Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Wordsmith and Rebel

My books are available on Amazon here or for an inscribed copy, write to ConsentingAdultPress@hotmail.com. Enjoy all of my low-priced books:

A Raisin in My Cleavage: short & shorter stories

Lillian in Love (a novel)

Lillian's Last Affair and other stories.

I'm available for interviews, readings, visits to book clubs, being the entertainment at your party, talking about senior sex at your senior center, talking about love in senior housing, and any other creative ways to get the word out about my work.

Some of these stories are 5,000 words long, some of them are 100 words exactly. Some protagonists are old and some aren’t.  Several stories feature gay men or lesbians, while several do not. So what unifies this collection? It is the interplay of heart and smart, facing off against the dangers of a viral wedding smooch, a scary staircase, a runaway supermarket cart, a disastrous online date, and a stolen sausage. Of course, you'll also learn about the raisin that falls where it shouldn’t.

Lillian’s life at 84 is tumultuous. She is moving to Manor House to be near Sarah, abandoning the demands of her own home, which has been colonized by her children. How will she and Sarah deal with the reactions of relatives, ex’s, and neighbors to their romance? How do two old women negotiate new love? Will slow-dancing, vibrators, and pot brownies help smooth the way?

 

“If I’m going to go after one more affair of the heart at 84, I’d better get my ass in gear,” says Lillian, speaking for all the characters in these six stories.

Ruby has a run-in with a waterbed and Catherine tokes her first joint in the bathtub with Victor. Elegant Anna’s introduction to kinky sex is bittersweet. And then there’s the neighbor with the strange attachment to the grocery cart. Sue Katz’s hilarious, tender, and impeccably written stories confirm that age fails to erode our eccentricities or dull our ardor.

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Bride and Prejudice: Film Review in 110 Words

If you love you some Jane Austen and you love you some Bollywood, and if you need a joyous film with a happy ending, then rent this film from Amazon Prime for $3.99 and settle back. Filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) sure knows her Pride & Prejudice. With an impressive respect for Austen’s words and wit, she creatively transports the Bennet/Bakshi family to India where a technicolor cast of thousands celebrates love. My main criticism is that William Darcy is played by an actor so bland and charmless that it is hard to believe he wins over Lalita/Elizabeth, the most outstanding of the four unmarried daughters. Loved it!

Here's the trailer:

The Queen's Gambit: My Mixed Feelings

I know that "The Queen's Gambit" is all the rage, and, yes, it is one of the few series that I watched all the way through in perhaps three sittings. But as riveting as it is, I have some problems with it. This is a show about a woman, based on a book written by a man, with three male series writers, and a male director. In the right hands, that would not necessarily have been an issue, but I was bothered by how drenched it was in the male point of view. For me it wasn’t so much the male gaze as the male leer. (What was the point of view of centering the camera on her ass as she danced alone in her underwear in her own home?) And I wasn’t surprised to hear that most critics believe the main character had a great deal in common with the life of Bobby Fischer, a misogynist prick. ("They're terrible chess players... I guess they're just not so smart... I don't think they should mess into intellectual affairs, they should keep strictly to the home"—CBC)

Beth Harmon is a brilliant child prodigy and adult champion in chess. She has big eyes, a great sense of 60s fashion, and takes to leaning her chin in her palm in a fetching manner. She somehow attracts women and men who want to save her, serve her, and adore her, although she seems totally incapable of returning the favor. Beth is all about Beth, given to either dreamy or drunk or stoned monologues, and on the few occasions where she actually responds to another person, she is likely to be rude and brief.

I found it hard to stomach that she never cuts her chess teacher Mr. Shaibel into her success, although she mentions him. The first gesture of gratitude to this custodian at the orphanage where she lived, comes after his death.

The series packs a visual wallop. Every shot is carefully and skillfully framed, so much so that sometimes I felt it was a period-perfect series of stills. The episodes gallop along, clutching your attention all the time, until the 6th and 7th final episodes which were so repetitive and drawn out that my viewing partner wondered if they had changed it from a 5- to a 7-part series last minute and had to stretch out the narrative. For example, in the final chess battle, in Moscow, we see her exit the hall the first day to several women wanting her autograph. The next day, a dozen. The next day, fifty. The next day, a crowd. The next day, a mob. We got the point.

Sexually, she is an object of lust to all the men she beats in chess. Even a gay journalist wants her for a minute. She herself floats through life without sexual passion in her stylized outfits and big eyes, when she isn’t hiding in her home drinking and drugging herself into isolated oblivion, always to be saved by one of her admirers. She sleeps with one woman, but I don’t count it because it was only after getting stupid drunk on the night before the finals of a tournament.

I know they purport to examine mental health and substance misuse, but really the camera obsesses over her oversized eyes and caresses her increasingly stylish outfits. Beth Harmon is not a character I could believe, let alone love.

I found "The Queen's Gambit" suitably diverting, quirky, and just long enough to fit into pauses from following the Covid and breaking news. But I was also annoyed by the lack of authenticity around the inner life of this character.

Here’s the trailer:

This Vote Counting Coverage is Ridiculous

You have to feel for the election officials, for the TV commentators, and for those of us who want relief. No matter which channel you turn on – cable or broadcast – it is ballot results non-stop. Even when there are no results to report. There are digital boards and graphic displays and electronic gadgets of every sort, and even they are getting tired. When Steve Kornacki’s toys start playing up, then you know they’re being overused.

Even Anderson Cooper can hardly think of another thing to say – but that doesn’t stop the producers from examining each result and reiterating the status (basically unchanged) in a days-long stream of increments. This is not the first election that is stretched out over days. That’s just how it is.

Pity the sleep-deprived voting officials who have to drag their asses out frequently to report on 20 ballots – to a flurry of whirling updated numbers and percentages – and to be unable to predict when they’d actually be done and to defend the beleaguered counters and the election staff and to explain that they’ve never dealt with so many dropped-off or mailed-in votes. For gawd’s sake, we get it.

Meanwhile, you wouldn’t know that day after day we are reporting the highest number of Coronavirus infections than any country at any time. We are breaking these nasty records, just as Europe too is having surges, but there isn’t enough time to report that. Uncounted people are unemployed and hungry and on the verge of eviction. As individuals we can, of course, turn off the TV altogether – but the country is absolutely saturated with these details and it’s hard to demure.

Why can’t we have an hourly update? And go ahead and break into the other programming if there is a definitive result. This approach just raises the national blood pressure and makes us go cross-eyed with the ridiculous nature of American elections. And I know that in my lifetime I will not see the elimination of the foul Electoral “College” so that the candidate with the most votes wins; nor the fair distribution of Senate seats; nor the end of gerrymandering and voter suppression. This 24-7 minutiae just confirms what a screwed-up structure those slave-owning, land-owning, property-protecting, white-male-privilege-defending Founding Fathers bequeathed us.

 

RIP: LOIS JOHNSON, leading light of Daughters of Bilitis

This tribute was adapted from a brief portrait of Lois Johnson that I wrote when she and her life partner Sheri Barden were among the honorees at an event I MC'd held by Rally, a Boston area group for older lesbians. Lois died yesterday. Sheri and Lois (in pink) are seated in front.

Lois Johnson was a local girl: she was born in Stoneham in 1931 but raised in Everett by a loving extended working class family. She was always a straight-A student in high school. At Boston University, she studied English and childhood education, planning to be a school teacher like her older sister. Lois was very active in the Christian Science church, teaching Sunday school and conducting services, but, she told me, “I wasn’t Miss Goody-Twoshoes.” Immediately I heard Sheri in the background yelling, “Yes you were!”

Lois worked in education for a couple of years, but she wasn’t that comfortable with it. So she got another a degree from BU: this time in journalism. She moved to California where she was a success in the field of advertising and journalism and worked for the Presidio army base newspaper, while living at the YWCA.

When her father became ill, she returned to Boston where she continued to be active in the Christian Science church. She met her first girlfriend and lived together in secret for five years. When in 1964 that woman foolishly dumped our Lois, some gay men fixed her up with Sheri Barden who moved in with her in Brookline.

When they rented and restored a 19th C house near the MFA, they decided they liked that kind of thing. Because banks would not then give mortgages to women, a gay male friend helped them to get a fixer-upper in the South End. When Lois’s long-time job as a producer at WGBH evaporated, she decided to go into real estate, where she spent 40 years. She missed that work after retiring.

About five years ago Lois fell and broke her hip so she and Sheri had to move out of their house with many stairs. The were welcomed with great enthusiasm by Springhouse, an elegant assisted living facility. Like in any such institution, the women ran into homophobic staff occasionally. They had their strategy for dealing with it, however. Said Sheri, "I'm so nice to them, they can't help but love us."

In fact, the very evening they moved in, the Springhouse administration wanted to screen "Gen Silent" (dir: Stu Maddux), a powerful, historic film about the intersection of queer and elder, which kicked off a vibrant movement around the rights of old LGBTQ people. Lois and Sheri were two of the stars of the film (and of the movement), and their wit and candor and obvious love won the hearts of all who saw it. Sheri insists that their role was to be "comic relief," and the women sighed over having to see the film dozens and dozens of times when they appeared at sell-out screenings.

For 15 years Lois was President of Boston’s DOB – Daughters of Bilitis – perhaps the first lesbian organization with chapters across the country. Sheri and Lois welcomed hundreds of otherwise isolated lesbians to their rap sessions. They embraced women who needed someone to talk to, someone to assure them that their feelings were legitimate. Sheri told me: “Lois was a wonderful leader because she didn’t judge anyone – never put anyone down, everyone was welcome.”

The death of Lois Johnson leaves a rip in the fabric of the Boston queer community. On a personal note, I was always gratified by Lois' close readings and gracious comments about my books. The couple never missed a reading when I was introducing a new book. Lois' generosity, dry wit, and loving presence will be profoundly missed.

This is the trailer for "Gen Silent." If you haven't seen it, you haven't seen one of the best documentaries evah!

Secret Love: Film Review

Prepare your hanky and your deepest thoughts about the future when you watch the poignant Netflix documentary Secret Love. Director Chris Bolan traces his great-aunt, Terry Donahue, and her life partner, Pat Henschel, from their love-at-first-sight romance in the 40s through their struggle as ailing elders. Bolan’s mother Diana is the third major figure of the film, as she struggles with Pat over the best way to support Aunt Terry in her decline.

The lovers met the year I was born, 1947, while Terry was a Canadian star of the Peoria Redwings – a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (which inspired A League of Their Own.) They only came out to Terry’s beloved family in 2009, living in a sometimes brutal, if love-filled closet, all that time. With remarkable footage and stills from back in the day, we see how they constructed a life in Chicago of fierce devotion, building friendships with other queers. The film shorts us on what this life was: we see only one dinner shared with a couple of gay men who are clearly central to their community, but we are given no sense of how the advent of gay liberation, with its new institutions and cultural opportunities, affected them – as it surely did.

The ways in which homophobia impacted them is encapsulated by Diane’s discovery of Pat’s love letters to Terry, from which the bottom signature has been ripped off to protect their identity. Pat is alienated from her own family, but unfortunately not entirely embraced by Terry’s. The reasons why they came out so late to Terry’s family remain under-explored, but we get a hint when one niece is outraged at having been deprived of this information (it’s all about her) while she is scandalized that they are living in sin. Pat is only too aware that in this family she is mainly seen as an impediment to Terry’s return to Canada, and not always as the solicitous life-partner she has been.

If gay people had made this film, it might have looked very different. The years of their Chicago life together and the social fabric they wove would have had more primacy. Their relationship may have remained a secret to the family – and there must have been good reason for that – but surely they were more open within the life they built for themselves.

On a personal level, the film reminded me of how our worlds shrink if we make it to old age, with our peers dead or ailing or retired in Florida or returned to distant home towns. Those with younger family members who give a shit have a lifeline, but those of us without close bio families are too often thrown onto the trash-heap of impersonal if not homophobic social services. We pioneers have failed to build any solid intergenerational network. The LGBTQ movement seems to have more cross-generational disdain, in both directions, than connection.

I wept throughout this film, most especially at the barriers to their love, prior to the 70s, and then at what ill health does to this couple’s independence. Sufficient hard-earned savings and Terry’s family’s concern allow them safe solutions in which to thrive. But I wept for those without money or loyal young people to shepherd them to the end.

The trailer:

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (book review) in 100 words

The most un-put-downable short stories create an entire world. In The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw does it with gob-smacking prowess nine times. Whether it is a teenage girl crushing on the pastor’s wife, or a couple coping with their first winter up north exiled from all they love, or a self-possessed sexually-active woman who outlines lengthy rules for the married men “applying” for a passing entanglement, the reader is catapulted into their emotional and physical worlds. Her characters are Black women wrestling with both church culture and with private passions. Philyaw’s stories kept me awake and awed.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston: A review in 100 words

This extraordinary collection of 21 short stories, including eight of Zora Neale Hurston’s “lost” tales, highlights the genius that cemented Hurston’s place among the top artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s command of vernacular adds oomph to her vivid portraits of mean men, gutsy women, and fraught families, which she could sketch in a sentence. Jealousy and love are strong components of her emotional palette, not the least in the heart-wrenching “Under the Bridge.” The multiplicity of relationships in this volume exist without the slightest nod to the “white gaze” – the literary concept Toni Morrison later defined and avidly rejected.

Do You Name Your Cantaloupes?

I don’t go indoors. Since March 11, I have not gone inside a store or salon or dance club or restaurant or, even more amazing, if you know me, a dollar store. I’m extremely cautious. I pay a shopper to get my groceries. She’s a sweetheart and shops for about 25 customers each week. She calls us, “My shut-ins.”

She’s been a shopper for several years. Before the pandemic it was just one of four jobs she had to support herself and her children. She lost the other three jobs as soon as everything shut down and has since beefed up her shopping business. She knows exactly where everything is stocked in every type of grocery store, so she’s incredibly quick. She is happy to add on other stops as well: she has picked up my prescriptions from the pharmacy twice already.

One has to learn how to be a shopee as well. Once I asked for two Dole cups of cut-up peaches (before peach season) and she bought me two packages of six cups each. I had to donate all of it, after tasting one cup. One must be very explicit. If I order broccoli, I have to write a note to specify that it be fresh, not bagged. A shopee learns slowly but surely.

And because she is shopping here, there, and everywhere all day, when she spies something that is hard to get, she grabs supplies for all her shut-ins. Early on, when disinfecting wipes were unavailable, she was in Costco when a big shipment came in and, voila!, she gifted me a box of wipes.

She’s efficient, flexible, reliable, and conscientious, but we don’t really see eye to eye on fruit and veg. It feels quite hit and miss. Last week I asked for a mini-watermelon and a cantaloupe. That was my first mistake. I should have said: small melon. Because I like all melons. She texted from the store that there were no mini-watermelons, but she could get me a pre-wrapped slice of watermelon. I asked for a photo of my choices, and she sent me one and I picked. I did not, though, think to question its size. That quarter of a watermelon was so big that it did not fit in my fridge: it was longer than the fridge is deep. I had to cut it into cubes immediately.

But it was nothing compared to the cantaloupe! The size, easily, of a basketball. The minute I saw it and struggled to lift the thing out of the bag, I texted her: “What?! I live alone. This cantaloupe could feed an affinity group for a week.” Later I sent her a photo and she LOL’d me back.

Too much cantaloupe is a problem. I’ve never heard of cantaloupe pie or cantaloupe sauce or even cantaloupe juice – not that I’ve ever baked a pie or own a juicer. One friend suggested, since I live alone and only see one person, that I make a friend out of my melon ala Tom Hanks in Cast Away with his volleyball friend Wilson. I tried developing a relationship, but the cantaloupe is insufficiently warm and fuzzy. Every name seemed insulting, from Big Head to Bulbous to Melonia. Particularly Melonia.

It is now 11 days later and I’m still consuming the cantaloupe. See the photo for the amount still remaining. I had to finish up the watermelon first – as it quickly turns to mush. But the cantaloupe just continues to hold up – bowl after bowl, mouthful after mouthful. I believe 2020 will be remembered as the year I had had enough.

Rating the Democratic National Convention: Highlights & Bummers

I watched the entire Democratic National Convention – all four nights, start to finish. Electoral politics has never been my gig but, like Angela Davis says, we all must vote for the Democrats this time. Absolutely must. I voted for Al Gore in 2000, literally 10 days after I returned from 24 years abroad. And was mortified to see the Democrats politely submit to Repug manipulations because they were just too genteel for a street fight. I remember friends from Europe writing to ask if America needed them to send an independent body to manage the USA’s chaotic and inconclusive elections.

I write this piece as someone who identified as a revolutionary as long as that was a relevant title in the USA: the 60s and 70s. Those were the days when one would introduce herself as an anarcho-socialist queer feminist anti-racist class-conscious activist. Now, in my dotage, under a proto-fascist administration during a pandemic, I find myself forced into dependency on an opposition Democratic Party that is Wall Street and Big Pharm funded, and that is impotent and weak, stuck with worn out leadership and resistant to the energy of the women (and men) of color who are unseating their friends. I write this as someone who is going to vote for the Democratic ticket and is going to encourage everyone else to do all we can to get rid of tRump.

Here are my Highlights and Bummers in no particular order

HIGHLIGHT
The music was often wonderful. Billy Porter wrapped up the first night in dazzling style. Billie Eilish accompanied the premiere of her new song with an incisive speech. John Legend is, I believe, the Frank Sinatra of our times. His performance of “Glory” with Common was strong and gripping. Prince Royce was spectacular as he strolled that long wall of graffiti. If I have to listen to the national anthem, then at least The Chicks did an interesting version.

BUMMER
What don’t the Democrats understand about the separation of Church and State? All four nights we had wrap-up religious benedictions that mentioned Jesus. Jesus! And the Trinity! The final night they threw in a Rabbi and an Imam, but piled on the God Blesses at the end of speeches. Jews were present throughout, but not named. However, Muslims had been absent, except for a couple of seconds of Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier viciously attacked by tRump. The whole emphasis on Biden’s “faith” was, if not pandering to tRump’s audience, massively inappropriate to the ears of this non-Christian.

HIGHLIGHT
I was transfixed the second I saw elevator operator Jacquelyn Asbie, who wore her tie proudly as she delivered the first nomination of Joe Biden. Check her out here:

BUMMER
I hated the inclusion of anti-choice campaigner John R. Kasich, and Colin Powell, a military general whose public lies to the United Nations in 2003 cost untold lives, both American and Iraqi. All this emphasis on “traditional” Repuglicans was irritating and unlikely to move many people. Absolutely worst of all was the prominent spot given to Michael Bloomberg. This oinker, who failed to buy the presidency, seems unable to recover from his disappointment in not being the arrogant narcissist who gets to replace the present arrogant narcissist.

HIGHLIGHT
Bernie’s speech on the first evening was the most practical, policy-based presentation of the Convention, in contrast to the usual patriotic pablum and platitudes.

BUMMER
While we were forced to listen to too many Repugs, Julian Castro – the only Latinx candidate in the primaries – seems to be the only former candidate (other than Marianne Williamson who surely has more fans than Kasich) who was not invited to speak. Why? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had 90 seconds in which to nominate Bernie – and then no other mention. This was a grave mistake. With well over 3 million social media followers, with stunning primary victories over Wall Street-funded establishment Democrats, she is the voice of the present many of us are listening to and the star of the future. Snubbing her was a slap in the face to her many constituencies: progressives, young people, Latinx voters, anti-capitalists, etc.

HIGHLIGHT
Michelle and Barak are clearly aghast at what is going on under tRump. I just wish they hadn’t waited till now to be speaking out and getting involved – although some say their timing is just right for strongest impact. I don’t see the point of elegance and restraint in their non-response to all these years of public abuse by tRump.

HIGHLIGHT & BUMMER
Three out of four of the moderators hit just the right note, staying in their role as MCs and moving things along: Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Kerry Washington, all women of color. Only on the final (and arguably most important night) did moderator Julia Louis-Dreyfus display her tin ear to give us a discordant “jokey” tone. It was an odd decision by the convention organizers.

HIGHLIGHT
The many clips of everyday people talking about their lives were powerful, not the least Mexican-American Kristin Urquiza, who lost her dad to Covid. She said, “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump.” Here’s the clip:

 

There were also stories of Joe Biden’s compassion – many many many stories – including the special speech by 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, a kid who stutters and who was encouraged by Biden, a former stutterer himself.

BUMMER
Three themes became excruciatingly repetitive:
1. Biden listens and cares
2. Biden is a man of “faith”
3. Beau Biden was a saint who continues to guide Joe Biden “from above” in all he does and thinks. The ghoulish focus on his dead son, over and over and over and then some more, became fetishistic. I was squirming. Biden’s other two children, themselves forced to speak about Beau when we finally saw them, must feel a certain way.

HIGHLIGHT
I had been complaining over the first days about the absence of spokespeople with disabilities – even in the midst of a strong commitment to diverse images – at least in the first days. So I welcomed the piece about Ady Barkan’s struggle for health care around his ALS. It was odd, though, that as a fierce campaigner for Medicare-For-All, that phrase was not included in his presentation.

HIGHLIGHT
It is widely agreed that the roll call (on night two) was the most brilliant chunk of the Convention. I was absolutely captivated at seeing so many different kinds of presentations from the States and territories, not the least Native people in their own clothes and settings. Let me finish on a high note by posting it here.

Collective Action on Hull Beach

I noticed that as soon as people left their area on the white sand beach of Hull, as soon as they went off to swim, the seagulls would circle around their chairs and sniff their bags. These seagulls were clearly regulars, used to humans and their accouterments. Some seagulls just planted their feet in an open spot and waited for a message to reach them.

All of a sudden I heard a screech. Someone had abandoned their blanket, but left their food bag open. This seagull grabbed a bag of chips which it ripped right open. But before that bag was even open, seagulls came flying in from every direction. Not two or three, but ten, then fifteen, then twenty, and perhaps more.

As more and more arrived and the bag was grabbed by one bill after another, the noise level elevated, and my questions multiplied. How could one bag of chips be shared around such a large posse? How did they know of the bounty, coming as they did from every direction and distance? Was it their sense of smell? Did the discoverer communicate to all in secret bird lingo? Are they born generous, with a tendency toward collective action and mutual aid? What happens to their digestive system when they eat greasy salty food? Can they distinguish between classic chips and those with salt and vinegar?

If you know the South Shore, you might have a different question. How did I get to go to the Hull seaside? A generous friend offered to arrange for my pandemic partner Barry and I to park in front of her parents’ home, less than a block from the bay on the left and about three blocks to the sea on the right. Each residential street running perpendicular between the bay and the sea on this peninsular town seemed to have its own path through dunes bordered by those thin wood and wire fences. If you don’t belong to the neighborhood, you don’t park.

For the first time this summer I got to play in the waves and splash in the salt water, especially as the tide started to come in and the waves became more energetic. The sea also, frankly, solves my won’t-pee-in-public-toilets dilemma – which has kept me close to home. I’m not a frequent beach goer, so I don’t have the right toys. I was jealous of a gaggle of straight teenagers who brought a boat-like blown-up rainbow unicorn to ride on the waves – and I knew they had no idea that they had mounted a gay icon. So goes cooptation.

Being an urban creature myself, I had to wonder how city-slicker seagulls get their dose of chips.

A Typical Pandemic Day: Except for the Fire Alarm

It’s around 90’ as it seems to have been for weeks and promises to continue to be in the near future. Or was that 90% humidity? In any event, I am wearing a nightshirt and crocs and nothing else. It’s a typical, if congested, pandemic day for me: I’ve done my 9:30 Silent Zoom writing session with my UK writing buddy Liz. I’ve done my 11:30 Zoom workout with my pandemic partner Barry. My weekly shopper has brought me my groceries. In a while, I have a video-appointment with my doctor followed by a Zoom gathering with a posse of friends in England and Ireland.

As I bake some chicken thighs using my friend Gilbert’s recipe, I think of the millions and millions of people – in this country and so many others – who are hungry. The lines of cars awaiting a food distribution would be ever more miles long except that people don’t have money for the gas. Everything sucks.

And then the fire alarm goes off! I open the front door – itself an action I rarely perform – and yes, the building alarm is screeching. I close the front door. What to do? It's covid-cooties vs flames. I text my landlord: The fire alarm’s going off. Is this for real? But there’s no immediate reply.

I need to dress. I throw on my workout pants, skipping the underpants. I put on a bra and the t-shirt I worked out in. Then I realize that if I have to walk down the seven floors, I need real shoes. So I sit down and put on shoes and socks. I'm dragging out the time - hoping it'll be turned off before I have to venture out. I used to worry about just this kind of situation when my neighbor across the way was still living. She used a wheelchair and was a decent-sized woman. I discussed with my landlords what would happen in case of a fire – how could I get her downstairs? They had already talked to her and instructed her to go out to her balcony from which the professionals would pluck her.

I open the front door again for a quick look. There’s a neighbor down the front end of the hall. He opens the double doors that lead to both the elevator and the stairwell, and yells to me, “I smell smoke.” I wave him towards me in the back of the building where I live. “Use the back stairs here,” and then quickly close my door.

What next? A mask, of course. Should I wear my face shield as well? What do I carry? I need to choose between my backpack with my credit cards and ID and other essentials, and my computer, with my life’s work. I pay for one of those cloud back-up services – plus I have most stuff on a thumb-drive, so I choose the backpack. What about a charger for my phone? Already I’m anxious about how I’ll get back up the steps with my dodgy feet.

And I’m worried about people who are isolating like I am but have nowhere else to go. I’m among the lucky ones – but I have been all along. I am in a pandemic pod with Barry and as discombobulating as it would be for both of us, I could find shelter there. And I think of all the people who have no shelter at all – and how many more there will be when the moratorium on evictions ends. I remember how the persistent problem of homelessness in Ireland was solved in ten days when the shut-down began: every single homeless person was housed, mostly in hotels.

The alarm stops. What to do? The alarm starts again. I head out.

Should I lock the door? I know the fire company is here – I’ve heard their sirens. In other instances, they’ve wanted to check every apartment – but I lock it anyway and start down the steps. The alarm stops. Just then a couple comes up the steps. I back up onto the landing so that I can keep my distance from them. “It’s okay,” they say. “The fireman said we can go back to our apartments.”

Inside, the phone rings. My landlord is on the line: “I’m nearly there.”

“It’s apparently okay, I tell him. Or so some neighbors told me.”

Back inside, I reverse my actions, peeling off the clothes I no longer feel comfortable lounging around in, not the least my bra. For the duration, I have unearthed old stretchy sports bras that do nothing but vaguely embrace my tits – no lifting, no squeezing. They are my pandemic bras for the rare Zoom meetings with strangers (seminars, arts gatherings, etc) or even rarer outings to the dangerous outdoors where other humans circulate. My perky bras are relegated to the back of the drawer awaiting a mystical time when my partner dancing life might resume.

“Have an emergency bag packed and ready to go,” my bestie Sandy said when I told her the story. “Copies of your passport and whatnot, a hunk of cash, your meds.” My meds! I hadn’t even thought of my prescriptions. Good thing this was just the alarm stretching its vocal chords when it smelled some food burning on the stove on the 5th floor.

My Pandemic Calm in Exactly 50 Words

This piece was published on the Boston Book Festival website in a section about being at home during the pandemic. This link leads you to the 10 chosen stories. Here's mine:

My Pandemic Calm in Exactly 50 Words

My underlying condition keeps me inside, overlooking Spy Pond from my seventh story window. I am calm, used to living alone in a room, used to being alone as a writer. I’ve been content, prepared for the long haul, until I saw the mouse. Now every shadow is an enemy.

 

 

My Nasty Mother Would Have Been 100 Today

Today is the 100th anniversary of my mother Phyllis’s birth. She was mean to me as long as she lived. She lied. She was violent. She was jealous. She was a tangle of affectations she thought made her seem middle-class.

My childhood memories are dim and unhappy – there aren’t long narratives to spin. So I have written about this period in chapters of 100 words. Exactly. Not 99 words and not 101. This form allows me to tell about as much as I am willing to recall of my childhood, one in which I was the captive of the nuclear family, a private turf where no one in the 1950s would think of intervening, even if violence and cruelty were obvious.

Here are three chapters that relate to Phyllis.

The Day I was Gendered in 100 Words
I was born in August Wilson’s Hill District projects. At 3 we moved to a tiny duplex and at 10 we moved to an attached row house – my mother’s determined ascent up the working-class ladder. I was a kid like other kids, playing summer kickball shirtless in the alley behind our row. Until one boy’s snobby mother turned up at our door saying she didn’t want her son playing with a whore. My mother dragged me from the alley by the ear and drove me straight to Woolworth’s to be fitted in the aisle with a training bra. Public humiliation.

Murder and Revenge in 100 Words
“Pets are dirty,” my mother said, forbidding them. Until at Woolworths I saw the turtle in its plastic dish, complete with a pond and palm tree. I had saved up enough dimes from scrubbing the kitchen floor to buy it for myself. That summer I went to sleep-over camp for the first and only time. My mother promised to keep the turtle pond full of water and the pet fed. On my return, I found the turtle swollen up like a ping-pong ball, dead in a dry plate. I buried it under her beloved hydrangeas bush, which never again bloomed.

Phyllis’s Shoe in 100 Words
My mother blamed me for a long labor during which my father abandoned her to go bowling. My dad, Saul, and I were always tight. My first memory is when I was 5 and Phyllis shrieked at me, “He’s mine! Get your own!” I was 11 when my mother scraped the side of the car in a parking lot. Later she told Saul it happened while we were inside shopping. When I contradicted her, she removed her high-heeled shoe to punish me for lying and for trying to turn Saul against her. I still have those scars on my thigh.

Finding my iPhone: My Mysterious Experience

This incident happened in late May.

Now that I have a medical mask and a plastic shield, I can go down the cootie-filled elevator of my building to my car and get out of my Pandemic Palace. I only see one person – my bestie Barry – who, like me, has been entirely isolated from other humanoids. While up until a few months ago I would have been in the midst of the protest crowds with my signs and shouts and comrades, I am prevented from such action by this plague and my age.

So on my maiden visit, we decided to take a drive. Since we went in his car, I needed nothing but my phone so I left my backpack behind. He lent me a sweatshirt, but once I got outside in the sun, I realized I didn’t need it and peeled it off and threw it into his backseat.

We drove around a very wealthy, very green suburb just a couple of miles away, snarking about the gorgeous oversized homes. Suddenly I realized that I could not find my phone. I looked around my seat and then removed my seatbelt to get at the sweatshirt in the back, flashing on a vague memory of having stuck the phone in its pocket earlier. It was not there. Barry called my number but there was no sound of ringing.

I was particularly agitated because just the day before I had downloaded my bank app in order to deposit my stimulus check. I have no password on my iPhone, and could not remember if my bank details came up automatically as they do on my computer. (Note to self – change that!)

We drove back to Barry’s parking lot and retraced every step I took. He was trying my number all the time and my heart sank when we mounted the steps to his apartment and there was no ringing at all.

Had I activated the “Find My iPhone” app on my cellphone? Was the sound turned on? Inside his flat, I found the website on my laptop and it brought up a smeary, unclear dim map (above) that showed the phone as a green dot! It was on Central Avenue, apparently less than two miles away according to a map search. I went to pee and we got ready to go look. I checked the site once more and the phone appeared to have crossed the street. I plotzed! Was it in someone’s hand? Was it still on the move? I waited some more, but it no longer seemed to be moving.

We rushed to the vague location the app’s poor map gave us, absolutely mystified as to how the phone could be there. Once in the area, I began searching up and down along the long tall fence that enclosed the front yard of a big house on one side of the street. I suspected this area had been the original location. Barry searched on the other side of the street, although there was no sidewalk there. I heard some people talking behind the fence and asked if they had seen or heard a phone. At first they said no, but once I popped my head into the driveway, one man, who appeared to be a gardener, came out and said, “Yes, I heard a noise down the end of the fence.” We walked there (photo of the fence) and I had Barry, across the street, ring my number.

The man lifted his head, concentrating, and then looked across the street. “It’s not here anymore,” he said, “it’s there.” A utility pole stood between Barry and the street. “I can see it,” the man said. He was young, and so were his ears and eyes.

Now comes the biggest mystery. Someone had built a teepee-like structure out of twigs, using a dirty discarded postcard for a shelf, and had placed my iPhone on it. You can see it in the photo.

I was weak with gratitude, borrowed a twenty from Barry to give to my savior, and only once I was back in the car, realized that not only was he only the second person I have talked to face-to-face since March 11, but that he wore no mask. I had kept my distance and am not worried, just reminded that everyday is no longer everyday.

I rushed home to check my bank account – which was undisturbed. And then noticed that my Otterbox phone cover (a very rugged rubber protector) seemed to be rather loosely attached and the inside quite dusty, as if it had been taken off and replaced rather haphazardly. Why? Had the phone been run over? And why didn’t the person who found it go to “recent calls” and ring the first couple of numbers there? And how did the phone get on a street where we had never stopped?

Mysteries must be matched with theories. I can only surmise that I put my phone on the roof of Barry’s car when taking off the sweatshirt before we went on our drive, although I doubt I have ever put anything on the roof a car before. Maybe the heavy rubber Otterbox kept it from falling off as we went out of his driveway, a skein of harsh potholes, and that as we progressed it somehow by increments inched itself to the edge and fell off well into the trip.

Why move it across the street? I imagine that the person who found it couldn’t figure out how to display it on that smooth tall fence and so took it across the street where there was grass and trees in order to build that exhibition stand for it. Why do that instead of taking the phone with them and waiting for it to ring or trying favorite or recent numbers?

Who found it? My theory is that it was someone who was fearful of being accused of theft. Perhaps children. Perhaps adults worried about a racist or anti-immigrant reaction.

And now to lessons learned. Use passwords for bank apps and probably for your phone if you’re going to have such an app in the first place. Although, an added password on my phone means a person wouldn’t be able to look up last calls or favorite numbers.

And then there’s the Find My iPhone website. Learn that at the bottom right corner of their splash page, in the smallest dimmest font every created by an out-of-touch young geek, are three alternative views. Really this menu is so hard to see that I didn’t see it. Until I got home with the phone. One view is “Satellite” and it is a bird’s-eye-view of every house and tree and driveway. This would have made locating the phone a breeze, had I discovered this view beforehand. I tested its reliability, by moving the phone across the living room and watching the change on the site!

The ultimate lesson I learned is that routine is your friend. Older people learn this lesson at one point or another. Take me, for instance. I always carry my backpack. It has all my essentials from phone to credit card to tissues that can double as toilet paper. Better to maintain one’s regular habits than grab out just one important item, leaving it orphaned from its customary resting place. For someone who has herself only been out of my apartment twice in well over 80 days, it was all a bit much and I was relieved to be tucked back into my room that evening, where the chaos is familiar, for it is my chaos. And where I never lose anything.

The Soundtrack of My Pandemic: A Grumpy View

The sounds of the pandemic are multiplying in peculiar ways. It used to be that via my iPhone’s notifications, I’d get the occasional ping or chime to announce a text or a message or to let me know that someone from abroad was reaching out on WhatsApp.

Now I’m dealing with a whole new soundtrack. Let’s start with 4:30 or 5:00 am when the birds, recognizing that their competition from early traffic has all but evaporated, begin to carry on. I live a half block from a pond, which attracts a high density of winged creatures. From early in the morning they are honking and chirping and cheeping and squawking, and flying around in squads or alone, big wingspans or little.

They are not alone. The general closure and the near-empty roads mean that sounds I should be used to after living here a decade or so are transformed into something threatening. It took me hours to realize that what I thought was a helicopter landing on my balcony was the idling of the fire engines in the fire station a block away, the building’s doors open and the motors reverberating. This was clearly going on all the time, but was masked by the main street traffic in pre-Covid times.

And then there is the teen drummer down the road a bit who has been making a clatter as long as I’ve lived here, and who is surely no longer a teen, but never before seemed to practice his instrument in my own living room.

Here, though, is the real audio clutter. I get infinitely more messages and texts and heads-up and phone calls nowadays than before the shut-down. My phone is a veritable orchestra of interruptions. At night, if I want the phone in the bedroom with me, I must either turn it off altogether or mute each app one by one to avoid being awoken mid-sleep by a friend from abroad for whom it may be a perfectly reasonable 9:00 am in Pietra Santa or Dublin or Tel Aviv – but is 4:00 am for me.

Even worse, if I am on a Zoom meeting, I hear the beeps and bings of all the people on the call who have not exiled or shushed their own phones. Or my space is flooded with the barking of their dogs – which is only slightly less disconcerting than the crying of their children, sounds that have never before darkened my doorstep. The variety of levels and quality of participants’ mics is an assault on the eardrums, mitigated only by those whose mouthed curses when they can’t find their own unmute button remain silent.

Part of the soundtrack is distorted. On any given Zoom-a-thon with three or more other people, one person will be enveloped in feedback while another’s mic will be cloudy and mumbly. The variety of devices through which we are all communicating makes the cacophony uneven and conflicting. People speak at once, or there’s an awkward silence, with folks looking down or around uneasily in their little online boxes.

Perhaps the most annoying of all is the confusion emanating from the television, especially the cable news stations that feature a chessboard of commentators whose gigs now radiate from their homes. I might have the news on in the background while I’m at my computer (which is all the time) when my attention is commandeered by a familiar ping or pong. First I have to find my phone; then I have to scroll through to see which app is summoning me, only to realize that it was the phone of this Senator or that virologist on the TV.

The problem with reduced urban noise is that it elevates and amplifies the sounds that are not only still coming through, but which have proliferated. I used to react to each notification, but my lockdown strategy now is to wait until the trills and clangs accumulate before checking to see if any of them are actually for me.