At this point, someone out there is thinking, if not saying out loud, Everything Happens for a Reason. No money, no ice cream, no additional weight gain or testing the limits of the doctor’s confidence. I’m not buying it, even if I did have the five bucks for the small container. This is not an instance of the butterfly effect where a tiny, unrelated element in the larger field influences an event far away. To attribute the failure at Baskin-Robbins to some kind of hidden agency would be to undervalue the importance of chance in the acquisition of ice cream and reduce the complex interplay of factors to a simple direct causality, in other words to privilege magic. It would be to ignore the obvious truth that shit happens and, often, for no reason at all. This is sometimes hard to accept. People want certainty and there’s no certainty more potent than Everything Happens for a Reason. Part of the challenge in this time of chaos we’re living through is that we’re increasingly called upon to forego certainty and face contradiction. The faster we’re able to communicate, the less we have to say. The more futuristic the AI cultural landscape, the less visionary, indeed the more medieval, our social arrangements. The more fragmented our lives, the greater the injunction to conform to a narrow range of extremist beliefs. Complex causality tests our ability to make sense out of all this. It’s much easier to say Everything Happens for a Reason and leave it at that and this is what religion in its most basic form has always been so good at. God moves in mysterious ways. Fuhgettaboutit.

This worldview does a disservice to all forms of human creative expression. It bypasses scientific understanding but it also undermines spiritual values that foster a rich soil of wholeness and an awareness of interbeing. Instead of speaking from inside of living and dying, recognizing the matrix of causes that always exist in relation to one another, reductionist religion, whether old-timey or new age, posits a force outside of life that dictates what will happen and knows the reasons for events in advance. It turns the sacred nature of life and death into the efforts of an all-knowing puppeteer, turning a symphony of sound into a nursery rhyme. If I were to pick the one fortune cookie most appropriate to our situation, it would not be Everything Happens for a Reason. It would be my old favorite, Beware the Man of One Book.

Thinking and feeling and connecting with one another are the most profound forms of resistance to mind control. We are under assault by the depredations of the algorithm, the narrowing of the arena of free speech, the inclination to return to discredited systems of social control in the family and at the ballot box. All of this tightening of the reins presupposes and further promotes a loss of agency in the individual heart and a dangerous determinism that makes no room for changing your mind, forgetting your wallet. It is imperative to stretch our awareness to make room for the wild unpredictable energy of life, the element of surprise that shows up and laughs along with us when we least suspect it.

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When I’m alone, I carry the heft of my age around with me like a large box from the condo package room I have to lug upstairs all by myself. Sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes I can’t do it. I monitor my energy level and critique my appearance and think about end times. But every year, the time alone also feels like getting acquainted with an identical twin I didn’t know I had. I observe her taking care of herself, going deep into a Chinese restaurant menu of spiritual traditions that speak to her and ask to be given consideration. Buddhism, hasidut, Merton and Teilhard. I watch this part of myself entering a deep contemplative space, thinking about aging and loss like a research scientist on one of those cushy grants where you don’t actually have to produce anything. Read, write, meditate. Repeat.

When Frank comes home, we pick up the very different practice of aging together in the everyday. We consider our respective dietary requirements which are fiendishly different. We demonstrate our exercise regimens. We alert each other when people die. Barney Frank, Sonny Rollins, people who have made music and noise. We cuddle and giggle over long-lost girl group song lyrics. We hold each other in a rapture of deep familiarity. Every gesture resonates with its archetype from back in the seventies when we first met and even further back to our childhoods in the fifties embedded in the stories we’ve told each other over and over again. Our knowledge of one another is cellular.

On our fourth night together, we celebrate our first date night of the season, going out to our favorite local restaurant where we sit at the bar and enjoy ten dollar happy hour martinis followed by mussels and falafel wraps and baby kale salad. We immerse ourselves in the world. This is why happy hour is happy. It’s a celebration of our longevity, fifty years this coming January, and how much we’ve witnessed. Two sons, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Many arrivals and departures. The following morning, which happens to be Memorial Day, we go to check out the cemetery on Lyndale. If you go cemetery shopping you have to be matter-of-fact about it like it’s just another errand. Go to the bank, go to the post office, go to the cemetery. We find it lovely. Just the right size. Not like the vast necropolises off the LIE in Queens. Not like the tiny burial ground in El Dorado, California with its displays of plastic flowers. In the Minneapolis cemetery, there are several spouts to allow visiting families to water living plants and trash cans so they can dispose of their garden waste. The cemetery is dotted with old shade trees.

Straightaway, we decide on one large stone. We’ve only just regrouped after seven weeks and we don’t want to think of separating, even underground. This is a major departure for me after decades of leaning towards cremation. Now after four years of practicing separation and reading up on the mysteries, I am moved by the engraved stone with the husband’s birth and death dates and the wife’s unfinished history. One of us will have to wait and I’m terrible at waiting and a rank amateur at not knowing. I will have to deepen my practice. In the meanwhile, we have date night. There will be laughter and hand-holding and gratitude.

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A life heading into its last lap is so distinct from a life at the starting gate that it’s almost beyond comparison. My younger grandson, turning seventeen in August, is wading through that dense forest of college applications, doing some serious future tripping. You can almost feel the neurons colliding in his head as he weighs his options. Yesterday, he recorded an interview with me, an assignment for history class. He wanted to know about the Vietnam War, what was it like in the sixties. I tried to explain that in the college-educated middle class in 1966 when I graduated, the boys/men were understandably freaked out about the draft, but overall there was no great anxiety about planning ahead or earning a living. There were lots of jobs and piles of money lying around. Rent was cheap. You could take a shot at being a poet if that’s what you really were or even if you just wanted to check it out. I lived on 10th street and Avenue B where, granted, I was held up at gunpoint in the hallway, but it was affordable and romantic in a La Bohème starving artist kind of way. Sometimes if we had too many people hanging out in the tenement apartment, some of us would have to sit in the bathtub in the kitchen. The world was our amusement park and we headed out into it with every intention of enjoying ourselves. There may never be a party like that again.

I have to explain that, born in 1945, I’m a little too old to be a hippie or even a bonafide boomer. I thought of myself as a bohemian along the lines of Allen Ginsberg. We wore black. We smoked Gauloises. In the end, all of those labels boiled down to identifying a category of people who saw no reason to play by the old rules. Where did it get us? Cookie cutter houses in Levittown, women imprisoned in kitchens and bedrooms, children mindlessly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. We were done. We wanted something else. The power of art and rebellion and sexuality and proto-feminism was unleashed and American postwar prosperity was ready for it and gave it a wide berth.

There is no question in my mind that those of us who benefitted from that moment were just plain lucky. It was amazing grace that rained down on us. We were not saddled by crushing debt. We were less likely to be imprisoned by outdated social codes. I take no credit for the oxygenation of American culture during the period when I came of age. It just happened to me and to millions of others in my cohort, leaving some of our children and grandchildren with a faint disdain for us, as if we might prove to be undeserving, just something out of Cheech and Chong. They will have to look deeply to discover what we’ve left for them. Our legacy will not be sacrifice, the example of the privations of the Depression and the war years, or the conformism of the fifties. It will be our vision of a larger life that’s not focused on scarcity, fear, and self-denial but rather on an embrace of what makes life worth living.

I want to tell my grandson that if he concentrates solely on accumulation, he will never have enough. That if in the process of getting ahead, he loses his capacity for connection, he will find himself alone. I want him in some way to share his considerable gifts with the real world off the screen so that he stays present to its magic, and discovers the creative possibilities of the depths and heights of human fragility and expression. Most of all, I want to enjoin him to look past the beads and outlandish outfits, even the loud rock and roll soundtrack, to feel back there the seeds of the potential he has to be free, to be himself, to carry on a noble tradition of being in the world but not of the world.

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This was the week I discovered I am eighty years old. I had been witnessing myself being altogether at a loss in the middle of conversations….like what was I talking about? This was an unfamiliar situation for me. I didn’t recognize myself. Then, I had the following experience. A man I’ve known and loved for better than fifty years sent me a text. It was a picture of a group of ten mostly familiar people taken in the Berkshires in 2011, a candid shot of folks hanging out against a greener than green woodsy New England backdrop. Spring, I would say, judging by what people were wearing. Some were standing, some sitting on the grass, several held paper plates or plastic glasses. An occasion for celebration of some kind. Frank was off to the right wearing shades and that great 40s vintage shirt of his. He and I, responding to the text from California and Minnesota respectively, were both blown away by the unexpected back-in-time and completely stumped by the woman in the tight jeans and green shirt with the short hair and the raised martini glass standing alone in the foreground. Neither of us could identify the mysterious stranger and both of us refused to entertain the possibility that her name was Susie. I didn’t recognize myself. “I’m not sure that’s you,” Frank said. “I never looked like that,” I protested, figuratively stamping my foot when my friend doubled down on his claim that it was me. “Yes, you did,” he repeated. “That’s you with the martini and the green shirt and the short hair and you’re just gorgeous.”

Six degrees of separation and eight levels of derangement later, I went into the photo library on my MacBook and checked out what I looked like in 2011 when Frank and I took lots of pictures in London and Paris. Here’s Susie at the British Museum. Here’s Susie in the Marais, both Susies softly entering their oldness at sixty-six. I felt like an imposter in the Berkshire picture and kept saying “I never looked like that,” as if for someone to suggest that I had were an offense, a misrepresentation. This despite the fact that there was evidence. My friend suggested wryly that it might be AI. Never forego an opportunity to blame AI for something.

So this is a deep unmediated dive into aging and vanity and identity. I’m accustomed to what I look like as an older woman and found it extremely disorienting to be called upon to remember a time not that long ago, at least for one day in Great Barrington in 2011, when I was fleetingly and uncharacteristically glamorous. I didn’t recognize myself. Maybe because I’m small, I tend to think I’m physically unremarkable, not a person whose appearance occasions a whole lot of notice one way or the other. This allows me to detach from the surface and focus on the interior, on my thinking life, my feeling life, my writing life, my life in spirit, parts of me I have a longstanding affection for. I imagine this is a very outdated subject that has been beaten to a pulp within an inch of its life, but for me the unrecognizable photograph of myself propelled this issue to the front of the line and made it demand to be heard. Especially now at eighty when I’ve long outlived my market value, I want to be seen for something essential about myself, not for what I look like. Comprende? Vershtehst? You’d think I would be capable of accepting a compliment gracefully, but I’m particularly sensitive about all this in the current Epstein, Mar-a-Lago, Met Gala climate of gawking at what Amy Odell in the Times calls “rich faces.” “A rich face, Odell writes, “is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants.” A rich face is no longer recognizable as the person you once knew. I didn’t recognize myself. I thought I had aged out of all that artifice and, like other women I know, was feeling relief. But no. Even the lovely Michelle Pfeiffer appears on my screen in a current TV series with lips that look like they’ve been inflated with a bicycle pump. All this remains a part of the human condition that I have to contend with when really I’d rather stay in bed in my pajamas and caress the keyboard. All this parading around with fixed expressions on indistinguishable faces and breasts so engorged as to threaten the free flow of air is nothing less than grand larceny nor maybe grand theft photo. Like taking pictures of tribal peoples who see the camera as a device that steals something from them that is rightfully theirs. This is where I went from “you’re just gorgeous” in response to a photograph of me that I didn’t recognize. This is how the deepening content of my knowing and forgetting met up with the expiration date on the packaging.

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Despite the fact that my cursive is nasty, I was tickled this morning when I saw an item in the NYT about the revival of school composition writing in longhand. Because AI has made term papers about Bismarck, Hester Prynne and so on available in seconds, there is no longer any point in assigning them to high school sophomores. The very word research has been degraded by the quaint notion that you can go online for twenty minutes and become an expert on the efficacy of vaccines or the latest use of antisemitic memes. Kids are no longer writing papers at home in front of the TV and may not even watch TV. They are, according to the Times, writing about their own responses to the bullying of Hester Prynne with number 2 pencils during the school day, leaving them much more time for Tik Tok at home. The entire enterprise is losing its appeal. What is there to teach? What is there to learn? Some people believe that education should prepare kids for the real world, whatever that is. This is the “how to” school of pedagogy…how to balance a checkbook, how to apply for a job. This reduces the Mind to a manual that addresses functional skills but misses the part about Ideas and the Inner Life altogether. On the other hand, maybe the Mind is overrated and maybe there’s no such thing as Time, although the capitalization does confer gravitas.

It’s hard to tell. Especially if you continue to be impressionable as I am at 80 and find that you’re open to new ideas. New ideas arrive like FedEx packages at my doorstep unannounced. This doesn’t necessarily make me more broad-minded, but it does make me feel more alive, even when the ideas are distressing. It makes me somewhat reluctant to give up on my old friend, the Mind. Not being sure where I come down on this question, I made a foray to Half-Price Books the other day where I discovered an original 1957 Vintage paperback of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. Just in case I harbored any illusions about Truth, the book itself proved to be an exemplar of Impermanence, crumbling in my lap the minute I picked it up. Every page I turned cracked at the spine, scattering desiccated crumbs of wisdom all over the couch. This seemed to underscore Watts’ point about hsin, the ancient Chinese word that best approximates the English word Mind. Hsin, writes Watts, is true, is working properly, when it works as if it were not present. The true mind is no mind. No news is good news.

This gave me something to think about in my otherwise empty, Time-drenched day. I slept deeply and woke up to twenty-four brand new hours, as Thich Nhat Hahn would say. I said the modeh ani, giving thanks for that greatest of blessings and made myself a cup of coffee.

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Imagine now the big shots in tuxedos and ball gowns crouching under the tables at the Washington Hilton the night before. Like many of you, I watched the unfolding chaos in real time when the network cut away from the basketball playoff game. I was at my son’s house where my family was all decked out in Timberwolves shirts watching Ayo Dosunmu defy gravity. Suddenly, it wasn’t about basketball, it was about political theater. We watched in disbelief as terrified women in dresses that cost thousands of dollars submitted to the pushing and shoving of Secret Service agents while Trump tripped and fell on his way out of the ballroom which is not his ballroom and therefore not an acceptable ballroom. How far from Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis could I be? In Washington, in place of the art-making, the power of community joining together, the collective grieving, what we were given to witness was a roomful of the overfed trampling one another to get out of the room followed within minutes by a dizzying tornado of spin. The president seemed to be enjoying himself. Nothing trumps a failed assassination attempt as far as getting attention is concerned. Everyone was watching. It had the quality of a dream, like seeing the J6ers scale the walls of the Capitol. Something had changed, the frog was getting cooked and I was watching it on ABC in my son’s basement.

On his Substack, John Pavlovitz, a former United Methodist pastor, describes the fallout from this experience as contact insanity. The daily posturing and gaslighting of the administration and its MAGA minions have spread their contagion throughout our fragile culture. “That leaves the rest of us;” Pavlovitz suggests, “the sleep-deprived, heartbroken, rightfully furious human beings to try and hold onto our right minds while being immersed in the insane, the profane, and the cruel.” Trump wants to bring us down to his level, wants us crouching under the table, trembling in fear. He wants to batter the empathy, the open-heartedness, the civility out of us so that we lose our desire to defend ourselves and our country. This is, may I remind you, our country.

He almost had me Sunday evening alone in my condo after I returned from the sidewalk memorials in Minneapolis. You’d think I would have been inspired by the collective witness to the murders of Good and Pretti…and I was. But my system was so shocked by the disconnect between the smirking theatrics at the Hilton the night before and the dignity of the shrines, that I started to lose it. I began to feel unsafe inside of myself. I didn’t pray or meditate or write. I went down to my friendly neighborhood grocery and bought something for dinner. In the store, I waited on line behind Somalis in hijabs and hasidim in kippot. I smiled at my contemporaries shuffling along and at lively children angling for candy. Then I went upstairs to my sanctuary and made a piece of salmon with a side of spinach and some steamed potatoes. I gratefully fed myself simple, basic, nutritious food and I committed yet again to take care of myself and to love as much as I can. That’s my strategy. What’s yours?

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Predictability, it seems, is for oddsmakers and they don’t always get it right. Sometimes the horse is having a bad day like me when I don’t sleep well and wake up miserable and unwilling. Sometimes the horse doesn’t run a good race. People claim to love surprises, hoping that some day all their friends will jump out from behind wing chairs wearing little party hats when they open the front door on their birthday. But most of us want to know what to expect so that we can tame the future and keep it on a leash. The weather, for example. Now we have 80 degree days in April, too hot to sit in the sun even though we’ve waited all winter for that opportunity. This foretaste of summer will likely be followed by 40 degree days complete with fierce winds and cold rain. Back in the day, I had something called a spring coat that came out of storage on a predetermined date around Easter and was worn until the middle of June, preferably with black Mary Janes. Something in me is nostalgic for that sentimental certainty even if I can do without the navy and white checked coat. Nat King Cole should have named his song “Unpredictable” instead of “Unforgettable,” although I did once own a jacket that I bought from his widow in a tag sale and the fact of that is certainly unforgettable.

Predictability is all about interpreting memory. This happened once therefore it will happen again. But this calculation is impersonal. There’s a lot about memory, a lot about how life unfolds, that eludes logic. Being in thrall to a disease process that is beyond understanding is a terrible place to be. But I admit there’s something about unpredictability that I find comforting. It means that we are not all coloring inside the lines. I reassure myself that AI may know what Kash Patel likes to drink but it does not know the taste of the green mousse my mother made out of vanilla ice cream and lime jello served in parfait glasses or my feeling of breathless exultation when I saw the tall cold glasses lined up in the refrigerator. Every time the Weather Station gets it wrong, part of me thinks it’s one for the win column even if it’s disruptive or disappointing. Actuarial numbers only go so far. Someone at Medicare probably predicted that I might fall down the escalator at the airport in Minneapolis, but no one knows what that was like for me, catapulting down the jagged metal moving steps, my bags flying off in different directions according to the principles of physics. It was frightening, of course. But my body also remembered it as a sly reference to rolling down the dunes in Provincetown back when the steep sandy declines were not off limits. A safer, softer freefall, Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. This is a descent that can be reliably predicted. We just, as the song goes, don’t know where or when.

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Perhaps you remember 11th grade world history where you learned about the causes of World War I. Militarism, imperialism, a whole parade of isms, laid the ground work. Then a Serbian hothead assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It only takes one match for everything to catch fire, but there has to be kindling. I’m not advocating for war, god knows. Just pointing out that transformation is a deeply complex process. Resistance in this country has a long and glorious history and certainly did not begin with the response to the ICE Surge in the midwest, but now it feels like it’s gaining momentum as Trump mires us in war in Iran and utters one indefensible outburst after another. Change is inevitable. It’s in the DNA of human history. Those who think they can impose a form of tyranny from above will in due course find themselves standing on their heads. As Brecht wrote, “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” Nothing can stop change. Our challenge is to commit that to memory and make it our mantra.

As if to illustrate this teaching, I received a large priority mail box the other day packed with letters from the early ’70s written on that nostalgic tissuey air mail paper. The letters had been collected by my first husband who died in February. Half were from friends in the States who wrote to us in Sweden where we lived in the American exile community during the Vietnam War. The other half were sent by resisters who remained in Sweden and wrote to us stateside after we came home in 1972. A large percentage of the correspondents have died, taking with them the memories of that extraordinary time of boundary crossing. But I’ve got the correspondence and because I’ve always had a writer’s curiosity about the particulars of other people’s lives, I’ve been gorging myself on all those stories.

The ones from Sweden tell the history of the young American men who said “no” to the draft and were willing to leave home and hunker down in a cold, unfamiliar place to protest the war. They were part of the politics that resulted in the end of the slaughter in the jungle in 1975. It took a long time but it happened. Some of the letters were from women friends at home and later from the wives and girlfriends of resisters in Sweden. They wrote rapturously about the energy of the early years of the women’s movement, the first consciousness raising groups that radicalized so many people. They were there when women said “no” to the old ideas about gender, about marriage. It takes forever, doesn’t it? There have been setbacks. We still have the Swalwells to contend with but the arc of history remains bent in our favor. That’s the story- and it bears repeating - “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” There are more robins and more budding trees out my window this morning than there were yesterday.

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This is where I feel the most safe these days. It’s a place that maintains the possibility of normalcy however illusory. The ducks are paddling on the pond two by two celebrating their avian love affairs amid signs of the coming spring. There are males with green heads courting their less flamboyant womenfolk. The geese have not arrived in large numbers to plaster the paths with their leavings, but one of their number makes an appearance, joining right in with the ducks as if species intermingling were unexceptional. The cottonwoods, which are budding, have not yet produced the white fluff that will cover every surface. Later this afternoon, I’ll make soup, submerging a chicken carcass in water with carrots and onions as my grandmother did before me. I cling to that image even though it was a struggle for me to love my brittle grandmother as a child and I preferred the Liptons dehydrated to the homemade soup. I regarded her story - Ellis Island, her husband dead in his forties - with indifference back then. But now I need her in my corner, times being what they are.

I need all the help I can get to keep from slipping off the seesaw onto the harsh playground gravel when I watch the news or suffocating in a sandbox of despair thinking about the myriad ways I have failed to be the person I had hoped to be. I will consider the blessing of aging in amazement. As Heschel advised, “just to be is a blessing.” Still it’s hard not to fall. Everything is always threatening to disrupt my equanimity by sneaking up on me and insisting on being either personal or political or both. I take it personally when Hegseth asks us to pray in the name of Jesus Christ. I take it personally when people talk about depriving married women of the vote. First I scratch my head in bewilderment. Is this for real?. Then I become furious. Bring back the ducks.

These days there’s a lot of talk about hope. It’s a deep inquiry. Hope in its conventional Hallmark meaning bleeds easily into disappointment. That’s because in that usage hope is really a misnomer for “want.” I want this horror movie that we’re living in to end and I want it now. At the same time, I have no idea what will happen. Just as I don’t know what will happen in my own life going forward. I want to stay healthy for a long time and die gracefully without fanfare. We all want that but we’ve seen in the deaths of friends and family members how that doesn’t always happen. Perhaps rarely. Every year that we are given comes with more sobering experience of this reality. We don’t always get what we want. What does it mean, then, to hope?

I’m going to take a flier here and suggest that it seems to have something to do with reinvigorating the future. To believe in the reality of the future is not to claim that one knows what it will be. It may be a garden of earthly delights. It may be a hellscape. Or it may be an infinite number of possible places in between. We are so paralyzed by the present that we’ve abandoned the future and that is a very dystopian posture to assume. Hope asks us to face the future and acknowledge the sunrise of every new day. Watching the sun arrive like wise men from the East, hope asks us to be open to possibility, to consider the balancing act of both transformation and acceptance that this moment of deep unknowability carries. Hope asks us to listen to the honking of the waterfowl and summon the courage to be part of their story.

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My great-grandchildren go to a public pre-K through third grade school in the Sierra foothills in the gentle, hilly, landscape around Sutter’s Mill where gold was first discovered. Gold brought out a rapacious greed in people and its mining despoiled this beautiful countryside, so there are a great many stories here. The school itself is located in a series of small structures that, unlike the schools I went to in New York, do not resemble a prison. The kids hug their teachers. Sometimes, they even hug each other. My granddaughter, Breanna, after extensive research, selected Sutter’s Mill for her kids because she sensed that “faith-based” families had gravitated towards this part of the district. I put this term in quotes because I’m not sure what she has in mind when she uses it. Breanna and her husband were baptized last year even though she had no previous religious affiliation and he was raised in the Mormon church. It’s their way of being in community and of creating some kind of protective cushioning for their kids who face what we all know is a harsh and threatening world. As far as I know, there is no iconography in the classrooms and nothing explicitly Christian in the teaching. It’s a public school and has to respect the conventions of separation of church and state but most of the parents bring their children to church on Sunday and that vibe extends into Monday and through the week. I can feel it in my Jewish bones. If you asked me what I mean by that, I’d be hard pressed to explain, but Breanna is like a messenger from another world. She brings a particular kind of presence to me, allowing me to let go of some of my fast-talking, hard-driving, city girl defensive posture. I’m more open to her way in the world now, even if it’s not mine. I’m better able to distinguish between her flavor of faith and Christian Nationalism which I fear and deplore. This is a crucial distinction.

It’s noteworthy to me that she made a point of asking about my son, Isaac, whose father died in February. She didn’t do that to be polite. She did it because she was concerned about him and wanted to know how he was managing the loss of his father. I told her that he seemed to be doing well and that he had adopted the practice of saying kaddish on the sabbath. I explained that our synagogue only offered services twice a month so he often went to other congregations. “Why can’t he just say it at home?” she asked. “Because he has to say it in a minyan, in community,” I explained and she got it immediately. How, in fact, can you learn to care about other people if you’re not connected in community, in family, in a congregation, in a neighborhood? There has to be come collectivity that presents opportunities for learning to be human. Spiritual practice, I am learning at this late date, is not only about being contemplative. It’s about sharing in other people’s struggles and triumphs. I consider myself very fortunate to be back in Minnesota where this idea has gone viral. May all our communities flourish.

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Time changes all that, of course, and a new pharaoh arises in Egypt, a new generation takes the reins. I was very aware of this passage recently when I went to a large birthday party in Berkeley in honor of my glorious niece who turned sixty. Berkeley, of course, is not like the rest of the world. To begin with, nobody ever moves away. The party was filled with people who had gone to school together, at least as far back as junior high, and still lived there high in the hills overlooking the Bay. Now they were attending their kids’ college graduations and planning for retirement. So poignant. These women, especially, seemed infinitely beautiful to me, twenty years younger than I am and still generating a heatwave of erotic buzz, yet no longer young. Navigating hormonal changes, dealing with elder parents in need of support, themselves making initial visits to the offices of specialists. I can touch the experience of sixty year olds in a way that I can no longer resonate with the energy of my twentysomething grandchildren, even though my love for them burns in me like a bonfire. I love them irrationally, independent of anything they say or do.

Every generation has its own fixations and its own soundtrack. Madelyn, my great-granddaughter, who turns five in May, has just learned how to ride a bike and knows all the latest K-pop lyrics. She has designed a whole dance routine to “Takedown” even though she doesn’t know where Korea is or even what it is. She also walks around saying “six seven” in that whiny voice that kids take on when they’re saying something they suspect is meaningless but which nonetheless gives them special power over you. What does it mean? What does it mean? We’ll never know. We are all just passing through, each in her own time, with her own top forty, her own identifying foliage. I recognize members of my tribe when I encounter them out in the world and I cherish them, knowing their numbers are dwindling, but I try to remember not to cling to generational exceptionalism. Space must be made for the retiring sixty year olds and the hard-driving forty year olds. We are all aging in amazement, even Madelyn riding her bike around the backyard.

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In this loud, filthy, chaotic present, my friend the future doesn’t return my calls. I need her to ground me, to give me perspective, but now she’s gone and I don’t know where she went. This train I’m on is moving so fast, war in Iran and Lebanon, blockade in Cuba, cars crashing into synagogues, that there’s no longer anything to hold onto to maintain stability. I look for my friend, but she’s gone. The rest of us are all trapped on a very hot, very crowded subway that isn’t moving. We are all stuck underground and we have no idea when this will end. All of God’s children and grandchildren are on this train. Women in shoes that don’t fit. Straphangers with sweat pouring down their necks. Children screaming because it’s that time of day and they’re tired and hungry. Black kids with earbuds. Puerto Rican girls with magnificent nails. Chinese ladies lugging groceries. We are all stuck on this train trying to survive another day in the Empire.

Living with Trump is like having several additional jobs, moonlighting as a political analyst, a psychiatrist, a pre-school teacher. Every day, we’re called upon to monitor his moods, his level of mania, his willingness to work and play well with others. Not to mention the rash on his neck and his tendency to nod out during strategic sessions with his generals. It’s exhausting. We all feel the pressure, the fatigue, the claustrophobia like the crush in the subway. This is a very demanding job we did not interview for, the job of resisting autocracy while maintaining our own equanimity. You can monitor your news intake and shore up your diet with mental health supplements like music and gardening but he’ll still be there spitting toxic substances at you when you wake up tomorrow. Some days I get that joy is the best resistance. Some days, not so much. Still, there are bright spots. He’s getting squeezed in the Strait of Hormuz which is a delight, spiking gas prices notwithstanding. I love the idea of him getting stuck in there like the piece of excrement that he is, unable to exit the large intestine. He seems to have been out sick the day they taught the crucial lessons about collaboration. To make a movie, or win a ballgame, to wage war or govern, you need to coordinate the talents of many people. One self-deluded tyrant can make a lot of noise and cause a great deal of damage but he cannot in the long run win the game. The future is not his friend.

We need to know this in our bones. While we’re packed into the train, assaulted on all sides by the raging racket, we need to catch a glimpse of the child with her head in her mother’s lap and the young lovers holding hands believing in their coming life together and we need to sign on and support our friendship with that future. We need to revive our love for her, our long forgotten belief in her. Children will be our allies in this effort. My great-grandchildren are innocent of the degradation of the present and alive to the allure of the next ice cream cone, the next bike ride. They have new baby chicks to play with and they cup these tiny furry creatures in their hands and whisper to them lovingly because they know what it’s like to be very small and have your whole life ahead of you.

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Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Over the millennia we have always known this. Whatever it is, we’re in it together. Trade unionists knew this. People lifting their voices in Black churches knew this. Everything I’m reading at this dark hour points to the understanding that our flourishing, indeed our survival, depends on interconnection, on developing a greater capacity for experiencing the reality of interbeing. Deep down we are wired to seek community even if we go through periods of amnesia where we lose touch with this essential human need. Our recent history demonstrates how it is possible for individuals, in fact entire societies, to become mired in a swamp of forgetting, in an orgy of grabbing and self-aggrandizing gimme gimme. But in the long run nothing can defeat our basic yearning for one another, our overarching desire for one another. Not even AI. Not even our phones. Community is like food, like sex. We will always come back for it because life itself depends on it.

We saw this in the street in Minnesota. The power of that mass action was not only that ordinary citizens were able to substantially undermine the efforts of ICE to terrorize their neighbors and that people in need were fed and housed and protected. It was also the impact of that action on the rest of us. We saw what community can do and it filled us with joy because we resonate with it. We know that that’s who we really are. I will wear my new pin with pride when I get back to St. Louis Park at the end of the month. And I will keep one eye on the unfolding of the Nobel Peace Prize selection process now that the old progressive periodical, The Nation, has nominated the entire city of Minneapolis for the honor. Community is back, baby.

Even so, I must admit that I have been slow to arrive at this awareness. I am not a joiner by nature and I tend to feel resistant to belonging even while I’m magnetized by it. I want it but I don’t want it. This is especially true in the context of religious observance where I have always bristled at the idea that I couldn’t go it alone, cloister-style, like one of the Desert Mothers. Why must a mourner go to synagogue to say kaddish in a minyan of ten worshippers? Why can’t she say it on her back porch watching the sun go down? Because, the Tradition tells us, the shekinah, the presence of God, dwells among the people, certainly not above them. A shachen is a neighbor. and we are enjoined to love our neighbors as ourselves. Understand that it is in hospitality, in generosity, in caring for and honoring the holiness of the other that life-giving love flourishes and exercises its power to heal. I feel this when I make sandwiches out of raw English muffins, frozen fried eggs and sausage patties for people in the Sierra foothills who have nothing else to eat. I know this, I do, but I have been resistant. I have been resistant because I was brought up in separateness and alienation. The natural human leaning into community has been scratched out of me by modern life, by self-checkout, by the sheer flattening effect of the terrible news every day that pushes me further and further into a defensive corner. I operate under the illusion that I can go it alone against the crushing deprivation and soul-violence that rains down. But I cannot. It is essential that I reach out in all my awkwardness and vulnerability to risk being part of something much larger than myself. Thich Nhat Hahn understood this when he said that the next buddha will not be a man in a robe sitting under a bodhi tree. The next buddha will be the sangha, a collective I imagine in sweat pants and sneakers.

The evolution of consciousness towards greater presence will be born out of our recognition of the sacred life-giving energy that we generate in common with one another with stories, singing, marching, cooking and sharing food. For me and for many of us, our gift for community has atrophied from disuse, but the trace memory of it lingers and this is where we will find the hope we want so much to keep alive. Hope is not something out there that we’re trying to grab and hold on to. Hope is something inside of us waiting to be re-activated and shared. Hope is the joy that bubbles up when we recognize that our lives are entwined in an intricate fabric that cannot be shredded.

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Focus on what you love: Take care of your beloveds.

This seems like wisdom to me. Unadorned, not dressed up with arcane practices or even incantations in ancient languages, as beautiful as these may be. Humble. What’s most important to me? My people. I love my people with unreserved abandon. I love their gifts, the scent of them when we embrace, our shared histories, our flourishing and our struggles. Most of all, I love the various ways we are doing what we can to be our best selves. I am deeply touched by that. The more I see it in people I love, the more I see it in myself and vice versa. Long relationships are filled with joyous celebrations, fabulous meals, travel, convulsive laughter. But also with hard times, arguments, periods of estrangement. In the sticking it out, we get to see that people really do have the capacity to change and become more beautiful. I gave my friend Andy a piece of beach rock when he was dying 20 some odd years ago and I asked him if people said stupid things. Without missing a beat, Andy said “not my people.” My people, I felt sure he was saying, don’t fill the air with platitudes. They concentrate their energies on matters of the heart and the heart is where their speech originates.

On Monday, sitting in my winter space in the Sierras, I live-streamed the funeral of my first husband. I saw my son and daughter-in-law and my two grandsons on the screen. Of five Brooklyn Jews born in the mid-forties who were devoted to one another, only one is left. Larry spoke lovingly of his friend Steve, as did my son and his younger boy. Everyone knew it was an occasion of great moment, a time when the wind was shifting and the generations were passing one another on the road. My grandson said he would read his remarks off his phone. It’s a generational thing, he commented. I marvel at them, the young ones, but today I’m thinking more about my contemporaries and how they’ve learned to fully occupy the space they’ve been given in the short time they have.

For myself, I’m returning again and again to speech and to the questions that we are called to ask ourselves when considering mindful speech…..Is it necessary? Is it kind? Is it true? I find myself staring down a little story that I feel the urge to pass along even if it’s not either necessary or kind. It’s as if the story is an adversary I have to stand up to. The story may be true in a limited sense since I’m probably not privy to all of the factors that would determine its veracity, but it’s definitely not necessary or kind. I feel the urge to repeat it rising up in me and the little frisson of excitement anticipating the other person’s reaction, the dubious pleasure of the shared deep dive into gossip. But then I find that I don’t have to tell the story. I can forego the buzz and hold the story lightly until its energy dissipates and I no longer feel the temptation, until the cloud passes from in front of the sun. This is a new development for me like learning a foreign language. In the past, I had an intemperate relationship to speech. I said whatever came into my head, sometimes with dire consequences and often with deep regret after the fact. I see myself developing the capacity to be aware of what words come out of my mouth and I am glad and grateful in the same way I’m glad and grateful for the ability of previously enraged people to hold their anger until the juice is drained out of it. It almost doesn’t matter whether the person being liberated from the grip of compulsion is me or someone else. It’s all good.

I’m averse to framing all this as “working” on myself. I prefer to think of it as enjoying a series of unexpected encounters with loving. Opportunities are everywhere but they multiply when someone dies. Everyone’s heart rests naked in her chest and wants to be met with caring and honoring. You and I can help one another pass out of this world and we can support the mourners who remain here. As the poet John Roedel has written, “You are the world’s threshold to kindness.” If I hold this suggestion lightly, if I don’t work too hard on the sweeping and shoveling, the threshold will be clear, people will feel welcome and I will have done what I can to honor and take care of my beloveds coming and going.

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I begin with Place because nothing happens unless it happens somewhere, in my case in a sixteen story apartment house on the southeast corner of 83rd street and Broadway in Manhattan. Some three hundred people lived in that building if you can believe it. The weight of the marital discord, the financial insecurity, the health crises pressed down on the people on the lower floors from the struggles of those above, flattening them like old Chevys in a compactor. A vertical childhood is dense with the stuff of life, dank and airless in comparison to a childhood like the one my great-grandchildren are enjoying where running out into the yard to dig for worms remains a possibility. We didn’t have yards or worms. We had asphalt and pigeons. There were, I suppose, families changing the water in the philodendron, keeping parakeets in cages, walking their poodles and cocker spaniels, but many of these people were refugees from the shtetl, from the camps. I grew up with melancholy and displacement, but also with pyrotechnics in many languages and feats of daring imagination. You could not see a distant horizon with sheep grazing in the meadow from my bedroom window, but you could fold in on yourself and make literary discoveries that waited inside you for the right time, their moment of liberation. The sheer compression of all those people crammed into one space had a profound influence on who I am. The crush of the crowds in the stores, on the street and in the subway, formed me. The Place I grew up in, New York in the ‘50s, was an Influencer.

There seem to be a great many individuals now who call themselves Influencers. I don’t know who these people are or what they do, how they expect to plant their taste in clothing, music, food, politics and so on in my head so that I will spend my money for example on certain wellness supplements, but I can tell you that growing up in the pressure cooker of upper Broadway I had to fight to fend off the onslaught of other people’s opinions. I had to kick and scream to become my own person, to become a writer in my own right. It took years and years to cleanse myself of the anxiety of influence as the critic Harold Bloom wrote in his 1973 book of that name. Bloom was writing about poets needing to alleviate the pressure of the past in order to create space for their own work. I had Isaac Bashevis Singer up the block. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t recognize the debts I carry, intellectually, artistically, spiritually. But I have to chew for a while and digest other people’s experience, allowing it to take its sweet time settling into my organism so that I can add it to the existing chemistry. I can’t just slap it on like pancake make-up because some tik-tokker thinks its hot.

There are many people to whom I’m indebted, but I can only invite them in a few at a time. Today, I want to acknowledge George Orwell whose fierce devotion to telling the truth as he saw it remains a model. His defense of the posture of democracy and free speech has sustained me since I first read Homage to Catalonia in college. I’d love to be able to introduce him to Grace Paley, the feminist and anti-war activist, who produced a small output of flawless stories while marching tirelessly in support of civil rights and against nuclear weapons. I am usually averse to cozying up to celebrity, but her older sister, Jean, who called her Gracie, lived in my building on 83rd street and befriended my mother so I take certain liberties. I want to tell George and Gracie that I can’t do without them. In a world where everything seems provisional, where four different people who are actually bots have recently sent me marketing pitches, I need to remember where I come from and I need to acknowledge the influence of real people, writing real books and doing real work on behalf of the common good.

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When I arrived, I was delighted to discover a sizeable assortment of stones and other fun New-Age ephemera: smudge sticks, hand-harvested teas with names like “Moon Majik” and “Witch’s Detox,” miniature glass charms of takeout containers and avocados, ironic and nostalgic bumper stickers. I soon had a full basket of nonsense. Then I entered the plant room.

So many plants! I circled the ersatz greenhouse several times, taking in the familiar and foreign flora, enchanted by the variegated greens, whites, and browns, the spikes, ruffles, and fluffs. I knew that I was going to take one home and was considering some of the smaller specimens. In truth, I had seen the one I wanted the moment I walked in, but hadn’t fully admitted it to myself. Isn’t it funny how, as much as we learn to hone our knowing, we still sometimes engage in those little dances of indecision?

She was hanging from the ceiling, deep green almond-shaped leaves cascading more than a foot over the edge of the planter. Tucked here and there were little cups- frilly dark maroon flowers with magenta buds just beginning to peek out. I might have audibly gasped. After my third time round, I emptied my basket, save for a nostalgic bumper sticker, and left with what I learned was called a Lipstick plant, on the verge of blooming.

About a week later, Loreen, as I had spontaneously named her after a former mail-lady, showed her stuff. The lipstick plant is thus called in reference to the bright pink flowers that emerge from its tiny cups, much like a lipstick unrolled from its tube. I had chosen the perfect indulgence, a gift to myself of beauty and frivolity. Loreen is no common spider plant or ubiquitous philodendron. She is an unassuming show-stopper.

The Genus name for the lipstick plant is Aeschyanthus, derived from the Greek words aischyne, meaning shame, and anothos, flower. Yep. Shame-flower. That’s what it’s called. Because, of course it is. Because vegetation blossoming unapologetically should be ashamed of itself. Heavens to Betsy look at the way it flaunts its bright protrusions! The public ignominy! The disgrace!

An image of Marilyn Monroe, the patron saint of unabashed sex-appeal comes to mind. Her dazzling red lips adorn magazine covers, advertisements, and television screens. Our collective grandmothers gasp, “She should be ashamed!” But she totally wasn’t. Among myriad others, Ms. Norma Jean certainly did her part to toss shame out on its demurely covered behind.

Alas, my mouth was never quite like Marilyn’s. As a girl, I loathed my huge front teeth. I was far from conventionally “pretty” and felt so ashamed of my mouth that I’d smile with closed lips. I swooned over my older sister’s school photo. I’d sneak into the bathroom, apply sticky lip gloss from its fuzzy wand, and practice smiling like her, teeth showing, in the mirror. I was surprised at how this actually looked better, but it would be years before I’d show this version to anyone else.

By high school, I collected LipSmackers like so many baseball cards: Watermelon, marshmallow, and my favorite, Dr. Pepper. Applying copious amounts of chapstick gave me something to do with my hands while I stood uncomfortably outside underage punk shows.

Later came maroon lipstick and winged eyeliner, a daily ritual I mistook for confidence. I wore makeup not to stand out, but to fit in. I couldn’t fathom allowing anyone to see me “without my face on.” Eventually, it became a habit of professionalism and a convention of what I considered adulthood.

In my thirties, something shifted. I honed in on a deep knowing that something was out of alignment. I shed a fiancé and a career. Discomfort fell like a silk robe to the floor. I moved to the Berkshires, fell into contemplative practices, and stopped painting my mouth. I was busy unearthing other things: beliefs, patterns, wounds I had finally named. Bare lips felt honest. Necessary. I wanted to see and present my own face without embellishment, to learn its lines and love them. To smile, open-mouthed, teeth front and center. What I discovered is that I have always liked being seen. I talk a lot. I laugh loudly. I make friends easily. The bloom was never the problem. The shame was.

Nowadays I occasionally use a rose-toned paraben-free/gluten-free/cruelty-free organic tinted beeswax lip balm. Because, of course I do. But when I go out, the bright red tube comes out. I don’t apply it to hide or conform. I wear the red to stand out and, more importantly, feel my gorgeous self. Like Loreen, I continue to bloom.

She hangs from the corner of my bedroom ceiling, her green leaves tumbling over her barely visible vessel. Amidst the guilt, shame, and pressure to conform, magenta calyxes burst forth from delicate maroon cups. She continues to bloom, unashamed, unapologetic. Loreen has no problem showing off. Neither do I.

As a jewel on the crown of outfit creation, I apply lipstick. I lean into the mirror, close to my own face, parting my lips just so. I unwind a tube of Cherry Pop Red, Walk on the Beach, Berry Bliss, and trace outlines that brightly stain my perimeters, then center, in the way only I know how. I give a wink, blow a kiss, might even audibly gasp, then head out the door.

Kristin Grippo is a rogue educator, storyteller, and mom who loves connecting with people of all ages. A friend to all, she brings curiosity, humor, and heart to everything she shares.

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I was astonished, then outraged, then offended. Well, if that’s the way they want to be, I mumbled under my breath. I actually had to tell myself not to take it personally. What’s the origin story of that? Hiding, silence, rejection. These unsuspecting frogs were carrying a lot of baggage. I love it when a scene that you didn’t see coming unfolds right in front of you like a parable or an idea for a children’s book. This piece is a collaboration between me and the sorry world we all live in. I have an earlier frog story, but I think I’ve used it too many times. It’s about loss and growth and compassion, a little boy and a frog. This new one unrolls a ball of yarn having to do with being in nature without knowing much about it and the delusion of not being in nature, being outside of it. In particular, it’s a story about predation. My first response was to feel shut out, excluded from the amphibian play date as if the whole thing unfolded in seventh grade and I had not been invited to someone’s birthday party. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood the frogs’ point of view. I am a really small person, but to them I’m a giant. The sound of my footfall on the road causes alarm as hard as that may be to believe. They don’t know me so they’re wary in case I turn out to be a bad actor like the local raccoon. Sometimes, they make extra loud noises to scare away animals that have them on the menu and to warn other frogs of possible danger. Sort of like plastic whistles. This is the way the world works, in the forest, in the swamp, in the street. This is the fox in the hen house, the pedophile at the playground. Which part is the true nature of humans and animals, the part where we eat each other or the part where we feed each other?

You might think sheer size and brain power give humans an insurmountable advantage. Think again. In the end, it will be the insects, the nest of fire ants you unwittingly sit in and the microorganisms that invade and swim in your bloodstream that will win. It will be ancient life forms even more invisible than frogs in the grass, that will triumph. They live in the world alongside us and inside us, but they keep their distance. We don’t recognize them as animals that leap and croak and have green skin. They have not yet been kermitted. They are not caught in the wild on summer afternoons and kept against their wishes in shoe boxes.

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I saw this astronomical phenomenon once. I believe it was the annular eclipse visible in Williamstown, Mass. in 1994. It struck me at the time that Williamstown was a rather stuffy, self-important place to become the backdrop for such majesty. But there we were in the street surrounded by pristine 18th century buildings, watching in stupefied silence as the sun was eaten by the moon. The insects stopped buzzing and the birds stopped chirping as if all living things were holding their breath for fear that the light would not return.

Historically, eclipses were associated with an intense and widespread anxiety. People thought of them as bad omens that predicted a coming famine or plague. Eclipses were associated with God’s wrath and caused entire populations to go crazy out of fear of retribution. Notice how little has changed when it comes to conspiracy theories. The feelings of shame and dread arising out of the swamp like a miasma and spreading throughout our culture have infected everything and are with us now even as they were in medieval times. Somewhere along the line, our perception of interbeing lost its way. Instead of understanding the pulsing unity of all things, the raindrop embedded in the rose, the past resting in the present moment, there is now an overarching sense of malign influence. There’s no escaping the kleptocracy and the wretchedness it engenders. Or so it seems.

I have a range of responses to our shared situation. Some days, I get in touch with the fear. I worry about increased violence in the streets of our cities, cancellation of the coming election and that old stand-by nuclear catastrophe recently revived by the expiration of the START treaty. Some days, I’m aware of a simmering rage that the corporate thieves have stolen my birthright, my air, my water. Some days, a numbness washes over me. I don’t feel a thing. What about you? It’s the silence of the insects and the birds at the peak of the eclipse. It’s the collapse of the glowing solar ball into the sea at sundown in the Caribbean. Somehow I have to remember, we all have to remember, that the moon will complete its transit, the sun will rise high in the sky in the morning, love will do what love does.

This seems to be the great challenge now. To have faith in the promise of children, the impulse of human decency, the splendor of creativity, the gift of beauty in nature. Eclipses come and go. Tyrants and misanthropes come and go. Good people die and babies are born. You can’t force this awareness, this chorus of hellos and goodbyes. You have to just allow it. I want to begin each day in gratitude for the infinite good fortune of living to see such a day even if it’s overcast and I never see the sun. After all, the sun is there all day every day, it’s just that we can’t see it at night or when it’s draped in clouds. There is much that is hidden. Life is filled with jewels like the magnificent diamond ring effect of the eclipse, a brilliant flash of sunlight at the edge of the Moon only visible just before totality begins or ends. I am watching for it, like waiting for a birth or a death. Like waiting for spring.

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*************************************************************************************************************Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

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A deck of cards is a wondrous thing. While you can walk around with it in your jacket pocket, it contains the narrative potential of an epic novel…royalty, peasants, numerology, the red and the black. The fifty-two cards represent the weeks of the year, divided into four seasons we call suits, each consisting of thirteen cards. Thirteen has potency. It’s the total number of months in the lunar calendar as well as the number of people on the guest list at the Last Supper. People used to be skittish around the number thirteen which happened to be the floor I grew up on in the apartment building on 83rd street. The elevator door opened on the fourteenth floor because no one would rent an apartment on the unlucky thirteenth, but we all knew and played along. We pretended that no black cats would cross our path. Fate cannot be tempted.

The playing cards, each of the twelve royals with its head pointing both up and down, not to mention those knavish one-eyed jacks, carry heavy symbolic baggage. They are not far removed from divination, from the Tarot and have an aftertaste of black magic about them, the aura of the alchemist. I have no idea how they got to Europe from Asia where they originated, but I imagine a castaway on a Chinese junk slipping the cards to a trader on a camel somewhere along the Silk Route who laid them out on a rug to pass the time during those frigid desert nights. Somewhere along the line they transitioned into a standard middle class recreational pastime appealing to people of all ages and levels of skill, playing Go Fish on the floor and high stakes poker in private clubrooms. I’d wager my mother had no idea she was inching dangerously close to an occult practice when she played canasta and ate salty handfuls of Planter’s peanuts with her cronies at the folding table they set up in the living room.

Women in the fifties played canasta. Men played pinochle. But there were also more serious card games like bridge which in our circle was mixed. My parents had a standard game with my aunt and uncle that cost a coupla bucks to play. The winnings were set aside to finance vacations the four of them later went on in the Catskills or the Poconos where they played more bridge. It fed on itself, this arrangement. It was a feedback loop that glued them together like sharing shabbes dinner or going to synagogue on Saturday morning. They preferred playing cards.

I refused to learn bridge, a harmless adolescent rebellion on my part. But when I got to college, I went out for poker like it was a varsity sport. My poker-playing friends and I were indefatigable, dealing out the hands by candlelight in a Boston suburb long into the night of the northeast blackout of 1965 which lasted thirteen hours and affected 30 million people. I remember people waiting to take turns on the land line, calling their friends from Vermont to New Jersey, trying to figure out how much of the country was in the dark. Everyone played card games. For the price of a deck, you could play casino with your grandmother or hearts on a long train ride. You could even play by yourself. To this day, I relax with solitaire and when that wears thin, I deal out four poker hands and pretend they belong to people who may or may not still be alive, people I used to know when the night went on forever and no one had to go to work the next day.

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Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

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Today, I’m allowing the grief I have tried to keep at bay rise to the surface and boil over. I read what seems like my 500th eye-witness account of events in Minneapolis. This one came from a clergy person who ran to the scene of the Pretti murder to lend support, to pray. Afterwards, on her way to her home three blocks away, she passed a house where a brown-skinned man was sitting on his porch weeping. When she asked if she could do anything for him, he said he’d been afraid to leave his house for two weeks and while he was locked up inside, ICE killed Alex Pretti. This is a heartbreaking story. It’s a distillation of what it is to be human and it’s really hard to bear.

Some people have a gift for compartmentalizing. I am not one of them. Some people have fencing available in their awareness that separates the pain of the world from the music of children making snowmen. They are presumably at an advantage. Their awareness functions like Macy’s. Toys on this floor, women’s coats over there, housewares downstairs. Mine is more like a flea market, junk of all kinds piled high. For people who can compartmentalize, the anguish doesn’t bleed into the whitewash like a red shirt mistakenly thrown in with the towels. They can read the news on their phones without feeling their stomachs cramp up. Perhaps, like me, their lives are blessed. They sit down to a big dinner in the evening. They have access to medical care. They are supported by loving partners, children, friends. I am most fortunate to be living a life like that but I don’t have the talent for compartmentalizing that would allow me to fully enjoy my blessings while the fires are burning around me. There are no fences in my awareness of the suffering. It’s like a storm system, like the recent snow, freezing rain and ICE event that swept across most of the country. There’s no escaping it. There’s nothing outside of it.

I have my strategies, of course. There are certain bonbons, little jewels of pleasure, that I indulge in which can reliably be expected to comfort me for a moment. There is the morning ritual of black coffee in bed with the Times games played in a fixed order like the recitation of the liturgy. First Wordle, then Connections, then Spelling Bee and the Mini Crossword and finally Letter Boxed. Someone should do a study on the mental health benefits of Wordle. Later in the day, there’s the glass of white wine. One glass reaffirms for me that I’m safe for the time being. Two glasses or a few tokes generally elevates the anxiety that’s bearing down like a giant wave at the ocean in Montauk. I can’t outrun it.

More effective in the long term than the distractions of word games or the sip of sauvignon blanc is the spiritual practice of presence to whatever is happening. I continue to be preoccupied with this quote from Brecht which captures it perfectly. “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” The quote does not say things are the way they are and, rest assured, will not stay the way they are. It says Because things are the way they are, they will not stay the way they are. Impermanence comes first. Impermanence is the foundational principle that precedes and supports everything else. I keep coming back to this because, frankly, things aren’t so good at the moment. They may, of course, get worse rather than better. That’s where faith and civic participation come in. It’s our way of putting a thumb on the scale. If things are teetering on the brink of disaster, we can influence the outcome by making our own small contributions of effort or dollars and, crucially, by believing in human goodness. The former is very important but the latter is essential. People in Minneapolis where I live most of the year are giving us a crash course in community. Human goodness is alive and well. Empire, I have read, can handle outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale.

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Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

Get more from Susie Kaufman in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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