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The soundtrack of his life is his security blanket. I think this is done through streaming services he trusts and specific music that he loves and relies on to trigger pleasant memories or yearned-for fantasies. And because he is a bona fide member of the original baby boom generation I suspect that much of it is rock-and-roll, but he says it is an eclectic mix that includes Broadway show tunes.

Last week he sent me the lyrics of a favorite song of his by one of his favorite songwriters, Nick Lowe. I had never heard the song, nor had I heard of the singer-songwriter.

He asked, “Do you listen to much music, and if you do, what do you listen to? If I didn’t have all my music, all my songs, all my many kinds of music, I might as well be the man in the iron mask, locked away in the Bastille.”

The gauntlet has been tossed. How much do I love music?

There were periods of my life where I had music playing wherever I was—but I think it was the technology that got away from me. I went from 78 RPM records to the little 45 RPM’s with the big hole in the center, to albums of 33 1/3 RPM’s to tapes to CD’s. I was transferring a song or two from different albums to a tape on a certain theme—creating my own mini-albums. My husband, a WWII vet, loved doing the same thing and we put together our own mixes for ourselves and each other. Over the years, those tapes physically wore out, and I miss them.

Growing up in the 1940s the music I heard was in song form, and many of the songs related to a war the country was already sentimental about, “Now Is the Hour (When we must say goodbye…)”, “There’ll be bluebirds over/The white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow, when the world is free…” “I saw the harbor lights/They only told me we were parting…” “Kiss me once, and kiss me twice/It’s been a long, long time…”

The songs had structure, narrative—they told stories. Even a little kid could tell they were most about being in love, whatever that might be. We were being indoctrinated. It was poignant, thinking what it must be like to be a grownup. Some of the songs were childlike, as in “A, you’re Adorable/B you’re be-yoo-ti-ful…”

Then there were the novelty songs, “I’d Like to Get You/On a Slow Boat to China…” I didn’t have any idea what that meant! And, “Give Me Five Minutes More—Only Five Minutes More…” Suggestive, but not threatening. Nowadays, that sentiment might hint a threat of rape.

The love songs my parents knew were endlessly revived and reshaped—and presented with new arrangements, sung by younger singers, and jazzed up with the sounds of big bands and quartets of singers. As teenagers, my generation loved to dance to them.

Couples danced together, as our parents had—the box step, not standing too close. In fact now that I think of it, we were transitioning into the lives our parents had modeled, and the music that appealed to us was like a watered-down solution of the music they played.

My father had a penchant for jazz. He bought a new hi-fi, which played big vinyl albums with five songs per side. He joined the Columbia Record Club as a way to build up his library of favorites. I’ll be forever grateful that among his favorites were Duke Ellington, Errol Garner, George Shearing, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. He also had a little Peggy Lee and Dinah Washington.

The record club sent him a Stan Kenton disc, which introduced us to that shrieking trumpet of Maynard Ferguson. Daddy and I were both piano fans, and we liked Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Mose Allison.

The songs I loved had lyrics like poems. I loved “Then I’ll Be Tired of You” (from the Hi-Lo’s “And All That Jazz” album with the soaring trumpet of Jack Sheldon), “East of the Sun” (Keely Smith. “Politely” album). “Remind Me” (Doris Day with André Previn). I’ll share a specific jazz number with you later, but you can research all these on the Internet just by asking Google.

The background music of my life evolved in the 1960s to include the work of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Tom Paxton, and Kris Kristofferson.

By the late 1970s I was in a different place. I married a man 17 years my senior, an executive for the Du Pont Company who had won the plum assignment of a high position in Geneva and we had the luxury of travel all over Europe where we could hear the jazz of many nations and went to concerts by Earl “Fatha” Hines and Dizzy Gillespie.

Europeans love jazz, and many of them are damn good at it. The locals in outlying small towns try it and usually sound a bit over-rehearsed, as if they are imitating what they heard on American recordings. But the Danes in particular have mastered the soul of jazz and even the street bands capture the cadence and scrappy spontaneity of the American music form.

My husband introduced me to the big-band sound of Count Basie and tender ballads sung by Tony Bennett and Carmen McRae. There was a constant background in our apartment of wall to wall music. I remember a telephone discussion with a man in my theatre company one day, when he suddenly said, “I love the music at your house!” I had not noticed that one of our tapes was wafting to him through the phone lines.

What would probably surprise my young friend is the gaps in the music I gravitate to. There is a decided lack of the “country” genre even though I heard a lot of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Tennessee Ernie Ford in my early life. They just didn’t really float my boat.

Elvis Presley was around then, but I was not a particular fan. I guess his raw sex appeal scared me. I always knew there was something dangerous about him, and that he was the kind of boy my mother warned me about.

I also have very little classical music in my repertoire. An occasional Chopin prelude, a piece by Debussy or a whimsical frolic by Louis Moreau Gottschalk--and I have a whole CD of Bach Variations which is perfect background music. Of course, Rhapsody in Blue. Also Fanfare for Common Man, by Aaron Copeland. All of these were very helpful in my theatrical productions.

We needed finding-your-seats music, selected to match specific shows. We needed intermission music as an unspoken commentary. And curtain call music!

But I am no longer surrounded by my music. I have many of my CD’s and vinyl stashed in a closet. I know I could stream all the music I might want, or I could pull out the equipment and put on a record from time to time, but I seldom do that.

It’s kind of wonderful to know there are those who are still transported by music, who need it as I once did, and rely on it as a key to all the enjoyment of life. I hope some of the artists I’ve mentioned here, and some of the songs, will jog your memory and get you thinking about your attachment to whatever phase of the music scene you favor.

I do want to share a piece of music that you might never have heard, and I expect you to love no matter what genre you usually choose. It’s an Oscar Peterson number, and I recommend that you listen from beginning to end, and let it take you where it will. I promise it will reward you, even if you have never heard of Oscar Peterson.

Listen to it. It’s good and it gets better. Best ending you’ll ever hear.

And you’ll know why you love music. Oscar Peterson Trio

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It hadn’t been lost on the white macho commentators around him, those who wore dress shirts, bound at the neck with old-fashioned neckties, apparently trying to look traditional and profound.

I went to the Internet and discovered there is a category of fashion accessories called “Men’s jewelry” and one of the items mentioned is “Pearl Necklaces.” It goes on to say that the trend is to wear pearls with casual attire rather than saving them for formal occasions.

The AI information is: “Historically worn by male royalty and leaders for centuries before being marketed as feminine in the 20th century, pearls are now embraced as a versatile, gender-neutral accessory.” I don’t believe women waited until the 20^th century to co-opt the practice of wearing pearls, but maybe that was when men pretty much stopped wearing them.

It may be that men wearing pearls became a coded gay-signal recently, but it is now just another thing that has become bisexual. Tim is openly gay but not flamboyant about it. He dresses in a very casual, masculine style.

Politically, he began as a Republican operative, but broke with that party when Donald Trump emerged as its leader. I enjoy his intellect, his banter as a MSNOW political analyst, and his appearances on The Bulwark on Substack. Miller expresses his anti-Trump opinions directly and forcefully, laughing much of the time.

I watched him for months before I caught sight of the pearls. Then I began to hear that other male consultants had made light of his style for years.

“The pearls are taking daytime cable news by storm,” he posted on X. This piqued my interest. I had a few strings of cheap(ish) pearls in my jewelry drawer, but I liked the way his hung just between the clavicle and the top of his tee shirt. I wanted what he had.

I went to a local jewelry store looking for a pearl choker. They had a couple in the $999-$1000 range, but they absolutely weren’t what I was thinking about. I didn’t want a serious pearl choker with three strands, or a rope of cultured pearls to go with my new strapless evening gown. I wanted a men’s plain, no-nonsense pearl choker. The Internet had dozens for sale.

I envisioned my new necklace as a statement in support of the LGBTQ community. So I ordered one for myself, and knew just what I’d wear it with to the women’s Meet-Up I have lunch with every Monday in Woodstock.

The necklace was on the way but hadn’t arrived by noon that Monday. I was cross about that, but I had the rest of the outfit, and I did have some pearls, so I decided to go with them. Smart white pants, sandals, a bright blue tee shirt, and an 18-inch pearl necklace in honor of LGBTQ folks, even if they didn’t know it.

My friends in the group at once complimented me for wearing pearls, dressing up my usual attire. I told them the story of Tim Miller and the significance of men’s pearls. It didn’t seem to ring any bells.

I think I have to tell you about my Meet-Up Group. They are lovely, warm, accomplished women, all over the age of 50, and they love and nurture each other and meet once a week just to talk things over. They are all, as far as I know, politically Liberal, but politics is seldom if ever discussed unless there is some immediate situation we all want to remedy. We all turn out for any No Kings protest when there is one.

I’ve been in the group a little over a year, but, as you might guess, as mouthy as I get in this space sometimes, in the meet-up I seldom rise above fly-on-the-wall status. I need a social life, and I bask in the warmth of their camaraderie and feel proud to have managed to fit in.

So there I sit with my pearls, and two or three of them heard my explanation. It’s hard to see an elderly lady making a statement by wearing pearls, but in my mind I was doing it.

The next week the organizer of the group who sends the invitations to the whole list announced that we would all wear pearls at the next meeting. I was tickled to death at this, but I knew a table with 15 older women wearing pearls wasn’t exactly like a meeting of the Red Hat Society.

As we walked into the restaurant, I tried to explain the significance of the pearls.

“I asked everybody at work about it,” one of the women named Susan said. “I thought maybe it was Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s birthday, but we looked that up and it wasn’t.”

I explained Tim Miller. I explained men’s pearl chokers. I said it was in solidarity with the LGBTQ community. I wasn’t sure the fly on the wall was getting through.

As I age, I sometimes have trouble making my voice heard. And in the Meet-up group everybody does. We’re all at least a little hard of hearing so we talk at full volume all through the lunch. Nobody ever gets the floor, but we all fight for it the whole hour.

Let’s face it, the men’s pearl choker idea is a tepid little protest. But I have a new necklace and I’ll wear it when I want to with whatever I want to wear. And because the meeting is in Woodstock, a tourist destination for intellectuals, Tim Miller may join us there one day.

And Susan had the best one-liner about the first pearl meeting.

“So it’s not Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s birthday. Let’s say it’s for Pearl Bailey’s birthday,” she said.

I looked that one up myself. Pearl Bailey was born in March.

But guess what: August 17, the day of our first pearl meeting, was the day she died.

We can make it an annual event now.

For those of you reading this, who went along with the pearls even though you didn’t get the significance, having you join me made me happy! We’ll do it again if the mood strikes us, or at least we all know now we can wear pearls whenever we want to, and that it’s chic to wear them with anything, and our men friends are welcome to join us.

And we do support the LGBTQ community too.

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Some neighbor kids were going to attend something they called Vacation Bible School. They were big kids, and they loved this, whatever-it-was. They were sure I’d love it too. My mama tried to talk me out of it, and she told the others I was too young, but they held out, saying they would take care of me.

Being scared was something I was familiar with. Large groups of people I didn’t know made little Mary Lois nervous, even if she didn’t know it yet.

A little background: I had been taught my name, and my sister’s name, and I did my best to say them when asked.

“What’s your name?” my parents would ask.

I’d think about it a minute and then say,

“Name Doi-Loi Tumm!” I was very serious about it. It was always greeted with gales of laughter.

So, I was working on “Mary Lois Timbes,” but I didn’t have it down.

The first challenge in Vacation Bible School was to gather all the students in a big circle. Then, the teacher wanted each of us to say his or her name, going around the circle.

My little knees were knocking and I was terrified I would have to say my name.

They went around the circle, each child, saying “Judy,” Or “Bobby,” or whatever their natural, easy-to-say name might be. It got closer to me with each name and I wanted very much to get it right. The girl next to me said “Susan.” Then all eyes were on me.

“M-m-me?” I said softly.

“What’s that,” the teacher said. “Marie? Is that your name, Marie?”

“No!” I shouted, and then I started to cry. That is all the memory I have of that event, but I remember up to that point vividly.

And crowds of strangers terrified me. I was sure I’d get something wrong. From the first days in school I had to read in front of the class, speak little pieces I had memorized, spell words I knew, the usual grade-school drill. I did it, but always had some level of stage fright.

And so, of course, I wanted to be an actress. I knew it would require me to say stuff, but I thought I could conquer the fear if I memorized every page, word for word, and knew the lines of the other actors too, in case something went wrong. I had yet to learn that even after doing that, the dreaded performance anxiety might overtake me at any time and erase all that memorization, leaving me immobilized.

Speaking without a script was out of the question. A trapeze artist without a net!

In the meantime I was already writing. In fourth grade we were asked to write a story, and I wrote one called “The Lonely Prince,” with a plot lifted from the animated dance Gene Kelly did with a cartoon mouse in the movie Anchors Aweigh.

Nobody said, “This child is going to be a writer,” but my teacher liked that I had correctly used a semicolon to connect two independent clauses, and my mother said I had a “nice little style.”

I was in a play that year, too, at school. I played a maid in a Valentine’s Day play, and was so jittery about it backstage I said to a cast member that I didn’t know what was wrong with me. He said, “You’re just excited,” and he was right.

Over time, writing helped me with vocabulary and being in plays stimulated my imagination and subtly made me a better speaker.

My first speaking gig—a presentation before an audience—was at the breakfast table when I was in college. I had to persuade my father to support me in my decision to drop out of college and go to a good drama school somewhere, which of course meant New York City. As I remember it, the conversation went something like this.

ML: Daddy, I want to ask you for something.

(Daddy puts down his cup of coffee and looks up from his crossword puzzle.)

ML: I know I don’t want to spend any more years in college.

Daddy puts down the pen—he did crosswords with a pen—and looks at me across the table.

ML: I don’t think I need to learn any more biology or algebra. They are not things I’ll ever use in my life. I want to go into the theatre. In my spare time, I’m reading a play every day, and I want to play all the parts. I learn more from plays than anything else. If I go into the movies I’ll learn how to ride horses and how to concentrate on words, and I’ll learn skills I never even knew existed. I want it so much I’ll make myself do things I’d be scared to even try any other way. I don’t know any way I’d ever get to do those things without the confidence I’d get from being an actress.

Western movies and television series were the rage in those days, and I guess that’s why I was sure if I was a movie star I’d be taught to ride. We lived in an old house on 3 ½ acres and kept a couple of horses although I seldom rode, fed, or curried them. I didn’t bother them and they ignored me.

Daddy was listening. When I came to a pause he said “I’ve never seen you like this.”

He didn’t say he was going to send me off to New York. We weren’t people who did things like that. For one thing, he was aware of the kind of money that would cost—and he was aware I was not always the confident, well-spoken girl he was looking at across the table. No matter what the movies showed, parents in those days were not likely to send their daughters alone into the dangerous place that New York City could be.

Maybe I was playing a part for him. But it worked. He agreed that dropping out of college was part of a not-bad plan for my upcoming career. He offered that I remain living at home rent-free, work somewhere and save my own money for as long as it might take to afford tuition at the drama school of my choice. That made a lot of sense to me, and I was on my way.

This led to a few months of job hunting, and one morning at my breakfast plate, my father had placed a classified ad ripped from the day’s Mobile Press Register. The job was copy-boy or girl!

That would definitely be in my wheelhouse—and certainly more promising than anything else I had turned up.

When I stepped into that newsroom for the first time I knew I had come home. I loved the clatter of typewriters, the chaotic atmosphere, the informal camaraderie in the air. I also loved the very fact that writing was a paying job.

I was 19 years old, and still had a long way to go to get comfortable speaking before crowds. I loved newspaper work, and went on working in amateur theatricals, honing skills in writing and acting, but I had a great deal of growing up to do.

When I was talking about plays, and even directing plays and working with theatre groups of my own I could talk for hours. I could teach what I knew. I could make people laugh. But life itself took many turns and one of those stumbles forty years later took me to a church hall that provided a real opportunity to learn how to talk in front of strangers.

I was in my fifties now. I sat in a group of adults, a circle as a matter of fact, and before one had the floor, he or she had to identify himself, and just that rule still made me nervous.

“Hi, I’m Mary Lois!”

“Hi, Mary Lois!” the entire group answered in unison, and they even had the name right.

Yes, it was a 12-Step Meeting. Al-Anon.

My husband, a WWII vet, had been unable to control his drinking after retirement, and we had moved to my hometown where I hoped he’d meet other retirees with mutual interests. Here I was to share so much personal stuff—and of course at first there is the fear that the group will not really be anonymous. I became more comfortable in the group over time. I would find myself crying as I heard some woman tell the sad story of the shape her husband was in, the helpless, hopeless feelings she was experiencing, and then would realize it was me talking.

I learned gratitude from those meetings. I learned I had nothing to be ashamed of. I felt the compassion of a crowd who knew first-hand what I had yet to learn. I too had been a heavy drinker, and a routine traffic stop one night sent me to Alcoholics Anonymous as well as Al-Anon meetings where the pain was shared openly. Learning to do that changed my life forever.

And I learned to meet new people and open my heart to them. When you get comfortable sharing the rage, the hopes and pain of your life, you can do anything.

As for me, I’m learning to write better too.

P.S. For those wondering about the impending kidney disease I revealed last week, that was a false alarm. All my tests came back NORMAL, and I am not likely to ever have kidney disease.

I didn’t mention what I thought of as encroaching absent-mindedness, the increase of tightness and pain in my knees, unidentified pings in body areas I’d forgotten I had, or the monster I faced in the mirror every morning. I was relatively happy to have lived as long as I have and I looked at the future as a promise of more good stuff.

The first week in August I was caught up short by a report from the lab about my blood work. I’ve been on a medication for high blood pressure and the doctor had changed the prescription in hopes of better controlling the blood pressure. The first check from the lab indicated a spike in glucose and in creatinine. Two weeks later, a follow-up blood check indicated the spike was still spiking.

I’m not hip to much in the medical world, but neither of these factors had ever appeared in previous lab reports. So I went to the Internet to see what they might mean.

They might mean problems with my kidneys. My full-on investigation revealed that a bad kidney or two might lead to months of work with dialysis, likely followed with sessions on a dialysis machine for hours a day three or four times a week! That is a fearsome prospect. For some reason the vision of spending my last years coping with kidney disease hit me like a ton of bricks.

My reasonable brain kicked in. I spoke with the doctor who said she would change the prescription back to the original one, and we’d do another blood test in the next two weeks. I was aware that the probable cause of the spike was the offending medication and that I could wait before I jumped to any conclusions, particularly through the “help” of the Internet. I simply had to wait.

I went back to the original drug the next day. I felt sluggish and distracted, and began feeling sorry for myself.

Those of you who know me—even just from these pages or my constant presence on Facebook—know this is terra incognita for me. I’m the one with a positive word for just about any situation. I know life is full of ups and downs, and I was born with a gene for optimism I just have never been able to shake.

I’m one of the lucky ones.

I have breezed through my 86 years on this earth, bounced around from good situation to bad situation, and always landed on my feet. I’ve made close friends with nice people, smart people, upbeat people, heroes, clowns, and a few charlatans. I’ve had astonishing successes, and I’ve made really big mistakes.

My attitude about my health has been realistic—however, I have been so healthy for so long that the thought dwells in the back of my mind that something terrible is bound to befall me as a part of life. For the past 20 years I’ve thought I probably had five good years left. Then, five years pass and I’m still okay. I move the goal post forward and say to myself that I have ten good years ahead.

But I never thought of having kidney disease. That Saturday I thought of it all day. I kept feeling I needed more sleep, so I was climbing in and out of bed all day. I got a lot of sleep. I had low to zero energy, and a bit of a headache.

What I didn’t know about feeling sad was that once the brain gets on the sorrowful wavelength it calls up memories of all the mistakes made years ago—and people from past decades, people once loved and cherished who have died. And all the things unsaid. Missing the treasured grandson who died of a drug overdose in my home three years ago. Obsessing on opportunities lost and people I laughed with who were no longer in my life.

I know it was a passing sadness. I knew myself as a person who is always balanced, even with some anxiety and more than one neurosis. It was not depression. But it was a sadness that went deep. I was grieving about something that was not going to happen. It took days passing for me to understand why I was so sad.

I wasn’t coping in my normal way—I couldn’t get the regrets and bad memories out of my mind. In the past I was always able to push them away and replace them with affirmations, concentrate on happy times, and sort things out. I felt that I was losing something ephemeral, something that told me there was hope for new events, new people, and even happiness at a higher level. But it didn’t feel true. What if the end was truly near, and I was in for a debilitating illness and pain for the five years left I had been giving myself?

What if I didn’t even have five years?

I was grieving my own life. It became real to me that five years, even ten years, is not a long time. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do.

Night came, and sleep didn’t. Not that first night. Even the herbal tea that claims to have a smidgeon of valerian in it wasn’t working. I was always good at sleeping, but this night was an exception.

The next day, I woke up. I realized I had actually slept. Those people I was seeing in the night were not real; they were part of a dream. I didn’t remember what I dreamed, just that I was in confrontation with some strangers on a street in a town I didn’t recognize and only I could find my way out. The dream was permeated with the feeling that I was responsible for getting myself back home.

I stumbled into the kitchen and made a monumental decision about breakfast. I still felt a little queasy. I didn’t think coffee would be a good idea. I would go with tea.

I was not happy with the essay I was writing for Substack. I didn’t want to finish it. Via Zoom I talked with Doug, my cheerleader, life coach, editor, and trusted friend. I had lost track of the days and felt inadequate to the task of rewriting what I had come up with for the piece.

After he sympathetically let me off the hook I realized it was Sunday. I had thought all morning it was Monday, the day we usually work together on the piece I post every Tuesday. I got a laugh out of that, but it was a weak one. If I had known what day it was I probably could have pulled myself together and finished the piece. But I didn’t want to. It wasn’t good enough. I filed it away.

On Monday I posted this on Facebook: “I admit it: I let myself become sad yesterday. I shall not do it today. It was an awful feeling.”

I was relieved not to post that week, and chose instead to run a longish caption with a picture of the Gulf Shores beach painted some 50 years ago by Jim Gray, a family friend. A copout, but something I felt like sharing.

The comments on my Facebook post elicited appropriate concern from a number of dear friends, most of whom I have never met. They were moved by seeing me admit I had a challenge in my heretofore idyllic life. By then, of course, I had gotten some sleep and had spent a day or two waking up to my usual routine of loving where I am and knowing I can handle anything, even my own bad kidneys. If that even happens!

I told my people I was over it; that it was not depression, but sadness based on what was a figment of my imagination. I’m sure they are still confused about what happened. Many of them are roughly in the same generation as I, and they too minimize the jolts of insight our natural aging process brings.

But now I know whatever happens I can handle it as I always have. My old self came back to me as I made the decision to enjoy whatever comes next. There is no way to know what that will be so I’ll make an effort to have as much fun as possible.

When I get the lab report and discuss it with my doctor, if she suggests I've got kidney disease in my future, and it's possible I might only have five more years, I'm gonna pack all the fun into them that I can.

I’ll be taking the week off but wanted to share a watercolor by the late Jim Gray, who started his art career working in my father’s ad agency. He had went on to start his own agency with a few of his pals and then moved his family to Gatlinburg, TN, where he worked as an artist for years.

This was what Gulf Shores, Alabama, looked like when he was here. Like every kid growing up in that area, I spent hours on that beach, and swimming in that salt water, every summer. So did Jim. Now it’s all condos, bars, and restaurants.

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I was 21, married, living in Atlanta, when I had a profound audition. I loved auditions and was always freer as an actress when auditioning than I was in performance.

The first year of my marriage I lived in New Orleans, which is a wonderful place to live in your 20s if you love any of the arts. Artists painted portraits and caricatures of tourists on the sidewalks, jazz was live on the streets every day, There was a symphony orchestra and an opera company. Exotic food as well as the famous seafood and local specialties were available everywhere, and cheap. In fact, everything was pretty cheap there—and much of it was actually free!

There were big theaters, tiny theaters, and new theaters opening up all the time. I got my first major role as Alma in Summer and Smoke with a new company working in a building that had been converted from a strip-tease club in the French Quarter.

I was well cast as the repressed Southern belle who dreamed of romance while harboring a smoldering desire for sex. I knew people like that.

I’m kidding, of course—the role touched on my own life and fantasies. But I worked on a characterization of Alma as beginning the play with a high-pitched, tense-sounding young voice, gradually dropping the pitch to sound a bit like Marlene Dietrich by the last act of the play. I knew nothing about the technicalities of acting, but it was my intuition that Alma was experiencing life and becoming fully mature. My Alma went from a jittery preacher’s daughter to a woman of the world, verging on becoming a prostitute.

The show was a big success and I thought I was surely destined for stardom.

I played a couple of other parts in New Orleans—in an adaptation of a Russian novel, I played a mentally ill young woman (again, I knew nothing about that, but loved playing her) in an original production at Tulane; and at the French Quarter theater I played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Because it’s going to come up later, I must tell you one little thing about that production. The leading role of Jack, or Ernest, was played by a nice man about age 40 named Gordon Greene.

Gordon was a professor at Dillard, the prestigious Black university. He was teaching English there and wanted his classes to attend a dress rehearsal of our play.

The matter was taken up by the little theatre company’s Board of Directors who voted against it on the grounds that “so much progress had been made recently for the integration of races that it might stir up controversy” to have Black college students attend a performance in this particular theater. I know that sounds insane but that was the conventional wisdom of the pre-Civil Rights South. That kind of thinking still exists in lots of places.

Stay with me, though—there is a good ending to this story.

The actors were consulted about moving the production to the theater on the Dillard campus for one performance and we voted unanimously to do it. It was a proud evening for all of us. The audience was enthusiastic, and they loved our show.

This was in 1960. Racial unrest was happening all around us. New Orleans was always a town comfortable with its biracial component, but it was still basically segregated.

Now let us move to Atlanta, a year or so later. Atlanta was way more segregated than New Orleans in those days, an oversized country town with an eye to becoming the Southern Regional Headquarters for as many major corporations as they could. The mayor was CEO of local office supply company, and he, the city council—and the editors of the Atlanta Constitution--saw racial integration as the ticket to growth and prosperity.

I am a young housewife, still hell bent on becoming a professional actress one day, and still auditioning for every amateur play that comes up.

Theatre Atlanta, the largest community theater, announced an upcoming production of The Crucible. This was a powerful Arthur Miller script, set in the days of the notorious Salem witch trials. The role I wanted was Abigail, the trembling young virgin who has the hots for John Proctor, a very proper Christian man in the overly proper village.

Abigail and her teenage girlfriends have been rumored to be dancing in the firelight with the slave Tituba, and they are thought to have cast spells on some of the women in Salem.

Church authorities are called to investigate, and they are pretty certain that any recent disasters in town were the result of Tituba having controlled the girls and turned them into witches.

At the audition, there was nobody to read Tituba. I had become pretty bored by the audition so far. I saw that the man in line for Proctor was a real estate executive who happened to be the chairman of their board of directors, and the young girl reading Abigail was a bland high school beauty.

I was called to read Tituba, and the scene was a stemwinder. Tituba is being questioned and she sees the writing on the wall—these white men are going to prosecute her no matter what she says, so she confesses all and calls on God to save her soul and condemn just about everybody in the village. I had a blast reading that. I pulled out all the stops, yelled (for me), and gave those old bastards what-for.

The room went silent.

Okay, yes. I got the call. I was offered the role of Tituba, a 40 or 50 year old Barbadian slave, which would call for the equivalent of blackface makeup and remove me from ingénue roles before my time.

Much as I wanted plum roles that would make me famous locally, I never considered taking this one. I told the director no. I told him he should look around the town, which had a large percentage of Black citizens, and surely he would find a suitable Tituba there.

I had thought community theatre existed to reflect and enlighten its whole community. In fact, I thought it was disgraceful that not only did the white community not know where they were, but I was sure there were plenty of local Black women who could tear hell out of that role.

Theatre Atlanta managers were not ready for that. I was of the generation of Southerners who were facing the challenges of the Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King, learning to pronounce the word Negro (and then not to say it), the integration of schools and the opening of doors long shut.

I was right to refuse the role, but it was not my crusade. My generation was being confronted with one upheaval after another. I had to pick my battles and mine was for the underdog I knew intimately—myself.

We were quivering on the brink of new stuff then, and by now impressive advances have been made.

There is a professional theatre scene in Atlanta today, and at least one Black troupe that probably uses an occasional white actor in a small role.

I’m not ready to believe it’s all going to be undone either. New Orleans still has its unique personality and spirit, and Atlanta has shown the world a Progressive side of the South.

The whole country is in an identity crisis. We have allowed the wrong people to take power, in spite of strides we thought we had made.

Now I have my own soap box to stand on, here, where I can give you glimpses of time speeding by.

I know my stories pose questions, but I hope to answer as many as I can. My memories are a trip, even for me.

It’s taken a lot of years to understand what I was trying to say about that. All I really knew was that I was angry at myself for accepting the definition others had put on me.

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Now that I have space and time—between doctors’ appointments, dentists’ appointments, bowling matches every other week and lunches with a compatible group of senior women once a week, random breakfasts with my daughter at the nearby diner—I have permission to think about what I didn’t want to think about then.

I also have the luxury of many years passing since I felt that I was not the center of my own life. I am looking back at the young woman who had so much to prove and almost no tools to do it. I have the time on my hands to think things over. To let myself and everybody else off the hook.

You may have read some of the pieces I’ve written about my childhood—the middle child and second daughter with an older sister and a younger brother, and parents who really didn’t understand any of us. This will not be another whine about being the overlooked one, or another attempt at analysis of my parents, but a little more about the steps I took to get me to the age of 86 still feeling like a youngster who wants to understand it all.

I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. I had ups and downs, but my greatest struggle was that I was born falling short of my older sister, whom Mama thought was almost a genius-level child. Mama was also burdened by the birth of a baby boy a year after who died in the hospital two days later.

She told me that when that infant died she and my father were unbearably sad. From this vantage point I can be pretty sure that what she suffered from was post-partum depression, as it lasted a year or more. All she could say about it was that she was terribly sad, so sad she was physically sick. I know that Daddy was sad, and anxious too, at having his beloved wife so despondent.

When she got pregnant with me, she was deep in this depression, and the nausea and inconveniences of pregnancy were so overwhelming she discussed therapeutic abortion with the family doctor. She knew one thing for sure, she was not ready for another child.

Everybody told her she should have the baby. Her doctor, a kindly old general practitioner who had been the family advisor for years, assured her that he knew she would always regret it if she chose to terminate the pregnancy. He could perform the surgery legally, since she was suffering mentally and physically from the pregnancy. But his opinion—that she would never forgive herself—was crucial to her decision.

When telling me this, many years later, me, that very unwanted child who was by then a full-grown adult, she said she had felt pressured from all sides to carry the child to term and that she would hate herself if she chose an abortion. She also said she knew they were all wrong and that she knew that she did not want the baby.

She said all this to me without a trace of emotion. She was merely telling me the story of the milieu I had been born into. She could still identify with the young woman she was, in days when others made the decisions for her, when her group assured her that she just didn’t know herself well enough to make this decision. But she showed no emotions in the telling.

She also left out the part anybody would have expected her to add.

She didn’t say, “I was depressed and confused, but I’ve always been proud of you and I know having you was the right thing to do.” The obligatory “I love you” would not have been out of place either.

But those words never came.

Not exactly the biography of someone who is going to have a happy childhood. Mama and I had some conflicts. She tolerated me but clearly doted on my older sister, and was attentive to the son who was born to her when I was four years old. Basically her indifference to me caused me to find happiness elsewhere.

I adapted. I sucked my thumb passionately, causing or at least exacerbating an overbite that would require painful braces for years. But I loved sucking that thumb. I developed nasty finger habits like nail-biting as I conquered the thumb-sucking for good.

For some reason I never wished I had never been born. I cannot imagine having such thoughts, no matter how angry or sad I was feeling, thoughts that the world would have been a better place if she had stood her ground and spared me the complexities of living life as a human being. That never entered my mind.

I had a built-in optimism that one day Mama would appreciate me and see I was the one she should have loved all along. I knew there was something missing, but being a child I figured it was my deficiency. That assumption spurred me to prove myself again and again. It may have even helped me.

I’ve written pieces about my childhood, my parents, my relatives and friends, always like a fly on the wall in my own life. But when I was nine years old something happened that was good for me.

We moved. The family found an affordable house in a different sort of place, a small town where everything was different.

Almost miraculously, after years of life in a small Southern city where a position in society was crucial to both adults and children, I was transported to a new home in a small, casual, comfortable community and placed in a school that celebrated childhood itself. And I was truly fortunate to be in a class of nice children with normal impulses and a joy in living.

I guess you could say that school saved me. But what it feels like is that I saved myself. That I am saving myself every day still.

It takes an effort, and some mindfulness, to endure the inevitable crises and loss that we are dealt over the years.

Nobody escapes it, but some are blessed with that built-in optimism I noted earlier.

And when we don’t see it right away, we know it’s there.

Give yourself the breathing space and the permission to think about the good things you’ve learned. Get professional help when you need it. Join a book club. Write some poems.

Take up bowling.

You’ve got it pretty good. You are the center of your own life. And so am I.

When I was a senior in high school, our class advisor was Oliver Mark Taylor, a gangly WWII veteran with training as an actor and life experience over a wide range of subjects. He was offbeat, acerbic, amusing, and accessible to students.

I was sure I was going to be an actress, and I knew he knew something about life in the professional theatre, so I took my questions to him.

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“How do I prepare myself for a life in the theatre?”

“That’s a tough one.”

Mr. Taylor, known affectionately as “Prof” to the students in our offbeat, non-traditional school, was happy to share his information with me, even though I could tell he wasn’t at all sure I had what it took to expect a joyful life in the theatre.

He tried to steer me toward public relations, which is where I did end up for a time, but at the time I wanted to know about drama schools and summer stock companies, how to break into show business, the value of a movie contract, and the ins and outs of a life on the Broadway stage. I was very young, and it all sounded like a lot of fun!

Even if he had doubts about my career choice, Prof was willing to talk theatre to me.

“I’d say the best training ground would be the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania,” he said.

“That is, if Jasper Deeter is still there. I don’t know. He’s the best in the business.”

Funny name. But that would not be the last time I heard of Jasper Deeter.

Theatre Arts Magazine, dedicated to news of the professional stage carried ads for Hedgerow Theater, “Performance…Costuming…Lighting and Technical…Scene Design…All on a Professional Level. Jasper Deeter, Artistic Director.”

I was not ready for the professional level, and felt I must go to a traditional college to get some stage experience before I could launch myself as a professional. But maybe someday my life would take me to a remote corner of Pennsylvania, to a wooded spot between Media and Swarthmore, where a former grist mill had been converted to a theater, and young people trod the boards to learn the many arts and crafts of play production on their way to Broadway in New York City.

At the hands, of course of the theatrical visionary named Jasper Deeter. It all sounded very much like a fairy tale. Because it was.

Jasper Deeter, as a young man enamored with the idea of starting a repertory theatre in the days when everybody in the theatre wanted to be in repertory, hung around with the crowd called the Provincetown Players, when they were performing one-act plays in a converted stable in Greenwich Village.

The dream of repertory was based on the hope that audiences would become accustomed to seeing a selection of players in a variety of roles. And that the actors’ talents would be enriched by the opportunity to play diverse characters.

The Provincetown Players had this ideal. They eschewed the star system and worked on experimental scripts written by their own staff of writers.

One of their writers was Eugene O’Neill, who was one of Jasper Deeter’s best friends. Deeter worked with him on “The Dreamy Kid,” a play with a cast of Black actors. Deeter was instrumental in casting Charles Gilpin, a minstrel performer and actor in the Black theatre community around Philadelphia, as the lead in The Emperor Jones, which opened in 1920. Gilpin was replaced by Paul Robeson in 1924.

Working with the Provincetown Players in its Greenwich Village space, Deeter hung on with the Provincetown group as long as he could, coaching some of its actors, and some were about to make it big in the movies. There was a lot of friction in the group, and he moved to Pennsylvania in Rose Valley, where he could direct.

One young beauty he mentored was a lithe blonde actress named Ann Harding. She glowed from the stage and had a good career in early talkies because of her rich voice, almost-British diction, and her image as “the New woman” who combined strength with feminine delicacy.

She bought the deserted grist mill in Rose Valley for Jasper, and within it he created his repertory company.

By the time I came along all this was pretty deep in the past. The Hedgerow Theater still stands, but Jasper Deeter is all but forgotten except in the Pennsylvania area, and in esoteric circles of actors today who remember the days of the stock companies provided experimental plays and proving grounds for the arts and crafts of the theatre.

The good news about the elusive Jasper Deeter is that you can see him as an actor in a long-forgotten horror film of the late 1950s. This one is worth looking for.

It’s just a few lines, but it’s your only chance to see Jasper Deeter’s work, so I recommend it

The movie, entitled THE BLOB, introduced a charismatic youngster named Steve McQueen. Steve and a date are making out at the end of a date when they see a spaceship land nearby and explode. All that is left is a blob of an unidentified gelatinous mass which is obviously set to destroy the world, so he and his girlfriend run all over town warning people.

That’s the plot of the movie.

The ensuing scenes show a town rejecting the teenagers’ story until they can’t avoid the blob that is encroaching. One night the town is at the local cinema palace watching a horror film and the blob oozes down the aisle.

Here’s where Jasper Deeter comes in. He is playing a WWII veteran, now in charge of the town’s Civil Defense program. He’s awakened in the night with the news that something horrible is coming to destroy the town. He scrambles out of bed, babbling that he knows he has to do the right thing, but first he has to find the right uniform to scare whatever it might be into submission. He fumbles through his closets, trying on hats and exhibiting the panic any normal man would under the circumstances.

So I suggest you break out the popcorn and commit an hour and a half to seeing a black and white movie from a day when we were scared of our shadows since science was exploding with new ideas and the world had had enough of human villains. I guess we needed blobs to be scared of.

I did visit the Hedgerow Theater in the 1990s. I toured the quaint little building that had housed so many yet-to-be-discovered actors from the 1920s and 30s.

Life is full of might-haves, could-haves, and should-haves. How I would love to have apprenticed at Hedgerow and gone on to a totally different life!

But in my own way I created a Hedgerow and am still living there.

So I can’t complain.

This is something I posted on Facebook in February of this year. When taking personal inventory, it contains some suggestions:

“To maintain a personal even-keel amid tumult, deception, and pain nearby and around the world, stick to a day-by-day plan. Prioritize the people, places, and things that give you joy. Cherish happy memories. Make lists of things worth thinking about. If you wander off track for a few minutes, make the effort to pull yourself back. More good things will happen. You can be sure of that. We shall all be called to action, and we must be ready.”

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Also, my last post here asked for feedback, and I did get a comment I’d like to share.

“I start a lot of replies to them (my posts) but I can think umpteen times faster than I can type. and realizing I just thought 2000 words, I fail at finishing a reply. But at that point you’re already guilty of having made me think.”

Hope this continues.

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The dialogue now opened could lead to some interesting future posts.

A longtime reader wrote: “We could all spend the rest of our lives puzzling over the lives of our parents. Your piece drew me in. Your mother’s comment about your father being nicer than he seemed reminded me of Mark Twain’s comment that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

That set me thinking—did I actually write that Mama said Daddy was nicer than he seemed? I re-read the piece a few times and see that I didn’t really say that, but I clearly implied it. I remember her assuming that part of her job as his wife was to explain that he didn’t really mean what he said, but I hadn’t mentioned that annoying habit in the “Fly on the Wall” column.

I wrote, instead, that our mother maintained that she was the only person in the world who truly understood him, adding I thought that notion came from her mistaking devotion for understanding. I’m pretty sure she didn’t come close to understanding him.

I do remember a lot of her time and energy was spent trying to cover for him when she saw his terse comments often insulted people. There was a lot of “He didn’t mean it that way.”

Maybe she did intend to say that he was nicer than he seemed. But experience has shown me that back-tracking for somebody else doesn’t work. He should have learned either to explain himself when necessary or to watch what he said in the first place. The people who gravitated toward him understood his personality flaws.

Another reader reacted with a personal memory. He wrote, “I was just trying to think about how my parents related and perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is ‘they functioned well together.’

“My mother knew my father had been a medic with the troops that opened Dachau. I never knew that until the late mid 70s or so when they had that big special on the Holocaust.”

My Facebook friend went on to some profound stuff.

“I think there’s also a space between child and adult that typically isn’t even thought about.

I was at an event with one of my daughters and her husband and in some kind of a large group discussion somehow the concept of parents having sex came up.

My youngest daughter’s comment was ‘Eww, who would want to think about that?’

I looked at her and said ‘Just be grateful I liked it the first time.’

“I think there’s also a space between child and adult that isn’t even thought about.” This very concept—the space between child and parent—reaches my unfulfilled compulsion to write out what I can remember so I can come to understand it. There is a lot of space, indeed—time, physical space, and history—between child and adult. I cannot fathom how other people’s minds work. Do they just move through life without retaining much in actual memory of what happened, what they were told happened, or did (or do) they literally put it behind them as soon as it happened, and not ask questions?

A space between child and adult…I cherished my mother’s stories, and most of my life I took them as literal truth. Upon reflection I can see that all I wanted from life as a young woman was a chance to relive the very life my mother did, and do it better if possible. She was confabulating much of it, I suspect, and I wanted the fairy tales to come true.

The space between a parent and child is more than a physical space. It is the great, undefinable space of history—world events, nearby catastrophes, shifts in the zeitgeist of every generation.

Who can define that? We who were taking notes can at least try to impart what we learned.

One reader was triggered by one word I used in the piece, “dysfunctional” enough to write me details of her younger sister’s apparently extreme bipolar disorder that all but terrorized the whole family unit. I didn’t see how my writing had touched on her life situation, but I do hope her writing about it has helped her cope with it.

Another friend, actually the son of one of my favorite childhood bff’s, related that what I wrote about my parents reminded him of his own grandparents, and we agreed to discuss it all when we get together one day in the future. I remember his grandparents very well, and yes, there are similarities.

Another man who is very present on my Facebook pages and reads most of what I write here, wrote: “I have often wondered about my father, too. He died when I was seven. He taught me how to bait a fishhook, how to bake bread, and nothing else. I once tried to “help” him fix the washing machine, which had sprung a leak. It could have been a teachable moment. I managed to learn that he was replacing a gasket. When I asked what a gasket was, I was told “It’s a part.” Thus, the lesson ended.

I find all these reactions illuminating and even a little flattering.

Flattering in that what I wrote touched a nerve and generated something..

With your participation I think we can keep this dialogue going for some time. I’ll go back to being a fly on the wall but now you’re invited to be in the show I’m watching.

Do you have an urge to add your own story here? Let’s discuss family secrets that were never revealed.

Did you grow up in the days when eccentricities were brushed off, excused, or ignored? Did you detect family malfunctions while others didn’t even see them? Did you find skeletons in the closet only to be told you were making things up?

Were there consequences for the gaslighting in your household? Or consequences for being the one who called it out?

I’d love to discuss your stories—please add something of your own for next conversation. I will not be posting here next week but by the week after I hope to have plenty of new stories to share!

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He could be cutting and sarcastic and seemed to be unaware of the power he held over people. He had a sweet, soft speaking voice, a crystalline intellect, and a terse, to-the-point way of speaking. It was not easy to read him. He kept his emotions under wraps.

As a matter of fact, our mother maintained that she was the only person in the world who truly understood him, but I think that notion came from her mistaking devotion for understanding. I’m pretty sure she didn’t come close to understanding him.

From the moment he first came calling, when they were both in high school, he saw her as a perfect innocent, sweet and charming, and she knew him to be in a different class—upwardly mobile, achievement-oriented, brilliant, and unattainable. She came from a dysfunctional home with a martyred mother and a volatile, mercurial father.

Morris told her that first night he wanted to be anything she wanted. She responded that she wanted him to be just as he appeared at that moment. She didn’t have the words for it, but he was somehow a nicer boy than he usually seemed. In school he was socially awkward, often showing off and trying unsuccessfully to be funny—but on this evening he was accessible, articulate, and kind.

Their mutual attraction was too much to comprehend. Talking softly of their hopes and dreams for life, they were mutually overwhelmed. They were too young to make such a move, but they knew they were going to spend the rest of their lives together.

It was the late 1920s, and they had been raised by traditional impoverished Southern parents.

Her own father was an outlier, a renegade who had run away from an abusive home in Ohio and traveled to the South where he met a farm girl who was smart and a good cook, and the two had married and raised three children on what money he could make as a plumber and his wife with her baked goods and handiwork.

On the other hand, my father’s father had come from a large family in Mississippi, had taught school for a time and run a couple of small businesses including a lumber mill in Pine Hill, Alabama. His wife, my grandmother, was frail and had a trace of gentility tempered by a modicum of insecurity.

Both my parents had done well in school and in spite of no income were thought to have a bright future. He got a job as a cub reporter on the Birmingham News and she taught elocution to little kids. When the Birmingham News job came to the abrupt end as so many jobs did in those days, he started a neighborhood free weekly newspaper and she wrote and edited the children’s page.

I have written short stories based on my mother’s version of their love stories, but my father died too soon for me to fact check him for his side.

My mother was willing to tell her nostalgic stories; over time, however, I learned what an unreliable narrator she was.

She described the early years of the marriage—she was 18 and he was 19—as both fun and challenging. They put aside a little money every week and after enough was saved, they invested in a radio for entertainment. Mama said the Great Depression didn’t mean much of anything for them, except that now everybody was broke all the time, and not just them. When they had neighborhood parties, everybody brought a dish. The men even took a turn at making gin in the bathtub, or so they told us many years later.

My mother worshiped my father, who was distant and driven. They had three children who all grew up thinking he was the all-powerful Oz, cold and unreachable, and that her devotion to him had turned her into his victim.

Our mother narrated our lives, and our father made the money. He had the power. She had the task of explaining everything to us. They didn’t discuss their relationship. They didn’t argue.

They thought they were good role models.

I had a sister a year and a half older than I was, and a brother four years younger. The two of them were in constant conflict with our father; I was not. I was raised not to make waves. Daddy occasionally took some time with me to teach me little things. I received that as unspoken love.

Love was not discussed in our household. That may sound strange today, but the stoic withholding of affection was the unwritten law of Protestants in the South of the 20^th century.

Our mother thought affection and compliments spoiled children, giving them swelled heads.

Mama moaned and complained about how controlling Daddy could be, but she never talked back to him, and she did everything he said. Nobody said she was “passive-aggressive.”

I think the blind spot she had about her husband was more about her own father than the man she married.

Emotions were not analyzed. They were not even discussed. As a matter of course, behavior was observed. Punishments administered. Corrections imposed.

We lived with the undercurrent of a feeling that nobody understood us. The children of such parents, particularly after WWII, spent a lot of time in therapists’ offices trying to get a grip on why their parents were the way they were. I have come to believe that if they examined their lives at all, it was not in the same way my generation did, employing the new information about psychology.

At some point as our father veered toward middle age, he had to go to a clinic in New Orleans for depression. He came back with a prescription for amphetamines that he took several times a day for the rest of his life. This addiction was supplemented with his habit of three or four stiff cocktails every evening. He died at the age of 64, from a heart attack no doubt exacerbated by the combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.

My late-life assessment is that it was likely he was somewhat bipolar, with an emphasis on the depressive. Both of them, and probably the parents of most of my friends, were putting up a front entitled “Happy Family,” and it was up to individual families to define the phrase. Our parents’ generation did not have the luxury of questioning their own motives, or seeking to change what they might.

I married young, and my first husband, also Southern and from a traditional home, had just graduated college and yet had been seeing a psychiatrist during his college days. This was very unusual in the late 1950s.

He said that at one point his doctor had asked him, “If you didn’t know your parents, say, and were meeting them for the first time at an event or party, what would you think of them?”

He said he had to think about it a while.

“I don’t think I’d like them,” he said. His doctor called that a breakthrough.

I thought about my own case. I knew I would like both my parents, but my decision was I would answer, “I like both of them but they don’t seem to belong together.”

I came to this conclusion in my early 20s. I’m still thinking about it.

But I believe I got it right the first time.

I escaped that basic fear of my father that my siblings shared, I think because I learned early on not to believe my mother. I sensed that she was wrong about me, and probably wrong about herself and Daddy too.

He was by no means the all-powerful Oz.

He was especially good with his grandchildren. I remember a visit when Alison was about four, he picked up a stalk of sugar cane at the village grocery near their home, to show it to her.

He cut off a few inches for himself and a few inches for her, and showed her how to chew on it to get the sweet juices out. They two of them stood there in the kitchen, chewing and sucking on sugar cane and Alison stopped long enough to look up and say to him,

“Morris, I love you.”

He kept on chewing and sucking and said,

“Honey, you should.”

Mama and I exchanged glances. This was the kind of thing he said.

Weeks later I told this to my therapist in New York, who seemed a little shocked by the story.

“Do you realize how that must have sounded to your little girl? It must have sounded like the voice of God coming down!”

I shrugged. It was just Daddy.

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Ten or fifteen years ago I was a volunteer on the committee of a local cinema that showed offbeat and “art” films.

The committee was charged with selecting, discussing, and planning the films to be shown, and meetings were lively. As a member of the committee, I was encouraged to follow different paths that interested me. I produced a showing of the 1935 black and white Max Reinhardt A Midsummer Night’s Dream to honor Mickey Rooney at his peak as the most outlandish, astonishing Puck ever. Rooney had died in April; our show was in June.

I also directed a few live one-act plays, a mini-Shakespeare festival, a program of personal monologues (“People, Places, and Stuff That Happened”), wrote news releases for the silent movie sub-committee, and learned a lot about silent films in the process.

At this time I was writing a blog of opinions and experiences, often as not reviewing the films we were showing.

At one of the film group committee meetings, the viewer-reviewed movie website “Rotten Tomatoes” was discussed, a member of the committee—a Feminist who also happened to be an actress—opined that the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were almost always written by men, and they tended to reflect a masculine viewpoint.

After that I read lots of those reviews and understood that men often overlook movies that women adore—and if writing a review, they tend to dismiss or even misinterpret the content.

I said “Why don’t we start a new webpage with movie reviews written by women, and call it “Ripe Tomatoes”? The committee loved the idea, so I bought the domain name Ripe Tomatoes and contacted a few young female journalists. I set up a Zoom call to discuss possibilities. This was in 2020, so all the thinking was new.

I immediately changed my own blog to emphasize reviews of movies from a woman’s point of view. I had read the reviews of Bombshell, the blockbuster film of the autumn of 2020, and on Rotten Tomatoes the general reaction to it was that it was a movie about the downfall of Conservative influencer and founder of Fox News Roger Ailes. To me, Ailes, though thoroughly despicable, was only a supporting player in the movie.

Here is the review I posted on my blog: A Bombshell of Movie

Ripe Tomatoes was a really good idea. But it needed heftier sponsorship than our little committee could muster. Writers were interested but they would need to be paid to contribute reviews. We would probably have to sell advertising on the website. We needed more than a good idea; we needed a crackerjack staff, some with names that would sell the project. We needed good graphics people. I had neither the contacts nor the energy at that time of my life to take on a project of this potential magnitude. Ten years earlier, in New York City, I probably could have pulled it off.

We did have a domain name, and I had an email address connected with Google that used that domain name.

When I saw the Ripe Tomatoes idea not getting traction as a movie review website, I ignored the domain and the email address. This is where the story goes off the rails.

I was owner of three email addresses, and thought the one leading with ripetomatoes@ had simply died from disuse. But what had happened was something I knew nothing about. That email account became entangled with my principle email account which was an account under my mac .com address.

I use the mac .com address for most correspondence, but over time the gmail address gets a lot of exercise too. Over the years I received mysterious communications to the effect that I was not answering my emails. I hadn’t responded because I never saw those emails. Emails I had sent from my mac .com account, which showed the correct address on my laptop, arrived at their destination identified as coming from “ripetomatoes” !

So when people responded to ripetomatoes .com, I never saw those responses. This went on for years

I contacted the young woman who helped me set up the email system and she was unable to dismantle the ripetomatoes site because over the years my password had been changed and she couldn’t open it.

I do have a technical expert on staff for my Substack project—you’ll be happy to learn he spent some time examining all the tendrils of my Internet connections and solved my problem last March.

But if you want to reach me by email, do not attempt to use any address with the words “ripe” and “tomatoes” in it.

If we do revive the Ripe Tomatoes idea, with women reviewing movies, there will be a major publicity push behind it.

It’s never too late.

Nowadays a preponderance of men who aspire to political office are, if not unblemished, at least careful enough to have kept their sexual peccadillos quiet. This ability has saved them from possible scandals that might have befallen them.

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I started thinking about this when the stories piled up about Graham Platner, the candidate likely to be chosen Tuesday to run against Susan Collins in the state of Maine. He is an oyster farmer. A veteran. He has a rough-hewn, tousled look about him. He looks like somebody you might pass on the street in any small town in the U.S.A. He is that, but a great deal more. He’s a wild card of the type who just might upset a status quo that needs a major kick in the pants.

But he’s new to the game and we just can’t be sure what new thing we’re going to learn about him.

The one thing clear is that his opponent is weak on all levels and has little going for her besides a rich and powerful party supporting her, and the incumbency of over 29 years in office.

Susan Collins seems uncannily naïve, taking her time to research questions over and over, and announcing how much she is studying the situation. All she has to show for that overthinking is consistency in making wrong decisions and apparently an enviable war chest from donors who reward her for those bad decisions.

At Donald Trump’s first impeachment Collins spent hours talking with him, felt “he’s learned his lesson,” and voted not to impeach. In the years in office since, it is clear that he had not learned his lesson and is not likely to.

At Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation Collins had a similar talking-to with him and she believed him when he said he was innocent in spite of the evidence against him. She glowingly described their conversation in which he assured her he would never vote to repeal the landmark Roe v. Wade case.

She never mentioned his betrayal of that promise a few months later.

She walked the Republican line of refusing to believe the testimony of Kathleen Blasey Ford who had spent her life suffering PTSD—reliving the trauma of Kavanaugh’s assault and attempt to rape her when she was in high school. The FBI investigation of numerous other such complaints was shut down by Trump. Blasey Ford was declared not credible. Kavanaugh’s friend from high school, who witnessed the event, did not testify, claiming that his own memory was clouded by his alcohol use back in the day.

Boys will be boys.

There is something about the masculine “mystique” that I as a woman do not quite understand. Women have always known the male sex drive is different from ours. Today it is more out in the open, out in the sunshine where all can see. Previous generations did a great deal to slough it off or to hide it, but today we want details.

Back in 1776, when her husband John was among those men charged with creating a Constitution for a new type of nation, Abigail Adams wrote him in a letter:… “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.” (Italics mine.) “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.

“That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.”

Occasionally that happens but it is not usual, even two hundred years later. All men still would be tyrants if they could.

Abigail did not anticipate the advent of women like Susan Collins, women who stand by the decisions of men who are not only flawed but basically inferior, men who are adept at self-aggrandizing above all else, ignoring the truth if necessary.

Collins has sold her country short many times. She must be replaced—and Platner is as good a candidate as we’re going to get. You and I may not be voting in the state of Maine, but I hope some who read this will be and will see my point. Shay Stewart-Bouley, a Black woman who Podcasts from Maine has a take on Platner we should read before writing him off as an unqualified outsider, or worse.

His opposition has unearthed a lot of dirty-sounding stuff about him. Some of his past comments sound decidedly White Racist. He had a skull and crossbones tattoo burned into his chest when he was a marine. A Republican woman said he twisted her arm and locked her in a bedroom where she went to sleep for the night. He said it never happened. (She did add “He never punched me.”) That she was working for the Collins campaign before and after the incident pretty much negates whatever value might be found in her story.

Platner has been married for only three years. Early in his marriage he was sending “sexts” to a few of his old girl friends. His wife told this to his campaign, allowing them to use it against whatever oppo-research it would generate. She said she and he had worked it out at the time. He says he loves his wife and that she is his best friend. Now that’s a tricky one to explain, but my understanding is that the content of a sext is fantasy and does not per se break any laws. What he said in the texts is not known; neither is any response.

I would suspect this latest revelation might fall into the “boys-will-be-boys” category.

All the worldwide attention to a senate race in the small-population state of Maine may seem an over-reaction to a primary. But Maine has become vital to the Democratic Party, and Susan Collins has bogged U.S. politics down over her 29 years in office.

I know I may live to regret saying this, but I can’t help thinking the oyster farmer may be just what Washington needs.

We’ll probably know before the day is over Tuesday.

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When television came along I was ready for it. Hankering. It seemed to us then that radio would be much more exciting if you could see the faces of the people doing the talking. Now that I think about it, I’m sure the very fact that the voices (without faces) prompted our minds to create our personal pictures of the characters who were talking and the scenes where they were—and that this stimulated our brains in ways we don’t have to anymore. And that that may not have been a bad thing at all, in fact, it may be humanity’s loss.

But now I am hooked on television. It’s so much easier to watch it than to read a book, magazine, or newspaper.

Lately, I get more information than I want, and I get it through television, and I have the box running more hours in the day than I like to admit. There is no “major” network anymore, no show with a serious journalist at the helm with a 15-minute program five nights a week revealing just the curated choice events of the day.

The landscape is all but undecipherable now. We the people are viewed as targets to manipulate, to coax into buying products, to defile with a barrage of misinformation deliberately designed to confuse rather than inform. I am of an age at which the brain is beginning to wither, and I fear I may not always be able to discern the truth itself when it peeks through the verbiage of insidious villains who are writing the texts I once was able to rely on.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I am now hoping for distractions from the chaos our dysfunctional government is presenting day after day. I must preserve more than my own sanity. I want to keep my equilibrium as I observe the hideous games from a distance.

You may remember back in April when I wrote here that I’ve started to watch re-runs of E.R, a television medical drama series that ran for 15 seasons, ending in 2009.

What began as a diversion is developing into something like an addiction. I have lost many close friends and family members through relocation, attrition, and dates with destiny. For a couple of years I have been seeking a community. I found a delightful group of women in my age range—which I’d place at 50-90—in nearby Woodstock, and we have lunch together once a week.

Besides lunch, we share common interests, and of course Woodstock is full of art galleries and music events, which we attend at will.

Our latest activity is a big hit—we’ve taken up bowling and the bowling alley is just a short trip from my house. We have so much fun at the game, and our styles are so idiosyncratic that all of us are good at tossing the ball just so that it hits the gutter on one side of the lane or the other. From the first time at the alley we began calling ourselves The Gutter Girls. It’s a jolly group.

But my new community of friends is the actors appearing in E.R.

The series began in 1994, so the story line predates COVID and Trump. It is about serious medicine as practiced in a large hospital in Chicago. The show was the brain child of author Michael Crichton, an excellent writer who started his career as a doctor some years before that. The show was retooled by showrunner John Wells, along with the creative oversight of executive producer Steven Spielberg. ER was first rate on all levels.

The cast featured Anthony Edwards, George Clooney, Eriq LaSalle, and Julianna Margulies. It introduced a newcomer, Adam Wyle, as a third-year medical student, a surrogate for Crichton.

Having this new community I’m watching the characters (and actors) mature, show by show, and I have an unlimited opportunity to know their secrets and follow their path. Watching an episode every day is like living a separate life. I observe the charm of a different world of people, their shortcomings, their trials, and the foibles that trip them up—without actually making any commitment to making things better for any of them. I’m beginning to think I could perform brain surgery if asked.

I’m in the middle of Season 7. I have seen some of my favorites in the show die and others facing life-threatening illnesses and catastrophic events. All in the safety of my own home and at no personal cost.

Like my grandpa and auntee, who followed the nighttime series One Man’s Family in the 1940s, I get involved in new story lines and cast a watchful eye on new characters. Alan Alda played a respected physician fighting off the reality that he was becoming forgetful. Sally Field gave a bravura performance as a serious case of bipolar disorder. People come and go in emergency rooms.

And with a series as superbly written and played as this one, it is easy to allow it to become a branch of one’s life, in a place where it rains more often and harder than anywhere else, where snow blanket streets and sidewalks many months of the year, where lives are saved and hearts are loved, lost and won--hard-bitten Chicago. It’s easy to watch even when events are fast and furious, and when lives are at stake and blood is flowing.

I remember when our government was a source of strength and, yes, pride, but the living conditions at this point in history are precarious and it takes all the heart we have just to endure information about daily events. Our trust is so eroded that we need to escape to a place where we know there are good guys even if there may not be happy endings.

My ticket to survival involves an extraordinary amount of focus on real people, people who may be fictional but are more believable than our so-called leaders are. It takes a shift in perspective, and a reminder that we’re all better than this and we shall show that we are with our votes and our zeal to expose the ugly underbelly of corruption our president and his cronies are trying hard to keep covered.

Every chance I get I escape to a cozy emergency room inhabited by earnest physicians and staff all sincerely doing their part to treat the sick and the wounded.

It may sound dark and scary, but it isn’t.

These days the real world is.

I say I am addicted to this particular television series. However, it has not taken over my thinking in the way an opiate addiction might. I enjoy watching good actors in powerful productions; I love to see them onstage as well. And I’m well aware such diversions are needed when we are being steered to watch cage fights and untalented people sing and attempt to dance. I’m uncomfortable that I will not be celebrating the 4th of July in this significant year. But I have no doubt there will be appropriate offerings provided, even if they are reruns of shows created before we got in the mess we’re in.

I still exercise my American right to vote. I still go to protest marches. I even write occasionally about politics.

It may be Amateur Night in Washington D.C, but the country needs and deserves more and better art to contemplate, appreciate, and discuss. Find something that makes you laugh, makes you think well of humankind. Let it suffuse you with hope and promise.

We’re all going to get out of this. We are a community of strong people.

The cowards and the bullies shall not prevail much longer.

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They were called the Impressionists, but they didn’t use the term. They said they were Independents, with stated philosophy to paint out of doors when they could, and to replicate the scenes in the vivid colors of nature—the very colors they saw. They set out to change not only the way the world saw artists, but also the way artists saw and presented the world. They painted ordinary people in their daily ordinary lives, and were intent in capturing the reality of landscapes in the light of day.

Cassatt was accepted as a peer among the group. For subject matter, she often chose women and children and her work reveals emotional bonds without belaboring them. Her paintings of mothers with their daughters invariably show us how women behaved in those days, with their children and children in their care.

One of my favorite Mary Cassatts is a scene she calls, “Little Girl Sitting in a Blue Armchair,” however, it is much more than that. The armchair is in a large drawing room, a living room, Americans would say, or perhaps a parlor, but its size and scope belie both terms. We see big windows in the background, and groupings of oversized chairs, upholstered in a matching vivid blue-green floral print.

And the little girl is sitting sprawled in what we might in the 20^th century have deemed an unladylike position, legs apart and the lace showing on her knickers. A beautiful child, she is gazing in the direction of a small dog in the armchair facing her.

My first reaction to the painting was, “That’s me in Gladys’ house.”

My aunt Gladys, Daddy’s older sister, was persnickety. My mother was casual. At one point Gladys felt the urge to take me on and civilize me if she could, and she asked Mama if she would mind letting me spend more time with her.

My mother told me many years later that Gladys offered to teach me the niceties I didn’t seem to know.

One afternoon I was at Gladys’ house and she was expecting some of her friends from church to come by for tea.

I think I was wearing blue jeans, because I remember clearly that I walked over to a red Chippendale-style chair and plunked myself into it. I automatically flung a leg over the arm of the chair to be more comfortable.

“Honey, that’s no way for a young lady to sit in a chair,” Gladys said.

I had no idea there was a right and a wrong way to sit in a chair.

“Move your leg down and sit up straight,” she said.

I did.

“It doesn’t look right for a young lady to put her leg over the arm of a chair.”

One of the eternal verities I didn’t know.

When I saw the Cassatt painting years later, I was astonished that in the middle of the 19^th century there were little girls who didn’t have an aunt who told them not to sit that way.

The subject of the painting seems to be enduring her fate with a wistful look at her puppy and wanting to break loose from posing for a painting as soon as she can.

Mary Cassatt said, “I love to paint children. They are so natural and truthful.”

She certainly captured that in this work, which became one of her most famous.

With our father behind the wheel, we took a drive almost every Sunday. I can’t think of any particular destination. But I remember the trips.

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Driving in South Alabama then was a different expeience. Cars were not air conditioned so the windows were wide open, and the most-often-warm winds blew on us enough to at least lend the impression of cooling us off.

One such day we were driving in farm country. The fragrance of good old cow manure filled our noses, and not in a bad way at all. A stretch of plants with white toppings greeted us on both sides of the two-lane highway.

“Look at all that cotton!” Daddy said. “Would you like to see it up close?”

Of course we would.

He pulled the car over into a driveway that divided the field, and we all walked over to get a good look at the plants, little miracles of brown plant, each bearing a plume on top of actual, snow-white cotton!

He broke a plant off at the base and gave it to me.

I was in the third grade at a traditional city public school in Mobile, Alabama. I took the cotton plant to school the next day and showed it to my teacher, Mrs. Lambert. She was impressed with it and with the story of Daddy picking the plant for me.

We had a card table set up in the corner of the school room with the sign “Discovery Table” in big letters on it. My cotton plant was placed in a vase on the table.

At the end of the school year our class presented a description of the Discovery Table to an assembly of the entire school. I was asked to be one of the students describing the table and its many discoveries. I was to talk about the cotton, so the teacher suggested I wear a costume to signify “cotton.”

Mama picked up a white taffeta dress somewhere and trimmed it with cotton balls and long strips of cotton from a roll she bought at a nearby drugstore. We worked together on a speech for me. I remember that the speech started, “There are many other things on our Discovery Table…” and that it followed with a list of the “discoveries” children had brought for the table, including of course, the cotton in its natural state. I may have held up the plant itself, but really don’t remember what I said about it.

Nothing was said at that time of the grueling work it was to work in the fields picking cotton, or the oppression of people it took to wrest the little bolls of the soft white stuff from the treacherous plants that held them.

I was to be enlightened on that score by the appearance of someone who had actually done it.

A few years ago, a good friend from my late childhood got in touch with me on the internet. He was basically a country boy, as you’ll see, but raised in Mobile, Alabama, where he got a good education at Murphy High School. He was to spend his life aspiring to be a philosopher, read deeply into Spinoza and his ilk.

He wrote several novels that went unpublished, but did find a publisher for his philosophical opus Spinoza’s God. His writing tended to be a little weighty for me, but he wrote a childhood story which touched me profoundly and I’ll post it here for you.

Picking Cotton

By Franklin Lonzo Dixon

My uncle Ben made a living as a sharecropper in Northwest Florida. Grew cotton. One year when I was about 11 or 12, I and several of my city-dwelling cousins went to spend a few weeks of a summer with my Aunt Fannie and Uncle Ben. We all were anxious to pick cotton, and on a very warm morning during cotton-picking time, our wishes were granted. About five of us were given sacks and rudimentary instructions. Uncle Ben stationed each of us at the head of a row. My row stretched farther than I could see.

As romantic as picking cotton had sounded, it turned out to be quite a chore. The bolls were sharp pointed and in less than a half-hour my fingers were beginning to bleed. The sun didn’t get any cooler either, in fact seemed hotter than any sun I had ever felt. But I kept at it, trudging along, head down, dragging my sack of cotton, pulling the white stuff from the hated bolls, with sweat stinging my eyes.

I guess it must have been around 11 AM, getting on toward lunch break, when uncle Ben came up from behind and asked me a strange question.

“Franklin, where’d they go?”

I straightened up and for the first time noticed that the other cousins had all disappeared.

Unbending my back must have caused me to grimace. Uncle Ben took my sore shoulders in his calloused hands – my God! I can still feel them! – and rubbed some of the misery out of them. While ministering to my pains he spoke words I can never forget.

“Well, I guess you got more grit than them others.”

I had never heard a compliment from anyone other than my Mom and Dad. I turned to Ben, meaning to say something nice, but I broke into tears that he understood far better than he would any words I might have spoken.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s you and me go get something to eat.”

At that instant I became a man.

The plant I took to school that day had more significance than I could have known. Had my father ever had an experience in the fields as those children had, he might have told a similar story, but few Southerners really understood the meaning of a stalk of cotton.

Cotton itself was a commodity that meant prosperity to our country, and especially to the region of my birth and upbringing–but I was born removed from the agonizing pain of the cotton fields, and I was spared the conditions of working under inhumane conditions with no possibility of a better life.

Frank’s story reminds us of how removed most of us are today from that reality, a reality that was far from “great,” as we like to think of ourselves. Our ancestors worked hard to shield us from knowing what life was really like for them, what poverty and oppression really meant, and how many Americans spent most of their days yearning for a fraction of the comfort we now enjoy.

Daily life required a measure of grit we no longer have. We don’t even remember it.

Our lives are filled with mementos--real ones, or just remembered ones, like the cotton plant on that “discovery table.” It is not important to keep the object, but it is a marvel to remember what it looked like and to ponder its meaning.

Frank Dixon died last January at the age of 93, in Virginia. He was a retired computer programmer, author, Mark Twain impersonator, devoted husband, father, grandfather, and popular lecturer and raconteur. Not many knew of his humble beginnings and yet his story of a morning in a cotton field glows with truth and insight.

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I watched a few minutes and saw the film starred Gregory Peck as an outsider working his way in, engaged to the young daughter played by Carroll Baker, who looked so much like Grace Kelly in this film I mistook her at first. Charlton Heston also lusted for the sweet young thing but it was pretty clear Peck had the advantage. I remembered the outdoor scenes—handsome people on horseback with sparse land around them, surrounded somehow by sky.

My thoughts went back to the time I saw another real American movie, The Electric Horseman, soon after I moved to Switzerland and was still sorting out the difference between the two countries in my mind. Switzerland too has heroically beautiful people and breathtaking natural resources: Wide expanses of land, panoramic mountain views, rivers, forests, and the like. But it really doesn’t look like the U.S.

The Electric Horseman was a quirky romantic comedy-drama, putting Robert Redford with Jane Fonda, in the contemporary West. Redford is a down-at-the-heels Western movie star who has taken a job promoting breakfast cereal wearing an outlandish sequined costume and draped with blinking Christmas lights. But it had scenes (shot in Nevada and Utah, including the Red Rock National Conservation Area) with a lot of sky. All of it just made me homesick for myths of my homeland.

My television sweep then took me to a channel that was showing a dark crime story called Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a 2017 vehicle featuring the great Frances McDormand. I knew I had seen the movie but remembered only one really emotional scene at the end in which a good actor who doesn’t get all that many leads, and whose name escaped me. I thought it could have been Christopher Walken. I watched enough of it to see it wasn’t Walken but Sam Rockwell—and promised myself to watch this one from the beginning sometime soon. I want to see that scene where he explodes all over the place. I congratulated my unconscious mind for equating the two actors.

But it was 4 A.M. and all this cinematic excursion did was remind me of living in Geneva, where French is the national language. I had an American friend there who asked in her French class how to say “I miss America” in French.

“L’Amerique me manque,” she was told.

It doesn’t take a deep knowledge of world languages to see that the phrase looks to mean “America misses me.” The subject and its verb seem to be in the wrong places.

The closeness yet differences between the two languages was one of the frustrating aspects of learning to understand French if your mother tongue is English.

But the sentiment is the same. When transplanted to another country, however pleasant, one tends to think of home, and to blur the reality of the memories.

These days I am back in my country, yet I miss the America I once knew, the place where people felt good about themselves and about their possibilities. America used to be about personal potential and self-improvement—and the trust that if you did your best you would go far. It was idealistic, and probably naïve, but for sure it is what I remember.

I watched enough of The Big Country to see a scene where all the rich cowmen and their wives were at a dance in an opulent home. I couldn’t miss the fact that all the people in the room were White people; today there would probably be a representative or two of another race. But of course this was a movie about White people, and for all we knew in those days there weren’t people of other races in the West. I doubt if I shall watch this movie again.

I would like to see The Electric Horseman again, however. I want to see Redford and Fonda together, young again, idealistic, directed by Sidney Pollack in an amusing story about Americans fighting a materialistic Establishment. I would like to see the scenery I recall, the very America I thought was real, as opposed to the dignified, righteous Switzerland I was beginning to love. I hadn’t given this picture a second thought since the first time I saw it; but knowing what I now know, I want to see it again.

And I know I shall make a point of watching the one about the three billboards again, from the beginning. It shows a gritty, angry, heartbroken America, a country of people who just won’t admit they are losers in the competition for goodness and justice in life.

I am one of the lucky ones, living the life I have and enduring much. I know that and I promise you I appreciate it. I know I can’t undo my own mistakes or put checks on the mistakes of others, especially those long gone. I am lucky that I’m alive to continue to learn and to enjoy what I can.

That realization haunts me. In fact, I think it helps me.

But I miss America.

He noted that 160 Supreme Court cases had cited the Magna Carta, that document decreed by King John of England in 1215, using language unsurpassed at this date by any greater expression of the radical idea that nobody is above the law.

Say what you will about the English monarchy, hold a grudge if you must for his treatment of his first wife—but Charles III, King of England, was the perfect man to deliver the message the United States was willing to hear and even possibly to act upon. The joint session of Congress, regardless of bias or political party, was moved to standing ovations at each of his points, although their actions before or following the address do not indicate any such support. We can hope they even understood his words.

Charles has won over the American public, without being our king. We know that his position of king is mostly ceremonial, but he bears his responsibility well and serves to show the world what a good king might be.

When his mother’s uncle Edward chose to abdicate his potential reign, he remarked petulantly, “What’s the good of being king if I can’t do what I want?” referring to the choice he was given at the time—if he insisted on marrying an unsuitable wife as consort—he could not be allowed the reins of power he might have as King of England. As that one turned out, his country was better off without him although neither he nor his American wife was ever reconciled to it.

Donald Trump does not understand that he is not a king, or that even if he were he could not simply do what he wanted.

Going back in history we know that the first king of America was a tyrannical madman, but that perception could use some scrutiny in the light of what we know today. I’ll get to that.

George III was a good king for many years, and American diplomats, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, found him an interesting man and a pleasant companion.

George never favored the growing unrest in the colonies, however, and took to handing out punishing policies that fomented the full scale revolution we know all too much about, beginning in 1776. He imposed a stamp act that caused great dissent among the colonists, and also applied a higher tax on tea than they would tolerate, which led the Boston protest group Sons of Liberty to disguise themselves in Mohawk costumes and stage a demonstration by dumping the tea sent by England into Boston Harbor.

The public perception of a benign royal presence across the sea shifted to a darker narrative as the struggling citizens of colonial America received information about punitive taxes and Parliamentary acts of control. King George’s imperial proclamations, one after the other, called by colonists the “Intolerable Acts,” made a revolution inevitable.

George made mistakes, and went down in history as the monarch who presided over Great Britain at the time the United States won its independence in a bloody revolution. He did not have absolute power, but he became the symbol of majestic mismanagement, and journalists and citizens of the new United States held him accountable.

In later years, he suffered from debilitating diseases and finally experienced hallucinations and lost the ability to speak coherently. In the parlance of the day, he went mad—but he was perfectly sane at the time that he was ruling this country. He was part of a complex political scene, and this part of his realm, America, only saw a small part of it. The mental illness came later in his life. This made it easier for propagandists to portray him as both a bad king and a mad king.

Our American history books paint an undeniably slanted picture of the villains and heroes of that period.

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump ever paid much attention to what was being taught in his history classes. A failed businessman and spoiled, overindulged 1950s “playboy” (in the Hugh Hefner mold) he grew to be the least qualified candidate for U.S. president in history. How he won the office is something for future historians to investigate; contemporary journalists dropped the ball and, with a few exceptions, continue to report his egregious behavior as if there were some mysterious strategy behind it.

We often hear in political reporting, “We are getting mixed messages from the White House.”

He was not certifiably mad when he took office in 2017, but there were undeniable signs of a warped outlook on life. A group of 27 psychiatrists and other experts on mental disorders published their separate opinions in a volume entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book published in October of that year. The book pointed to the danger of having this person as president. They agreed that, although a diagnosis should not be made without examination of the patient, dangerousness may be assessed from observed behavior. The phrase malignant narcissist became part of the national discourse.

His first term as president was chaotic and disturbing to a country that had become comfortable with its political system and was not prepared to face the outright lunacy of his agenda. He was not reelected, yet he spent the next four years claiming that he had been—and that the system was rigged against him.

His second term gets more disastrous by the day and has prompted a monumental reaction through marches of unprecedented size in the streets of cities and towns all over the country, and even in other concerned countries. The size and enthusiasm of the crowds demonstrate that the United States wants to make it clear that it wants no king and never did.

Having zero information about leadership, government, democracy, history, or the normal comportment of an adult human being, Trump loves kings, dictators, and very rich oligarchs. He is closer to a mad king than George III ever was. He and his advisors are working as hard to obliterate free and fair elections everywhere.

This madness has spawned the shakeup of everything we ever learned in American history classes, Civics, and political science. We remember the marches against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and this time we are carrying signs that read NO KINGS.

As is our custom and our duty, we the people are letting the party in power know how ephemeral power itself can be. The Movement is organizing to increase voter turnout. The “swamp” created by our mad king is trying its best to see that there will be no mid-term election at all in November.

It took a speech by the King of England to recall to the U.S. the roots of dissent that inspired our forefathers. The speech was last week. If you didn’t watch it live at the time, I suggest you watch it or read it, and think it over.

It is a comfort to know there are articulate, intelligent world leaders who are aware of our plight.

And we have such leaders here, concerned and prepared to right the ship again.

Let us not let go of the founders’ hope for us. In the country they cobbled together almost 250 years ago, the people have the real power.

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The utopian stuff did not work out all that well. At least not the real estate part.

Early settlers thought they were leading the way to the enlightenment they envisioned for the 20^th century. Most of them were living on low incomes and hoping an economic turn in the country would clear their way for what was then the American dream: an affordable home in a pleasant place, with breathing space for families and children.

Most of the founders of Fairhope were idealists. They were amateur philosophers.

Houses were modest, many having been built by their owners. Some were jerry-built beach cottages called Fairhope’s castles by the locals.

Captain Ed Roberts, one of the pilots of the big bay boats that plied back and forth between Mobile and the villages of the eastern shore across the bay, built what was in those days a snazzy “airplane bungalow.”

I was taken by the old “Fairhope castle” when it came up for sale in 2004. I impulsively bought it.

I wrote then that it “was solidly constructed and had an ambiance of bygone days that suggests the comfort of a warm hug.”

One of my first nights in the house was not all that comfortable. The weather was stormy and windy. Upstairs I heard doors and windows banging, and the situation seemed eerie. I knew the place had been built by Capt. Ed, and I had the feeling he was somehow still watching it.

Never having met the man, I felt a certain bond with the captain, and from the first I was proud to be the owner of his house. However, on this rainy night, I felt that somehow the captain considered me an interloper and was trying to deal with me from the beyond.

I took a deep breath and went upstairs to see what was causing the banging. There were no doors or windows swinging. There seemed to be no source for the noise. I gathered my wits and said in a loud, clear voice, so as to be heard wherever he might be, “Captain! I bought this house, and I love this house. I’m going to do my best to make it a good place to live again.”

When I came downstairs the banging had stopped. I never heard such noises again.

I lived there for four years and put more money into shoring it up and bringing it up to date than I like to think about. I hired a landscape designer to plant flowers in the large front yard.

The house meant a lot to me, and I thought it was likely to be where I ended my days—until I woke up one day and my life had changed so I decided to put it on the market. My husband had died, my mother was dying, and I felt a shiver as I recognized that the Fairhope I had known in my childhood was also dying.

New, bigger houses were being built all around me. The ideals of a single tax were rapidly fading. Young families were gravitating to Fairhope for its physical beauty and its reputation as a safe, clean, happy little town, and they never gave a thought to its history.

They wanted big houses with “open plan” interiors, and they were building them all around me.

I sold the house, moved north to be near my daughter and her family, and almost never visited Fairhope. When I did return I could see how the town had prospered, yet somehow it had maintained green spaces, added parks, and become a veritable theme park of huge homes cheek by jowl with older cottages. There were new restaurants, coffee shops, upscale retail stores, and gift shops.

A month or so ago I was called by a man I had known slightly, one of the new citizens who had worked in the local library and the historical museum. He told me of a historical building he was working to restore, and asked me for some information about it.

He was so bright, articulate, and interested in learning what I could tell him about Fairhope history that when he mentioned there would be a ribbon cutting when the renovation was complete, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to go.

It was time for me to take a good look at Fairhope again.

I decided to ask the friends I had in Fairhope to a get-together the day after the ribbon cutting, and extended my visit to four days.

The renovation of the museum in the old school was beautiful, and my personal party was an inspiration. Somehow at last I was able to get my bearings as a bona fide elder citizen of the 21^st century.

I flipped a switch in my mind to accept that people are not the same as those brave souls who built the Fairhope I had known, and that it’s okay that the world is different too.

In the four days I was able to find time to drive past The Captain’s House and see how it was faring. I knew it had changed hands a couple of times since I sold it in 2007. I am one of the grownups now.

I cannot find that magic wand that will turn back time, but I’m still here, so I’d better learn to like things as they are.

Fairhope made that easier. It is more beautiful than ever. I arrived on a day when the weather was perfect and even the humidity was not stifling as it is so often in summer. The sun still sets in the bay every afternoon and the sounds of the waves lapping the shore still stir my heart.

The remodel of The Captain’s House speaks for itself. I cannot call it improved, but even in my transformation as a broadminded, well-adjusted elder, I do not want to see the interior.

I’ll keep the memory of my encounter with the Captain, and the joys I had in that house, and make no comment about what it looks like today.