’t mean it is fair to ask it to do so. Not in the current environment. Not when context is everything.

In a matter of days

It was 8 days ago that Joe Biden was sworn in as our 46th president on the very steps where 14 days before hundreds of 12 angry men (and a few equally angry women) smashed and hurled their way past the vastly outnumbered police whose job was to guard that stoic symbol of democracy and beacon of hope to generations of people around the world, the U.S. Capitol.

With an embrace of science and a steadfast belief in the goodwill of mankind, President Biden in 8 days has smashed and hurled his way through roadblocks to, among other things, vastly expand COVID vaccination rollouts and nurture a country that is a triumphant symbol of democracy and beacon of hope to countless otherwise hopeless people around the world, and whose fervent symbol of democracy is the U.S. Capitol.

All in 8 days.

Committing, at my own risk

Seven days ago, in honor of our 46th president’s committment to deliver 100 million COVID vaccinations in 100 days, I committed to posting on this blog 46 times in 46 days.

Then, today, in a tweet, Andy Slavitt, the White House senior advisor for COVID response, shared the terrific news that on his seventh day, President Biden announced a remarkable increase in COVID vaccination doses planned for purchase: 200 million!

That great news for all of us means a significant increase in blog posts for me! Multiple times the 46 in 46 I committed to seven days ago. Moral of the story: be careful what I commit to. And count it all joy.

A Name of Their Own

It has been six days, and so far, I am 6 (blogposts) for 6 (days). And on this sixth day, a day on which the U.S. Senate has just confirmed Janet Yellen as the first-ever female secretary of the Treasury, I am holding a creased newspaper clipping that dates all the way back to my toddler years: “House and Garden Tour To Include 5 Local Homes.”

One of those 5 local homes was my family’s, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A reader could be forgiven, though, for thinking that only my father lived there: Of the more than 50 women referenced in the article, all but 3 were known by their husband’s first and last names–with no names of their own.

In the timespan of my life, then, we have zoomed past nameless women to inaugurating five days ago a female vice president of the U.S. with a resounding name of her own, Ms. Kamala Harris.