Days of the Locust

I have become friends with a 3-year-old. I’ve been having “play dates” with her since she was born. As a gift, I had offered her mother a night of babysitting so she and her husband could go out for dinner. After one night, though, I had fallen in love, and I asked her mother for more. So for three years, once or twice a month, we have been play-dating. This week her family is moving to California. So I asked my little friend to write a letter to me from California. “Yes,” she said. “I will write you a P and an N and an L.” Boy, am I going to miss that kid!

Am I the only one this kind of thing happens to? A skinny, toothless young black woman accosted me on Bushwick and Montrose and said her name was Meeka, and she needed $9 for sanitary pads. When I gave her $7, she saw that I had a $20 bill left in my wallet and demanded it. When I refused, she stuck her hand in her pants, then withdrew it and shook her bloody fingers in my face as proof of her need.  She said she’d give me my $7 back if I gave her the $20. So I gave her the $20—and she ran off with my $27, shrieking at me not to be mad at her. I suppose I should feel lucky. When I got home and told Other about it, he quipped, “Well, at least she didn’t need toilet paper and stick her hand in her pants to prove it!”

A kind of good-German passivity has overtaken me and everyone I know. Even the most ardent of us can no longer bear to watch Rachel Maddow. If we do, we can’t sleep at night.  We’re not allowed to talk about the ugly mess our country has become. “One thing,” the daughter of friends of ours said, setting the ground rules for our dinner on the Fourth of July. “No talking politics.”  The next day, I was visiting my daughter in Bushwick and started spewing off to her roommate about the latest outrage. “Stop!” my daughter said impatiently. “We all know. No one needs you to tell us.” She's right.  I’ve marched in more protests this year than I did in the whole of the Viet Nam era. But it’s a listless sort of marching, mostly treading in place, no real hope any more of making any difference.  We’re all good Germans now.  What precisely was it that good Germans could have done to stop the Holocaust?

Thank you for coming today to remember my mother. I know how pleased she would be that you are here—friends, family, loving caregivers. In preparing for today, I thought a lot about my mother’s life. And I realized that she was different people at different times, and in each phase of her life she acquired a new name. So I thought I’d tell you about those names. The name she was given at birth was Millicent. Wikipedia says that means “brave strength.” Millicent showed her brave strength by always going for the win. She played hard, she used her elbows, and she broke the rules. As a child, she was known for refusing to do as she was told. A cousin told me that if Millicent’s mother told her not to step in a mud puddle, the next thing she would do was step in the puddle.  My mother herself wrote an email to my daughter about a similar act of rebellion: One night when she was 5 or 6, Millicent’s grandfather was going to babysit her. Before he arrived, Millicent’s mother gave h...

Recently I’ve been having a dream about sore feet. But the weird thing is that the cure is to line the inside of my shoes with lettuce. And the weirdest thing is that when I wake up, my first thought is, “I need to get some lettuce for my shoes!”

A young visitor told me this week that my apartment building looks like a castle. Yes, it does!

Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis...