New blog

I'm playing in another blogosphere.

Dear handful of readers, will you come find me over here?

http://wp.me/p1tDah-1I

Mirroring

Sometimes you just need a different pad of paper.

http://maypops.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/digging-38/

what the garden does

... is pay you back for showing up.

if you go every day – to water, deadhead, weed – you don't only see the fruits of your labor, you can taste them.

Thinking Pink: Listening beyond the noise

When the topic is women's healthcare, I often feel like I'm standing on bare ground between two warring castles.
Blazes of gunpowder and noise and fiery light fill the air overhead. Unyielding voices shout loudest from the ramparts, drowning out the quieter, more thoughtful points of view on both sides. Torches are hurled from one wall to the other. Each side wants to win.
On the ground in between, you have to make your own path. With all the flares above, it's harder to see the gentler lights that can help you find your way.
On the face of it, you'd think the topic of healthcare would be as benign for women as it is for men. But because you can't talk about women's health without talking about their reproductive systems – and everyone has an opinion about what they should and shouldn't be able to do; or about what "healthcare" means when it's about women – it has become next to impossible to have a civil conversation about it.
Today's news that the country's biggest breast cancer advocacy group has been spending considerable time and money on issues beyond breast cancer research and "finding a cure" – has, in fact, been seeking to divide women, for political gain – has whipped up the frenzy yet again.
A genuinely surprised American public rose up, flooding the Internet with rage and shock and an outpouring of support for the women's healthcare group that has, for more than 60 years, been providing free or low-cost care for all women, regardless of their ability to pay.
While I wade into this latest firestorm a little reluctantly, with flak jacket and hip boots on, I can't stay silent.
In 2002, I did the 3-day Breast Cancer Walk in the name of friends and relatives who had died from breast cancer, or were newly diagnosed. I wore their names on my shirt and kept them in the front of my mind every time I got tired or sore or thought I couldn't go on. It was the Avon Walk then -- but it's become the Komen Walk, so I consider myself an alumna of the original, and deeply concerned about how it evolves. In my 20s, when I would drop out of college (forfeiting student health services) every few months so I could work full-time at the first newspaper to win my time and love (dramatically prolonging the time it took to graduate), I relied upon Planned Parenthood for all my health-care needs. They would always see me; whatever my immediate concern, they never turned me away, keeping me and many of my friends healthy and supplied with birth control at a time when few of us had insurance.
I see no contradiction in considering myself Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, and feel only deep sorrow at how far apart good women have become on the topic of our life and health, and frustration at those who continue to seek to divide us with shorthand labels that insult the nuances of our lives and beliefs.
So I'm remembering the cornerstone of what I learned in newspapers, which is: When in doubt about an issue, read from as many sides of the conversation as you can bear.
Spend some time thinking for yourself.
Helpful questions to keep in mind, while you do:
What's at stake for the major players here?
When you follow the money trail for each party – who is spending the most, and why – where does it lead?
When you look at the extreme sides of each argument – i.e., who is most interested in shouting into the megaphone and least interested in listening, or having that old-fashioned civic enterprise known as a Real Conversation – what do you find?
Don't turn off your brain for any principle. If you believe that a higher power granted you life for a purpose, do Him / Her the supreme favor of using the marvelous brain you were born with, and be brave enough to live in the bands of gray where most Truth lives.
As quietly powerful religious thinkers Frances Kissling and Richard Mouw gracefully show in a moving episode of Krista Tippett's American Public Media show On Being, it is only when you stop talking long enough to really hear those with different views that you stand a chance of getting past this national shouting match over abortion and women's healthcare.
To me, the greatest human value of all is respecting one another's divine essence enough to actually see the light inside each one of us. Efforts to obscure that truth with one-topic bludgeons, to divide us from one another so we can no longer communicate with civility, is the greatest evil of all.
If you care about reading beyond the headlines, here are a few places to start. I welcome anything you've found that adds to the conversation.

The first place I found the kind of context I was looking for this morning was in this surprising backgrounder from The Daily Kos – the "largest progressive community blog in the U.S":
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/01/1060885/-Behind-the-Pink-Curtain-Komens-Political-Agenda

Here's AP's story today, on what Planned Parenthood's role in securing mammograms for women actually is:  

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iF4s0f2Mvo-5uJwdG96YyKTjmhOA?docId=144d4682a1804b2888dfc09816698362

Here's the take from the Weekly Standard, a leading neo-conservative blog founded by William Kristol:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/after-lying-about-providing-mammograms-planned-parenthood-outraged-breast-cancer-charity-cuts-grants_620875.html

When you get dizzy from the volleys, take a quiet minute to consider a more thoughtful conversation about the issues that have divided us so, from Krista Tippett, host of American Public Media's show about  values and ethics called On Being:

http://blog.onbeing.org/post/2891389588/healing-our-fractured-civil-spaces-on-abortion-by

Finally, a related essay from Christian ethicist David P. Gushee on the importance of listening:

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/listening-beyond/essay-gushee.shtml

If you care about women's lives and health, become someone who refuses to play the Divide and Conquer game.

The curious case of the $10 mystery

Bleary-eyed from hours of lilypad-leaping online, I was just about to close the laptop when i noticed a FB post from Narrative Urge, the curious spirit behind the delicious communal riddle known as the $10 art mystery:

♥ A Lost Boy on Ponce waits for rescue now
This rhyme by Frederica is meant to tell you how
Paging Charles McNair! 980 on the door
Find it find it find it please, the Bob-A-Lou on 44 ♥


My heart hopped.
I'd given up hoping one of the coveted envelopes (containing a $10 bill, a note and a snippet of prose from someone else, often an Atlanta writer) might land in my mailbox, since I'm practically invisible anymore compared to my successful writer pals Jessica Handler, Kate Sweeney, Gina Webb and Suzanne Van Atten – all of whom had either been sent a letter or had their work quoted in one.
But if I could figure out the clues ..... I could be part of the game too!
My inner Harriet the Spy purred to life. Hmmm. Ponce and Frederica? The library! It's at 980 Ponce de Leon. Charles McNair's brilliant novel "Land o' Goshen" has a club called the Bob-A-Lou!
Breathless, I threw on a ballcap and glasses and grabbed the keys. I could have walked there and back in 15 minutes but felt the pressure of time – the clues were already 20 minutes old!
Once there, I hurried back to the fiction stacks, scanned the shelves of Mc names for Charles and boom, I cradled his book in my hands. It fell open to Page 44, where a white envelope, folded in half, had been tucked between the pages.
Two words were written neatly in blue marker on the front – "for you" – just over the envelope window where Alexander Hamilton's sharply etched chin peeked through.
I stuffed the fat white square in my pocket and peered around to see if anyone was watching. Maybe Narrative Urge herself was here, waiting to see who solved the riddle?
If she was, I couldn't tell –  so I raced back home to open envelope #77.
It contained the hand-written letter I'd seen quoted before:
"Thank you for opening the envelope. The money is real. This is not an ad campaign or marketing ploy. It's an art project. Please use the hints and find us!" Signed Henri Rechatin, Oct. 5, 1966. A purple marker squiggle set off the lines "a site to see: haiku for you" and "robotic cranes dance in singapore. in taiwan appears tornadoes!"
Little black hearts enclosing tinier magenta ones opened and closed the missive.
My literary snippet – "Right, I'm classically trained. And I draw on that, but also I rebel against it, when I think it's important to tell the story" – turned out to be from an interview with Atlanta music legend Bill Taft, whose mournful horn solos helped lodge Smoke's "Another Reason to Fast" in my car's cassette player for months after it came out in 1995.
I spread the pieces out and studied them, surfed the Web to get up to speed on the unfolding story, took a few pictures.
"Follow your narrative urge!" exhorts the mystery sender in looping blue marker script across the bottom of the envelope.
Which made me wonder if this puzzle wasn't screaming so much to be solved as joined.

The whole delicious adventure made me want to round up as many participants as possible over drinks, line the literary snippets up, end to end – and see what kind of new story we could make from the mystery bits.

Walked around downtown today, marveling at the hotel atriums (hyatt, marriott marquis), chancing upon a fabulous parade (courtesy of the atlanta football classic, this year featuring the lock-tight marching 100 from famu) and wandering up and down much-loved streets from my newspaper days past. was grateful the healey building's light-kissed atrium, as lovely as ever, wasn't all locked up for the weekend.

Muffled shouts in the courtyard drew me to the window. Two guys wrestled a bulky object wrapped in blue mover's quilts and rope. They'd move it a few inches, set it down and reconsider. It took 10 minutes to get whatever it was to the bottom of the stairs. I was tempted to open the door to get a better look, but decided it might be smarter to keep my still-pajama'd self inside my own apartment and let the nice men do their work. That hallway is tight enough if you're just carting up boxes of books. They weren't arguing – their voices were more thoughtful, though I couldn't make out the words. Was the weight of the thing what slowed them down – or just figuring out how to navigate the 8 steps up to the landing and the 8 steps after? And then I remembered: A week earlier, the new neighbors had shown up early one morning. Having driven all night from New York City, they were in a hurry to unload the rental car and turn it in before they'd be charged for another day. Their realtor – who had the only key – was nowhere to be found. So they emptied all they'd crammed into the car onto that corner of the courtyard nearest their entrance. A pile of guitar cases, rolled-up carpets, boxes – and a fat-bellied black case we soon learned held an antique oud – spread across the walkway as if it had fallen from the sky. They'd just been hired by different colleges to teach music, said he – tall, with dark curls and deep laugh lines. He made conversation while she – petite, sun-colored hair – sped off to return the car. Guitar was his specialty; piano was hers. "But we won't make much noise," he said with a laugh, as if to ward off potential complaints. We begged him to reconsider. The moving-in would happen in stages, he said. Last to arrive would be his wife's piano. When it arrived, I was a thin wooden door away from all the excitement. But not, it turned out, without a view. Though I've yet to see the piano without its thick layer of blue quilt, it sounds from here as if it couldn't be happier.

kodachrome

the paul simon song i knew by heart -- but the slide film was a mystery to me.
i was deep into black-and-white photography in the '70s, the mysteries of the darkroom, the magic of images appearing from the white photo paper like spirits from another world.
the smells, the machines, the hardware drew me into seeing the world's shades of gray.
so seeing the rich color of my husband's family's collection of slide films was a delicious shock.
the pictures his father had taken over the years -- birthdays, holidays, annual camping trips -- were not just well-composed; they looked as if they'd been shot yesterday.
it seemed impossible they'd frozen time so perfectly.
terry knew the images by heart, since part of his family's tradition was regular home movie nights, sometimes silent films with popcorn and ragtime music, other times they relived the past by watching slide shows of their younger selves.
to me, they were a revelation.
it wasn't just the scenes i loved so much, the forever-young faces. it was the whole story of what the pictures meant. one in particular i especially love. it's terry at 1 or so, at the beach with his young, beautiful parents.
he wrote about it today on his Tumblr blog, on which he records the images his own eye captures, and occasionally tells a story. today's was one i loved so much i had to repost.

http://thebonaventuretapes.tumblr.com/

If you walk slow enough.....

...you'll often stumble upon delightful worlds, just a little off the beaten path. like the backyard greenhouse business of jack herman mitchell. Story: http://patch.com/A-jsxj

oy!

apologies to all seven readers (i cherish you, each and every one!) for being away from this blog for so long. i created it just to See What One Was -- and then realized that like any living thing, it needs to be fed.
oops! bad blog mommy! : (
so the good news my lack of wordage here means the wordage offstage has been happening apace, flowing like a good (stuttery, but constant) river, and therefore i can't -- as a writer who hopes (don't we all?) to someday Leave Something Behind -- be too mad about that.
nevertheless, i miss the idea of my delightful seven blessed readers, who signed up to hear What I Might Have To Say (and i type that in full knowledge of the fact that i have been (kindly) prodded to consider that perhaps i overuse the capital letter thing for emphasis. o twell. sue me!
but i digress.
aside from wanting to re-jump into the pool of cyberconversation, i just wanted to note that i LOVED this whole rant:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/qmoone/2011/06/mr-naipaul-and-becoming-a-writer/
and regret like the dickens that i ever let a former books editor insert a VSN reference into the LEDE of a book review that had nothing to do with him.
what can i say? i was young, impressionable, and stupidly swayed by males who seemed to know what they were doing.
thank heavens i'm old enough to know better.

on realness

the older i get, the more i appreciate the friends who endure.
who allow you to pick up where you left off.
who think the best of you first, not the worst.
who love you anyway.
i just came back from visiting one i've known since we were 15, when we shared some laugh in biology class. tho neither of us can remember exactly what it was, we knew we'd found a kindred spirit.
we saw each other through trying times -- my broken heart, her housefire.
when it gutted the tiny apartment she shared with her mom, she moved in with us during our junior year.
it was only 6 months, but gave us the chance to live like real sisters and gave her a look at life inside our home, warts and all.
after she moved out, we'd lose touch and reconnect as life pulled us in different directions. each time, we picked up where we left off, no one blaming the other for the lapse, both just grateful for the lines that held us still.
when she got sick last year, our conversations grew more regular. we visited in august and spent a long weekend remembering and laughing and telling each other stories about the life adventures we hadn't shared.
eight months later, we got to celebrate her successful surgery.
cancer didn't take her out, as doctors had suggested it might, but gave her yet another chance to show anyone who didn't already know that she's made of stronger stuff than most.
i haven't even downloaded the photos from this trip, but she's so much on my mind today i had to try to write about her anyway.
all the corny quotes about friendship don't come close. it's not just gratitude for the ways our teenage selves live on in each other's eyes and stories, and the ways my parents live on through her.
it's also a bone-deep reassurance that some of what i thought i knew to be true back then really was.
i'm so grateful that one of the loves i thought would last forever actually did.

Mr. Imagination rises again

The renowned visionary artist who first captivated his Chicago hometown by turning castoffs like industrial sandstone and bottlecaps into fantastical creations stopped making art for months after a 2008 fire leveled the life he thought he'd made.
In 2009, Gregory "Mr. Imagination" Warmack left Pennsylvania and moved to Atlanta.
Grieving for all he'd lost – decades of art he'd made or collected; books, photos and historical documents; his beloved dog Pharoah and a family of cats – sapped the energy he'd once used to bring new life to old things.
In his hands, spent paintbrushes and mops had become shaggy-haired kings or creatures; mountains of bottlecaps found new life in giant thrones, sculptures – even clothes. Wire screen turned into dresses, faces rose up from cement and putty.
What was real didn't die, it just came back in different forms.
Turns out, living in Atlanta has been good medicine. Mr. I's friends rallied, he found a new home, time passed. Once he got his hands moving again, the work flowed. Some bubbled up from new places, like birds carved from salvaged wood. Some stayed rooted in the old, like scorched pieces he's reconfigured, repaired or left as they were.
This time, the life he's reclaimed is his own.

http://www.accessatlanta.com/AccessAtlanta-sharing_/visual-arts-preview-mr-826795.html
http://www.barbaraarcher.com/

such a deal

so i'd had a lovely walk in the old suburban neighborhood where a friend lives. it's 30 minutes by car to get there, but worth it for all the birds, traffic-free hills and patches of woods.
when i got back home, it was misting, not quite raining. no need for the umbrella. but somehow my arms were full anyway as i exited the car, so i slammed the door with my foot.
from the second-story porch next door, a woman with dark hair waved, smiling as if we were old friends. in her arms was a tiny white dog, smaller than my cat.
i waved back.
"nice dog," i say, loud enough to carry.
"free to good home," she yells back.
at first i'm wondering why a dog needs four names. then i get it.
"don't think my cat would much care for that," i say, pausing at the sidewalk.
"oh she loves cats," the woman says. "we have three."
"tempting," i say. "but i think we're good with just the one cat right now."
she shrugs, still smiling.
"i'm joy," she says. "this is celine," she points to a girl who's maybe 20, "and he's robbie." a toddler crawls on the clay tiles in his diaper and t-shirt.
i say my name twice before she gets it. i think about asking if they're cold out there without jackets.
we smile at one another, nod the way you do when you're not sure what to say next, and go our separate ways.

catching up on where i've been

so i'm back in the world of quick turnaround newspaper stories – snapshot journalism. the kind of thing where a conversation becomes a window to a life or calling and the challenge (and joy) comes from seeing how quickly you can translate it to the page.
this is what i loved most about my last three years at the ajc, when i worked out of the gwinnett bureau.
sometimes i'd have so much fun immersing myself in one or another of the county's fascinating towns, i'd wonder what it would be like to actually live there, instead of driving up for the day and pretending.
picturing a crashpad under the trees, just small enough for a bed and desk and hotplate, i imagined being able to watch a place go to sleep and wake up, to hear its particular cast of birds and smell its particular flavor of morning.
can you ever really know a place, i wondered, without living in it?
now i get to find out.
committing to a weekly column – wherein i'm never sure what will be next but i'm on the hook for it anyway – is a big part of the charm.
here are links to a few. the first is about painter rocio rodriguez, whose terrific show at barbara archer gallery in inman park has been extended through feb. 5.

http://vahi.patch.com/articles/local-artist-brings-her-art-back-home

http://vahi.patch.com/articles/rescuing-the-rescuers-2

http://www.reporternewspapers.net/2010/12/30/churchs-divorce-recovery-group-helps-singles-learn-loss/

kudos to mtv....

...for balancing out their maddening "16 and pregnant" franchise with a solid 30-minute look at abortion, a topic that seldom gets moving, thoughtful treatment anywhere. and thanks to salon, for reviewing a show that apparently only aired once, late at night.
say what you want about dr. drew, he's consistently a source of straight, respectful talk about sex, aimed at just the audience that needs to hear it most.

www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2010/12/29/mtv_abortion_show_no_easy_choice

who knows where the time goes?

sandy denny's windswept lonely song is never far from my mind. her voice, the scratchy british grandeur of it. the images and waves of richard thompson's guitar. and her question, a heartbeat that sounds like home.
who does know? it's a riddle, a koan, a question mark that rolls on and on.
i know it's all circling, never resting. it's not a straight line the way we imagine in times of too much to do and the choking worry of not enough time to get it all done; not a ruler to be checked off in millimeters or inches, hours or minutes.
more a river that we swim or wade along.
i remember september and october and november. writing, scrubbing old walls till they are clean enough to paint. remembering and forgetting.
and here it's december, nearly the end of. i treasure the last days of each year, reluctant to let the number i've finally gotten used to -- 2010 -- leave; reluctant to get used to the new one. they change so fast.
a story before going.
on christmas day, i was in a tiny church in the florida panhandle. it was my grandmother's, when she retired to that corner of the gulf of mexico, and then my parents. my father's last christmas -- 2003 -- he'd created a songbook of christmas hymns for the church, joined the choir to add his voice to theirs. i'd gone in hopes of seeing a copy, snagging one even.
i arrived late, grabbed a seat in the back, grateful to sing those once-a-year songs with a crowd of strangers.
across the aisle, a huge man in a hunting jacket held a whimpering yorkshire terrier on his lap. everyone pretended to ignore it. i wondered how he'd gotten it past the usher.
finally, at a quiet part in the homily, a woman in a bulky fur turns around to complain to the wife, who wears all black but for a thin gold ribbon banded around her short gray hair.
"can you please do something?" she whispers. "the dog is distracting me."
the big man doesn't give his wife time to answer. "it's a baby," he hisses, "alright? he can't help it!"
her white-headed husband turns around to see who's yelling at his wife.
"don't stare at me!" the big man says, louder. "turn around! you can move if you don't like it!"
it's right in the middle of the sermon, and for a second we wonder if the young priest will intervene.
he's up there talking about light and love and waiting and the birth of a tiny king and his audience is torn.
the fur coat and her husband stand without looking back and move five pews up.
the big guy pets the pocket-sized fur coat in his lap and stares straight ahead.
finally, he gets up slowly with his dog and walks out the door.
his gold-banded wife looks around with a smile, nodding at anyone whose eye she can catch, "sorry. i'm sorry. sorry."
and on it goes.
the little gap inside what was expected closes, and everyone sings aloud the words they know by heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2xODjbfYw8

in these times

it's tempting to let the political storms rage on their own, to stay out of it, to let the crazies tire themselves before moving on.
so many of them are fronts to sow discord, to pit us against one another, to generate enough smoke that what really matters can be obscured.
sunday mornings honor thoughtfulness, whether you find your inspiration in scripture or newspapers, literature or film. it's when i most miss the kinds of shaggy conversations my parents excelled at, both natural and lifelong teachers who valued rhetoric and logic, poetry and passion, and could talk for hours about the lessons of history and civilization.

if latin -- which was called a "dead language" before its surprise return to high schools -- and the proudly low-tech game of chess can be rediscovered by the young, is it crazy to hope that debate teams could return as well? we have never needed them more, to bring back the art of weighing ideas on their merits, to understand that moral high ground is not the same as real estate. it does not belong to whoever shouts the loudest or pays the most. everything isn't relative.
two of the voices i came across this morning said what i was thinking far more persuasively than i could. i'm grateful for their voices.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/real-americans-please-stand-up/?src=me&ref=homepage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPPxBrtrH1c&feature=player_embedded

happy anniversary, mom and dad

In New York City on this day in 1951, my parents walked down the aisle at St. Thomas More cathedral in Manhattan as husband and wife. She'd just turned 24; he would be 26 in four days.
By today's standards, the wedding was small -- one maid of honor, one best man.
The cake was tiny. Guests look crowded into three long tables.
The reception appears to be in a hotel, but which one isn't clear. If I remembered to ask, the answer didn't stick.
What did was the faith and hope that carried them that day, that danced them around a banquet hall, that kept each one reaching for the other's hand.
Their joy streams forth from the grainy black-and-whites. They cannot know their shared life will eventually bring six children in 10 years, work they love and challenges they struggle to meet, an illness they cannot beat. Or which things will strengthen their bond, which nearly break it.
All that's certain is the word inscribed inside their wedding bands along with the date: Caritas.
Greek for love -- the selfless kind, the way God loves, the way we strive to love one another -- it was their guiding star, their anchor in stormy times, their rock.
Wherever they are now, the next world or someplace I can't imagine, I like to think of them as they were 59 years ago today. Their faces so innocent and beautiful, so glazed with love.

tsk tsk on me

meant to post this link to my story on three cool artists -- katie hall, right; j.d. koth and lisa tuttle -- and their work last week (argh) but hey, pix look as fresh as ever and art is up through october. if you live in (or near atlanta), the Art on the Beltline exhibit is most definitely worth a visit.

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/around-the-corner-a-573144.html

7.27.27

This is the day, 83 years ago, when M. Eileen Connolly Drennen was born.

Had my mother lived past Feb. 9, 2002, we would have had one hellacious party. Every year after 75, certainly.

As it was, the one big blowout we managed to have was for her 70th, and we made it as grand as the nursing home where she spent her last years would allow. Took over the dining room, brought in balloons and food and cake and music, and invited every relative who could make it -- including a brother she hadn't seen in 20 years.

Thank heavens for that.

I was thinking of her even more than usual today because I saw her everywhere this weekend, at another birthday celebration in Philadelphia, where my brother and his children threw a surprise party for my sister-in-law on the occasion of her 50th.

She was clearly present, in looks and spirit, in so many of the descendants who traveled far and wide just to yell SURPRISE and see Debbie's face erupt in shocked joy.

My mother's smile, dimples, great wheezy laugh; her love of song and singing, all live on in the lives she made and the lives she made possible.

So tonight I raise a glass in her honor, for all she was, and all she helped us to be; for all the stories she told us and all the ones she never found a way to tell.