Monthly Archives: February 2021

Life

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.

Life, Owning Our Truth

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.

COVID-19, Life

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.

Family, Life, Owning Our Truth

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.