Writings, Revelations, and Other Nonsense

Here I post a daily diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2010.

Today the river is very still as though it is holding itself together after last night’s festivities. I watched big spreading fingers of cracking, colored light all across the sky from where I stood on a patio, eating grilled squash and burgers. The kids ran down the hill with sparklers, people smoked by a bonfire and the dogs pricked their ears forward with curiosity.

July 4^th, of course, is really about war. A war that won us our freedom, the story goes. And at the party, I wondered whether fireworks signified bombs or ammunition, but when I got home, I discovered that 2,000 years ago, a Chinese cook mixed charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter and BOOM, fireworks came to life.  They are thought to have the power to fend off evil spirits and ghosts. Which is funny because July 4^th has always brought the ghosts on for me.  Somehow in the face of barbecues and bright colors bursting in the sky, I feel a certain loneliness.This loneliness is brought on by a stricture, an unspoken law in this country: We must belong to someone, to our children, to our friends, to our community, to our work, to a religion.  And the more we strive for this belonging, to facebook, to twitter, the more we are networked together like membrane, the more lonely I feel.

Belonging has always held terror for me.  Not because there is anything wrong with belonging but because it reminds me that not belonging is not an option. And I really like to have options.

Belonging goes back to tribes and packs and all the things related to the root chakra, which is about survival.  If you don’t belong, it is feared your wiring will develop differently, and you can wind up on the fringe, doing awful things, like heroin for instance or shooting yourself.

The belonging is about the microcosm, the family, and then it goes outward from there, and the largest fact of belonging is that we are a pact culture, a herding species. Where one goes we all go. Which is why Oprah is worth 2.4 billion dollars.  Oprah is okay.  As far as IQ and depth she’s probably pretty much average. But Oprah hit a wave and the herd followed, stampeding forward like blind buffalo and taking advice about our marriages from mediocre bald men because she said so. The herd likes the smell of money and the smell of luck and the smell of power, and they like beauty, though the person can just be affiliated or married to or friends with beauty and that will suffice. This herding culture is what makes a son say to a father, Well, everyone else was doing it. And it is most ironic that the father says back, Well, if they were all jumping off a bridge, would you? The kid might as well answer, But aren’t I supposed to do what everyone else is doing? That’s what he is taught, from the time he becomes conscious of the unspoken laws in his family to the time he enters school and learns the same thing as everyone else day after day.

Before I got married I couldn’t really figure out why everyone was hurrying up, trying to get married and have kids as though we were playing musical chairs and there were only so many seats and the song was just about to end. Didn’t they know how much fun it was to jump in your car with your music blaring, and drive to a commune in Virginia, go fishing in Mississippi, write the great American novel, date people you couldn’t possibly dream of marrying and not have to be back at any time special or telephone to say you’ll be late?  I couldn’t figure out why people were all tied into nine to five jobs, why not just jump in your car and go to the southwest and get a bunk on a hacienda, learn Spanish from the staff and ride horses for free and figure out what it was like to be a cowgirl? Why not play banjo on the streets of Guanjuato for money and wake up in a blue tiled hotel room with Mexican birds of paradise out the window?
This was all fun and games until I one fine summer day, I found myself walking down the sidewalk with another gypsy friend to the fourth of July fireworks, and I felt an almost blinding loneliness, not that I was ready to get married and have kids, I was having too much fun for that, but the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to be my free self forever, hit me like a brick in the chest.

Society doesn’t support nomadic artists, sooner or later, and preferably sooner, you have to plant yourself down and belong.  If you don’t belong, people look at you funny, you have to be in a state of having belonged or about to belong and preferably you should at least have a child if the spouse has disappeared.  You should really belong to a house and you or said spouse should belong to a company or an organization.  Sometimes this is a matter of life or death, if you don’t belong either to a marriage or an organization, you can’t get good health insurance and then not belonging can cost you your life.

Luckily, I fell madly in love with my husband, and we got married, though neither one of us ever thought we would, and now we belong. To each other. And we have a group of other people who belong to one another and we all watch the fireworks on July 4^th. During these times, I try not to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t fallen in love with my husband? Or what if my husband falls off a cliff, proverbial or otherwise?  The fact that we are not going to have kids and don’t really want to be bothered with a house right now is already considered a little suspect in terms of belonging and so my only thin thread to this belonging thing rests entirely with him.  Which feels like a really faulty business plan.  Most of all, I try not to consider that blinding loneliness I felt that time walking down the sidewalk, which is the void we are all stepping around as we drink beer and light up the fuse on the fireworks.

The truth is, I feel sort of badly for that girl who used to fly across the country with her sunroof open and her music blaring, believing that the United States was born for people like her, people who valued freedom above everything else. But then again, maybe it was. Maybe those are our real warriors, the ones who refuse to belong.  Maybe it’s easy, after all, to belong, or to pretend you belong even if at home you can’t stand the wife and the kids get on your nerves and you hate the organization that gives you health insurance.

If we strip everything away and look at the real story of how our country was made, the marrow is about independence. It is about saying screw you to the cult of belonging.  It is about a group of people escaping the constricts of a very uptight country,  forfeiting security and admitting that our values were being compromised,  our spiritual self was being squashed, and we wanted freedom.  As we stand around belonging on July 4^th , we might contemplate how, against all odds, against royalty and money and tradition and circumstance, our country fought for one thing that is becoming a scarce commodity in the United States: independence.

As always, this leads me to my grandmother’s diary. My grandmother seems so free on these pages, she can trail up to the Whitney to view a new exhibit anytime she wants to, drink champagne on her roof, she can be pampered at the hospital for three weeks while she has her baby and when she gets home a maid named Grace makes her meals and does her laundry, but  in fact my grandmother belonged whole cloth, as most women did back then, to her husband, my grandfather. She wasn’t educated, and she’d been trained as a dancer, which was completely dependent on age and not a good longterm plan. And now she had a tiny baby named Timothy, and so she really belonged, which can be a terrifying place to be.  Perhaps much more terrifying than a girl in her car who is sailing down the American highway towards god knows where belonging to no one, without a care in the world except her own freedom, her own independence.

February 28, 1938

Wept after baby’s early morning tea because M. twitted me on not caring about cold he’d caught from me, on account too taken up with baby’s affairs. He then decided we better keep Grace full time an extra week as in my right mind I should never have dissolved.  Felt pretty foolish but not capable of spurning idea. In afternoon put on beautiful housecoat to receive Edith and Lump and a few minutes after they had arrived in came Malrand and Anne, Anne with a cane which she forgot to use every now and then as she was the first to point out. They had been to see Clare Boothe Brokaw’s play The Women and enjoyed it enormously.  Joneses reported being entertained by spelling bee over radio and said one of the words given was flylfot, which we discovered year or so ago with glee. Talked of story in paper about fancy and libbing done when actress in Tobacco Road dropped dead in dressing room last night and no understudy available; also fine interview Roosevelt gave Arthur Krock of Times– exclusive we think and if so first time president has done this since Theodore R’s time according to M.  Explained his view of what he wants to do to Supreme Court and says not paving way for dictatorship in his opinion but guarding against it, and definitely announces that he plans to retire to private life himself in 1941.  Had cozy fire in fireplace.  Infant very good. Company left before 6:30 feeding, played sticks and had dinner at 9:15 so M would feel I was doing things again as Grace is always very prompt.  M. read Flowering of New England and I began Moscow Skies by Muarice Hindus.



Here I post a daily diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2010.

I sometimes wonder, as I am transcribing my grandmother’s 1937 diary to the worldwide web what my grandmother was like when she was a little girl, before champagne and gin before guests from Hollywood and cooks named Grace.  I want to ask her about her best childhood friend, that girl she might have kicked her shoes off with and run bare ankled through summer streams. This weather brings back the memory of being sunburnt and long-limbed with my best childhood friend, Olivia Harrison.

Olivia lived a mile and a half from my house in a rambling 1800 three story with hidden nooks and fireplaces and a stone staircase arched by trellis.  It was at Olivia’s house that I first understood the power of writing, her uncle was the novelist, Jim Harrison, who came Easters with his wandering eye and whiskey smell, tantalizing and frightening, and her mother wrote poetry books that contained labyrinths of jeweled promises I longed to understand.  Her father, (who tends to come to me in dreams to tell me if I am being foolish or wise), built a writing studio for her mother beside the house with a woodstove to keep her warm, and I remember knowing, even at eight years old, that this was the perfect place for a woman to write.

We didn’t write back then, Olivia and I, we daydreamed.  She was the kind of friend you could lie next to in the sheep pasture and tell each other what shapes the clouds made, with Olivia you could imagine what the wart-laden minister looked like naked (before the image of a naked priest became a perverted cliché) and you could laze around in lawn chairs goggling Shaun Cassidy in Teen Beat and singing Leaf Garrett songs at the top of your lungs. We’d stand in front of her mother’s mirror and brush our hair a hundred times, practicing at womanhood.

It was fun to go to Olivia’s house because she was queen. It wasn’t her fault, she was adorable and smart and afraid of nothing. She walked with her chin up and her perfectly straight hair hanging off her back like a thrown off veil, and she pretty much knew everything.  It’s always fun to go to the queen’s house.  She was allowed to watch television whenever she wanted, and she could lie down and have a temper tantrum whenever she felt like it, she and her sister had the whole third floor to themselves with their very own bathroom, and they could decide one day to put up an art studio in the little nook by the banister and make a big clay head.

Olivia didn’t act queeny with me, she considered us equal and often came to play at my house, where I was absolutely not queen.  If it was summer, we played hermit crab families in the tidal pools outside, building castles from barnacles and seaweed, we covered ourselves in baby oil and lay corpse-like on the deck, waiting for the cheese sandwiches my mother brought.  Weekends, we rode the Ferris wheel at the Fireman’s Bizarre, and called to boys, when boys were still bare-chested mysteries.

Olivia’s parents were best friends with mine, her sister with my sister, and she knew all the not-so-nice things that our family, like all families, hid.  She taught me to be indignant in the face of injustice, how to make humor of adult anger. Olivia was a giggler and adventurer, we went through some trauma together, Liv and I, and we came out the other side.

Then one beautiful summer day, a day of strawberry picking and wraparound skirts, a good day for bicycling to a friend’s house a mile and a half away, Olivia’s family lost a daughter. This daughter was coming to our house to play, she was my sister’s age, and she was coasting down Boston Post Road when a 16-year old driver hit her broadside as she crossed the street.  Some time later that day, her mother waited in a hot line of traffic, wondering Is that my daughter? Is that my daughter.

So, this season’s slip of tide also brings the memory of tragedy, the knowledge that on that summer day, God seemed to skip a beat, look away, let go his supposedly sweet hold.

The accident might not have been the reason they left, but it seemed a happening worthy of leaving behind, not the haunting spirit of it, for this must be with them still, but the exact spot in the road they had to drive by to get to town, the bicycles parked in the darkened shed, Olivia’s sister’s carefully made bed.

Their VW van packed to the gills and that house for sale, they left.  It was the end of my childhood, and the start of my writing career. I’d written Olivia a long, epic farewell poem.  I skipped homework and sleep to write it.  I still have it.  It rhymes but it also has some tenor for the specific, the detailed, and through its lines, you can almost smell the love.

But because we can’t know anymore whether my grandmother was gifted with such a friend or whether she was made to wear taffeta bows and Patten leather shoes, we will just have to be satisfied with what we do have, my grandmother lounging around on a bed in Saint Mark’s place, having just given birth to a son, sewing her new velvet housegown, eating oysters and reading Virginia Woolf.

Grandma Maggie, Saint Mark’s Place, February 23, 1937

Wrote a few letters, had lunch in bed and fed baby.  A little trouble with Grace wanting to coddle baby when he cries and being lugubrious about his ailments– thinking he is constipated, that he didn’t get enough to eat, that he cried too much to ever gain (we weighed him Saturday, and he hasn’t gained) etc… This wears me down when tired and M. has great time cheering me and telling me not to mind. Walked over to Esposito’s for first time and back by cab.  Pat came over.  Sorry I forgot she had said she would like to hold baby–was never allowed to hold June—so I did not offer to let her.  Baby fussy all day, gave it bottle again at 6:15, and then off to fritz and Kate’s for dinner, leaving it yelling bloody murder behind. Fine dinner prepared by their new Chinese cook, Yic, who we thought looked too intelligent for the job and felt curious about.  Hennie there, too, and we still find him full. Enjoyed first evening out very much and came home by ten. Found Grace very doleful as baby yelled all evening and was in pain, she said.  Discovered for once she was right. He had indigestion and spit up and had hiccoughs and was generally sad. Tried to get him to drink a little warm water and bicarbonate.  Put him to bed around midnight.

Here I post a daily diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2010.

Mom still building sand castles at 70

Well, here in Suzanne Blog Land we ra ra ra about my grandmother, who I must admit is an absolute celebrity, but really the best most important most amazing and incredible thing  my grandma ever did was to give birth to my mother, who, in grandma world, is still two years from being born, but I want to talk about her anyway.

My mother went on a cruise to Bermuda last week. She’d never been on a cruise before, and she’d never been to Bermuda and the whole thing made me feel like I was sending my five year off to her first day of Kindergarten. I kept hoping she’d packed her Dramamine and a first aid kit and wished they weren’t about to put that bell thing on the oil spill that can make it explode, right when my mother happens to be floating around in the Atlantic ocean.  In theory it’s nice when my mother travels, but really I don’t even like her to go down the road for a gallon of milk, I’d rather she just had her milk delivered at home.

Mom with her granddaughter, Lexi

The day my mother left for Bermuda, I picked up the phone thinking, I have to tell mom about blobberdeeblink, but I didn’t know how to call Bermuda, and it gave me a sort of empty, no-floor feeling.   She’s the only one who cares about every little thing in my life, or at least she’s movie star good at pretending to care, and the thought occurred to me that one day I might have a spot of news I just had to tell her, and she wouldn’t be available to hear it anymore, ever.

My mother is a little bitty woman, you could just pick up and carry around , but she’d much prefer to walk.  As a school social worker, she spent most of her life talking kids out of killing themselves, hearing confessions about attempted murders on highway bridges and learning about dads sleeping with their stepkids. It made me feel like I might poison myself, how sad it was, but my mother believes a child needs one sane adult who cares about him, and he can learn to fly straight, and she intended to hold that space.  My mother baked bread, cut the hedge, tended the woodstove, figured out the sump pump, called the plumber and took us shopping for school clothes all in one day.  She managed to save us from pregnancy and drugs by reading our journals and listening in on our phone calls, and she always woke up at three a.m. when we had something crucial to talk about.  She (along with dear old dad) always paid for our education and our travel and took us to church.

Life can blindside you with all sorts of things, a bad break-up, a career blunder, a mean-spirited criminal who snatches your wallet  in the middle of Bombay, but this blindsiding isn’t as bad if you have a good mother behind the scenes, cheering you on and giving you bits of wisdom that are more valuable than diamond mines.   My mother happens to be the healthiest, person I know, she’s always in her yard planting garlic for the first time or cleaning the leaves out of her roof drain in her church clothes, so there’s no reason to believe I have to immortalize this wisdom now, but why not?  As soon as I start writing down the wisdom of Kasha Duffield Kingsbury, the floodgates will open, and I will find one million and five more pieces of wisdom to write about, but for now these will do.

Mom, the armchair sage

More than three dozen things my mother taught me:

If you can, go for a walk every day, no matter the weather; Said walk should involve some kind of prayer; Prayer is always about gratitude; Find something constructive to do; Decide what the center theme of your life is, and build your world around it; Don’t sacrifice your values to serve your loneliness; No matter what age, a teddy bear is curative; A penny saved is not only lucky but smart; Work even if you don’t have to, it builds confidence  and capability;  Often the least expensive, least complicated option is the best one; Borrowing and loaning should be kept to a minimum; Learn the lost art of listening; Always do your own dishes and make your own bed; Attend funerals and weddings whenever possible; Silence is often your best, most resourceful ally; Your thoughts are an eight track tape, learn how to turn the tape off; The lines of a woman’s face tell her story, to erase those lines is to erase her story; Take risks, do things that scare you, and listen to your intuition; Don’t talk about how much money you have; If you’re sad, call a friend or put on a pretty piece of music; Looking forward to something is just as much fun as the event itself; Money can’t buy you happiness; Freedom is knowing you can pay for yourself; A complaint must be accompanied by a plan of action or it is just noise;  Try not to overtax your friendships by talking about your problems; Eat your vegetables first; One glass of wine is enough, but it can be a very full glass; Ice cream can make the whole day seem celebratory; Keep your car at least half full with gas; Sarcasm isn’t that funny; Reuse and recycle; Don’t expect one friend to serve all your needs; Plant a garden; If you can still use it, don’t tear it down or throw it away; Remember birthdays; Bring people soup when they are sick; Write thank you notes when you get a gift or go visiting; Live in the landscape you most love;  There’s a gift in every single thing that happens to you; Say please and thank you.

Maybe Grandma Maggie taught her that, or maybe she didn’t, we might be able to figure it out by peaking at Maggie’s journal. Right now she is in Saint Mark’s place back in 1937 with her new baby and her velvet housecoat and if you want to know what else, read on…  (dictaphone is such an outdated word, my computer spell check doesn’t even recognize it! and when was the last time you heard Manhattan referred to as “town”?)

Grandma Maggie, Saint Mark’s Place, February 22, 1937

Baby again took forever to eat so called doctor, quavering for the first time and this gratified him  as he said  I would have to quaver about something sometime, but assured me  all babies did this from time to time, and there was nothing to do about it.  In afternoon Bobbie Sutton came, said her babies had done same in their day.  She’s conscience stricken because not enough to do on new job but thought would learn to loaf as other girls did.  First hazard had been having to learn the dictaphone, which scared her so she surreptitiously wrote everything out first and then read it into machine.  Spends her time going about seeing what is new in cosmetics and stationary and then writing reports for scores of stores.  M. M home and Donn Sutton, Bobbie’s husband came in.  All had drink, I sewed hem of my dress, which was much admired. Suttons are tired of Forest Hills and thinking of moving back to town for a year or so. Talked of possibility of taking cottage with them for part of summer.  They now have Baptist cook, colored, who doesn’t approve of drinking and Donn says she has him so cowed. he sneaks into the bathroom with his bottles to make preprandial cocktail.  They were bound for the theater so left at quarter till eight.  Baby yelled all evening but slept pretty well at night.

Oh! Poor grandma in screaming baby land. It will get better soon, soon the baby will grow up and be wise and pass the wisdom on to daughters who might just write a blog and tell the world. Until next week everybody…

Here I post a daily diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2010.

Finally back in Saint Mark’s place after a long hiatus!!  Back to Grandma Maggie and the littlest Timothy Duffield, who just this minute (back in 1937) came home from the hospital and is  howling on the bed amidst Hollywood actresses.

February 21, 1937

This morning to Wanamaker’s to try to get another brassiere, but they had none I liked.  Nice day, felt nice to be out though found had to walk rather slowly.  Liddy Nowell sent us several large branches of cherry blossoms, odd floral piece but very effective against our wallpaper and the only use we have found for the ugly vase Papa sent on.   Edith and Nelson came over and we all sat on the bed, they had Scotch while I had orange juice, baby lay in the middle, howling, I let him howl in hopes he wouldn’t howl afterward. Katherine just came home from Hollywood , said Richard’s new girl was worst he’s ever had and her name is Golly Hayes, said she spent a good deal of time refuting rumor which had preceded her trip west that she and Dale were separating.  Grace bathed baby, M. and I had oyster omelet.  M. read aloud to me from Boswell’s Life of Johnson* which we found very entertaining and a propos of same I read him the account of Dr. Burney’s Evening Party by V. Woolf from the Traveler’s Library, played sticks and to bed.  Baby wore me out going to sleep at last feeding and not getting enough milk down contrary self ‘till midnight.

And what  is yours truly doing in Brattleboro, Vermont in May of 2010?????

Joe Fichter’s Winter Thunder at the BMAC

Perhaps Brattleboro’s not Saint Mark’s Place, but it has its own enclave of fabulous artists who make their living sculpting stone, slapping paint on canvas, and working the pottery wheel.  So last night I ran down the sidewalk and across the street to the Brattleboro Museum and Arts Center, where Joe Fichter’s sculpted horses prance on the lawn, and entered the arched, stone doorway because Brattleboro West Arts was sponsoring an artist talk by a famous ceramics artist, one of my very best friends in the whole world, Natalie Blake.

Because this is Vermont, there was a potluck first in the middle of the museum with pounds of fresh produce, vats of rhubarb and real apple cider.  The Brattleboro Museum is sort of shocking in the caliber of art that comes through and right now, among many others in their oblique/abstract show, they are showing Rudy Burckhardt’s paintings from New York City. Rudy happened to move from Switzerland to Manhattan at exactly the same time my grandmother did.  Because Rudy portrayed beauty in unlikely places, like a woman’s ankles, I kept thinking I might be seeing the Patten leather party shoes of my grandmother in his photographs.  Debra Bermingham, Yvonne Jacquette, David Kapp, and Nicola López were also featured.  Maya Gold was my favorite because when you look at her paintings, you feel like you are flying.  But be careful googling Maya Gold, her name is also the stage name of a Hungarian pornographic actress.

Everyone ran around gazing at art and eating potato salad until finally someone blew a whistle and we found our seats.  I sat with Natalie’s parents, who I consider family. “She loved to be in her room making projects,” her mother said about Natalie in childhood.  “Her door was always open, of course.”   That pretty much sums Natalie up.  Except now her projects sell for $50,000, and she runs around the country selling them at exclusive craft shows.  More than not, I am saying goodbye to Natalie as she packs up her tiles and vessels, popping with bright blue glazes, and heads south, on I91.  She’s always calling me from San Fran or Chicago or Palm Beach Florida or New Orleans, where she’s combined her trip with a music festival and is singing at the top of her lungs before she gets me on the phone. Every September she trips out to Nevada, to Burning Man, a huge festival in the desert that is so wild and difficult to explain, so much about another galaxy opening up right here on earth, that you will just have to google it to understand why it is Natalie’s Mecca.

Natalie wore a bright blue dress I coveted the entire time she talked, and she curled up in a club chair in front of us just like a guest on Oprah except Oprah happened to be a man with a very hairy face and wire-rimmed glasses. The talk was about success in the arts and right away Mr. Oprah asked Natalie if she thought she was successful. Now, Natalie got a Watson fellowship and traveled the world studying ceramics, she came back to Brattleboro, plopped her clay on a wheel, fired up a kiln and in twenty years she has become one of the most successful ceramics artists in the United States, hiring staff to carry out the work of her designs, winning multiple awards and being featured on the front page of high-end art journals. “Well,” she told the hairy-faced man.  “I have a car and a house and a business, if that’s success.”  Of course, Natalie’s car is a $45,000 van she can literally live in and her house used to be a Catholic church until Natalie renovated it, putting the bathroom where the confessional used to be and her bed in the belfry. Recently she and her soulmate, Nic, bought the house next door so now they will be just like Frieda Kahlo and Diego except, of course, in Vermont.

Natalie kept turning towards us while she spoke and calling us by name. As soon as she possibly could, she was throwing out paper and pens and telling us to get busy drawing. “Just doodle whatever you usually doodle,” she said. “Or something new.” About five minutes later, we were imagining those doodles huge, we were imagining them carved in wood, moving on wheels, we were imagining them painted murals on a gigantic wall in the town square.  “Write down one step toward making that happen,” Natalie said. “That’s how you start.”  Natalie didn’t want to talk at us about her fabulous art career, she wanted to empower us.  In turn, I thought it might be a good idea to inspire you with Natalie’s words, so here are some of the most important things she said:

About resistance:
Notice Resistance.
Allow the resistance to speak, what does it have to say?
Sing to it.

About Judgment:
There are no ugly colors. (Or judgement limits or everything can be an inspiration or make art not criticism)

About the blank canvas, the unformed clay, the empty page:
Make a move.  Any move. It’s okay if only one move is your work for the day. That’s enough. (this she credited to our very own Doug Trump, another amazing Brattleboro artist)

About life:
There are no mistakes.
There are no mistakes.
There are no mistakes.
There are no mistakes.

Thank you Natalie Blake!! My grandma Maggie would have loved you!

Here I post a daily diary entry from my grandmother, Maggie, who lived on Saint Mark’s Place, Manhattan, in 1937, and a blog entry from yours truly, who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, 2010.

Well spring has sprung.  My littlest niece spent Easter pinching a stuffed duck and dancing along while it sang a drunk sounding quack quack quack song.  We went barefoot down the sidewalk and picked flowers out of strangers’ yards, ate too many dyed purple marshmallow nightmares and rode home in the blaring sunshine.

Of course it is supposed to snow on Saturday but Thursday is going to be in the 80s. No small wonder New England suffers from more bipolar disorders than anywhere else in the country, which reminds me that my Lyme disease winter might be over. I spent it cuddling with Miss Marla on the couch, reading mostly memoir which is hands down the most depressing genre out there.  I read about poor Irish immigrants in pre-war Brooklyn; people pooping in a hole in Appalachia; a Somalian girl killing a Lorry driver to escape rape; an alcoholic poet getting blindingly drunk on her porch every night; a guy dying in a tractor trailer accident, going to heaven and then waking up completely paralyzed; a doctor in a concentration camp in World War 11, trying to figure out the meaning of life; and a bipolar woman who found balance on lithium.  It was glorious. All I had was Lyme disease.  And even though Lyme  had dropped a couple of bowling balls on my back and my intestines were falling apart from the antibiotics, I was much better off than these people.  Which leads me to my grandma’s diary.

Memoir completely changes when it comes to grandma’s diary. We love memoir when we read about Saint Mark’s in the 30s.   Everything good and fun happens, and when it’s not good and fun, well she just doesn’t dwell on it.  She’s sort of like a Zen nun, not attaching emotion to anything, just going blissfully through her days, recording it all for her granddaughter to write on the world wide web in 70 years.

As of this moment, she’s still in the hospital after having her baby. It’s still February in Grandma-land, so cozy up with a hot cup of Joe for your next episode. This one a tad long, yes, but fascinating, with champagne and gleaming silver, taffeta housecoats and well, yes, screaming babies that are quieted by a nursemaid so the mother (my grandmother) can get her beauty sleep.  Times they are a changing or have changed drastically. Where’s the nursemaid when you need her and when was the last time you tied twine around champagne and hung it outside your hospital window, hoping it wouldn’t smash?

Grandma’s Diary February 1st-February 16th, 1937, Saint Mark’s Place, New York, NY:

M. came to see me at ten in the morning.  I had seen baby and described him as hideous, red, aged-looking and eyes not open.  Doctor came in and asked how much I remembered. Was pleased with meager report, said I’d done him proud. Kate and Fritz came in at night and assured me baby was all right in spite of idiotic appearance.

Flowers arrived from Mom and Dad, “Timothy with love to his mother.”  After that flowers and telegrams and letters came at fairly frequent intervals for over a week and I felt very much petted. <here my grandma lists pages of incredible gifts she received from boxes of lavender tulips to corsages of gardenias to white crepe de chine coats>.

M. came every night, very sweetly though it made for horrible hours on the subway for him, half an hour to the hospital on Eighth, hour to get home.  Sometimes he had his dinner afterward at Jack Bleeck’s and sometimes ate at the quick and dirty around the corner from hospital.  Never ate with me because Kate warned us the meals were ruinously expensive.

My days very much occupied with nursing every four hours, baking stitches under lamp for half an hour twice a day, being catheretized until could wee-wee by myself (when this last achieved was occasion for congratulations on part of whole staff) being bathed and having abdominal binder wrapped tightly around me.

M. is rather startled to find that he is much congratulated because child was a boy, we not having cared one way or the other, but the result is regarded as a major achievement by many.

<For another page Maggie tells us all about all her visitors and the chocolate and news they brought>

My room at hospital had sunshine all day and a view over the park and a small bit of river. The food was very good and nicely served, pretty china and gleaming silver.  Was amazed when ordered steak to find it beautifully broiled and not too well done.  Nurses did a great deal of talking about what a nice baby he was. I wondered if this were propaganda dealt out to mothers.Discovered things nurses hate to have a patient say for instance: “Did you forget….?”

On eighth day I hung my feet out of bed two times for fifteen minutes until they were red and purple.  On tenth day I was allowed to go to the bathroom.  Got so I could walk to the nursery and watch babies being changed and washed on drainboard.  Also went down the hall to the solarium with riverview but droughts through cracks so didn’t stay long.  On last day went up to the tenth floor and saw a room all decked out with draperies a the windows, silk-covered chairs, walnut bedsteads, bathrooms with showers all de luxe, which I was told Jewish mamas went for in a big way.  No floor service, you had a special nurse.

In second week, M. brought up a game of sticks and we played on a table which had been snitched for me by a nice maid from a more expensive room.  Great fun.  All nurses seemed to know and play and stood around watching us.  Even the stately head of all nurses, Miss Morrison, who came each morning to ask in a deep, awe-inspiring tone if everything was all right, unbent when she saw the sticks.

I bought nursing brassiere from shop downstairs, has little doors to unsnap and removable pads to absorb leaking milk.  Went to scales and found to great delight weighed 108, just the same as before start.  On Monday was bundled up in a wheelchair and taken over to Sloane to mothers’ class, where a number of ward patients, mostly colored and three semi-private patients, were shown hot to bathe a baby, how to sit it on a chamber on our laps and so on…  Discovered ward babies get cod liver oil from first day. Private babies don’t.  Was shown incubator room for premature babies, but they were all so bundled up, could not see them at all.

On day circumcision took place, doctor came in, stood at foot of bed and announced rather diffidently, “Well, I just altered your child.  He didn’t cry—much.”  Supervisor hovered in doorway during this announcement apparently ready to run for smelling salts if I had hysterics.  When baby came in three hours later, he looked just the same as he had that morning and peacefully ate.

Big event of the day was always M.’s appearance and he usually stayed until baby came in for supper, then left.  He read me Max Eastman’s, Enjoyment of Laughter aloud.  He also  brought me Carl Carmer’s Listen for a Lonesome Drum which I read to myself.  Valentine’s Day, he brought up two lovely pints of champagne, one for lunch and one for after dinner; second was tied outside of window with twine and stayed beautifully cold though we were almost as cold with fear that it would drop and smash.

Stayed in hospital fifteen days for flat rate of $200.

Fritz and Kate came for me on February 16^th at 5:30 and baby was dressed in the dress, slip, sweater and bootees from Uncle Wilmer, encased in the Hoffman snuggle-bunny and then wraped in Uncle Wilmer’s pink shawl and carried down to the car and put across my knees as I sat in the front seat by Fritz.  Snowing lightly and wetly.  We went down the West Side Harbor, and Fritz pointed out boats in the harbor, Ile de France, a couple of lesser Cundarders and so on to the infant, who squalled from time to time.

Found house fragrant and rosy with flowers which M. bought with part of check Papa sent for the purpose (the rest saved for champagne).  Baby was taken out of wrappings and put in middle of big bed to play for a minute or two. Was then undressed and put into one of my old flannel nightgowns with all the featherstitching and embroidery which Grace had newly washed.  Kate and Fritz went off to a cocktail party, and I took off my green velvet dress and put on the pink flannel house wrap uncle sent me for Christmas and fed the baby to sleep.

During feeding, M. came in bearing a large box which proved to contain a beautiful flowered taffeta housecoat trimmed with black velvet, puffed sleeves, trim waist with black velvet sash which just fitted around my new figure, flowing skirt, square neck and the whole opening down the front with black velvet bows parading down the bosom, so could be opened for feeding.  Put this on immediately in spite of fact it was a trifle too long and received Kate and Fritz in it when they came back for dinner, which Grace made for us, providing a beautiful roast beef. Had Chilean wine which Lee Stowe sent as a welcome home present.  Baby cried a lot as doctor had warned.  M. and I Spartan about this, but Kate and Fritz fidgeted and finally went.

Again fed infant and put to bed. Was up and down all night, changing pants for fretful youth.  Next night had Grace take up her station in his bedroom so we could get some sleep.  After second night baby slept fairly well.

Ooh, I have a whole trunk of grandma’s clothes including silk scarves with foreign coins hanging from the tassles and pink velvet sleeveless dress with elbow length gloves and rhinestone trimmings, but the beautiful taffeta gown with the velvet bows on the bosom is nowhere to be found. We’ll just have to imagine it….  XXXOOO until next time!!