Romancing the Mind.

Why the Gypsy Apprentice? The autodidact? The pilgrim? It’s because I believe in the quest to feel life, so I can live it better.

For me, it’s not gut feelings that influence my decisions or processes. I’m more mindful of the feel of a shine to the heart, or a surge through the head. If I’m trying to learn something or trying to improve existing skills, or if I’m trying to care for relationships, or believe in myself–I want to replace fear, vulnerability, shame, and humiliation, with something better. Something that feel good. I seek the shine and the surge of elation, but I also know that I have to journey through the fundamentals in order to arrive at the shine. So there’s a kind of faith I believe in–it’s a promise–that if you keep trying, you’re going to be jumping for joy at some point. And, it will start out to be just a point, so brief–but memorable enough to hold your attention and make shame, humiliation, and frustration more bearable, more humorous, and more useful as you get better and better at living and learning.

We are born knowing how to breathe, our hearts already work, but we have to learn how to eat. We try drawing, reading, and writing. Then someone else shows us other ways to draw, read, and write. We observe, we self study, we copy, we practice, we ask for help, we are judged good and bad, we experiment, we fail. Then we try again. Or we don’t.

Once, my mother put a small clump of flowers–sweet alyssum–into my hands and told me to plant them in the garden. I was little and I didn’t know if I could do it. As my mother kept working, I kneeled nearby, watching her. I cradled the plant like a little fledgling that had fallen from a tree, afraid I would kill it and cause my mother to stop loving me. By mid-summer, the plant was blooming in the garden, saturating the breeze with its distinctive perfume every time I visited it.

There was the time I came upon the studio of a woman in Maine whose weaving and chair-caning skills mesmerized me. I asked her, “Where did you learn your art?” She said, “I taught myself.” It’s so hopeful, whenever I hear something like that. There is desirable prestige in being able to study with great masters and being able to attend great schools. But finding your own way to skill and knowledge is another excursion all your own. I am drawn to the wabi-sabi spirit in life, the perfect imperfections, the shine of a unique heart, revealed.

In Argentina, my husband and I were copying the patterns of other tango dancers in a dark and sultry warehouse in Buenos Aires. We danced around and around in a circle with everyone else, our bodies succumbing to shame, humiliation, fear of failure. And then, a teacher danced into our embrace and said to us, “Feel the music.” She stayed with us, holding us up, showing us how to believe in the music. The tango in Argentina is improvisational, you must feel the music.

This week, my son texted me: “How’s the blog going?” I texted him back: “Fun. I like practicing my writing skills.” He replied: “Good. It’s all about the feel.” It feels fun. Good. Like. Definitive words.

Today is Friday. The end of another week writing down words I don’t know, or words I liked, that I came across in my travels: scabrously, temerity, ableist, putrid and pitiful, caper about, baseness, slatternly. The week was not a bust.

I watched snow fall.

I made a good meal.

I began reading a new book.

I wrote letters and put them in the mail.

I called my mother and father.

I text chatted with my little niece–her incoming texts are so funny, not annoying at all. They are arrivals of shine and surge.

I blogged. What an ugly word–blog. I am a blogger I said to my daughter. A blogger. The word is ugly like booger-(which should be spelled like bugar, rhymes with sugar).

And–there was a day when the house was empty and cavernous and into that vast void flew the bedeviled foul breath of remembered shame, humiliations, vulnerabilities, and failures as I tried to work. I sat down at the piano. There has been a piano in my home since the year 2000 when my husband’s parents gave us $1,000 for Christmas to celebrate the new millennium and we used the money to buy a piano for our children. My husband, my son, and my daughter are all musicians. I am not and I have never played piano in all of my life. But I sat at the piano that day. I put my right hand on a set of keys. And then, I played a note. I don’t know what the note was, but I played another note and another and it sounded enough like Kumbaya that I kept pressing down keys in all the right orders until I had played the song. Then I played it on other positions on the keyboard. I loved how long the music from one tap of a piano key would linger and rise up, sounding so sweet, coating all the remembered ickiness in my mind with the bright yellows of corniness. I don’t think anyone has ever played Kumbaya on our piano. I am sure of it. Whenever streams of children sat at our piano, they played Mary Had a LIttle Lamb, or Jingle Bells, or Chopsticks, or Smoke on the Water. I remember how my son, during the bedeviled days of his adolescence, played Clapton’s Layla on that piano. We’d all jump on board his ship when he did it, happy to escape into the passionate anthem to angst.

The whole little foray in my home, the excursion to nowhere that ended up at the piano, put a shine to my heart.

And a surge through my head. I moved on through the day, the romance of my life restored.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

1. The ones your son gives you.

2. The ones your daughter reads over and over again.

3. The ones your son and daughter were assigned in high school and college.

4. The ones your son and daughter write.

5. The ones your husband reads, even if they’re about industrialists, capitalists, and how to achieve your dreams. Because he always reads the ones you give him to read about artists, dreamers, lovers, and rainbows.

6. The ones your mom and dad are reading and have read.

7. The ones your mom studied so she could master financial independence.

8. The ones your mom and dad give you.

9. The ones your sisters give you.

10. The ones your sisters write.

11. The ones your brothers and sisters give to your son and daughter.

12. The Bible. King James Version. (Might not finish before you die. But there will be versions of these stories wherever you end up.)

13. The Dictionary. (Hahahahaha)

14. The ones your friends, teachers, and spirit guides recommend.

15. The ones your friends write.

16. The one your sister-in-law suggests.

17. The ones you took from “take a book, leave a book” shelves in campgrounds. And the ones you bought from people you met in the gypsy camps–the ones they read aloud on the gypsy stages. Those precious pages of self-published souls.

18. The ones in the homes of your brothers and sisters.

19. The ones your nieces and nephews are reading. And writing.

20. The one your uncle mailed.

21. The ones your cousin gives you.

22. The ones your cousins write.

23. The ones that were dropped off for you when you were lost to grief and couldn’t think, or concentrate, or enjoy anything.

24. Every single one written, by every single one of your favorite authors.

25. Every single one written, by every single unappreciated woman.

26. The ones that protect the art of poetry within their pages.

27. The surprise ones you find in random bookstores in your travels.

28. The ones you read a zillion times to your children, and to other children, out loud.

29. Read those ones a zillion times more.

30. The ones about love.

31. This is all about love.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

My daughter had a roasted marshmallow collection. I liked it the best of all her collections. But it’s a tough call.

Her feather collection was neat, too. I remember one tiny feather, and the way her small fingers pincer gripped it in a meadow where it hid, trying to pretend to be a blade of grass. We were out hiking. As soon as my daughter spied the feather; she captured it.

She organized her collection of feathers by sticking them into a repurposed block of styrofoam. We knew the blue jay’s feather, but everything else was known as biggest, smallest, tiniest, prettiest, coolest, best polka dots, best stripes. The collection is still on display in the library upstairs.

Her roasted marshmallow collection, though, was unique. She started it when she was in third or fourth grade because by then she was a champion marshmallow roaster.

Marshmallow roasting–real marshmallow roasting–inspires a life-long appreciation for patience. The fire has to be just right. (Use glowing coals, not flames.) The stick has to be just right. (Au natural, native to the campfire location, tip nicely cleaned with a few swipes of a jackknife.) And the marshmallows can’t be knock offs. (Jet-Puffed.)

At our campsites, the kids chopped the wood and built the fires. It was a wild thrill for them to be able to swing the axe, especially if they brought friends who never got to go camping. We had some good competitions setting logs up on a stump and waiting to see who could split them with one slam. There were a lot of strikes, but that just made the kids more determined to figure it out. Wood chopping uses the same tricks as baseball and golf–you gotta keep your eye on the ball–and, you have to keep your grip tight on the axe. We never lost any fingers or toes or arms or legs. Or noses. No eyes ever got poked out with the marshmallow sticks. No one’s hair ever went up in flames once the campfire started to roar. I’ll always be grateful to the gypsy winds for blowing fair through our camps.

So, my daughter’s Perfectly Roasted Marshmallow Collection was dedicated to preserving marshmallows that had been slow turned over the campfire coals just right–until a brown as soft as my daughter’s sun-tanned skin appeared–and then–ever so carefully–only for a few more turns beyond, in order to form a coating of delicate crunch. All gypsies admire excellence in the campfire arts.

Marshmallow roasting is a many-splendored thing. During one excursion to find the perfect stick, my daughter was led astray into a thicket on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. She claims a flash of light distracted her and seduced her curiosity. Into the thicket she went as the sun set. I thought she was lost, but before panic stopped my heart, I heard her gleeful shouts and, soon after, I saw the silhouette of my little girl, back lit by the last glows of the day, leaping up and down. She had come upon the nearly-complete skeleton of a deer and when she showed me where it was, I couldn’t figure out how in the world she had ever crawled into such a tangled hedgerow. We braided the vertebrae onto a rope and marveled at how precisely they connected, one to the other. You can read all about how the world was made, but when your daughter finds a deer skeleton and you play around with it like a puzzle, suddenly the hand of God strokes your soul.

Here’s a simple way to make chocolate-covered marshmallows, sans the fuss of a campout. They are surprisingly fun to eat and there’s no waste–you eat the stick, too.

1. Put sturdy pretzel sticks into big marshmallows and line them up on parchment on a tray. I used Snyder’s pretzel sticks–not the skinny ones. You want some heft.

2. Set up bowls of decorating bling.

3. Rig up a double boiler. (I put a stainless steel bowl over a pot of water.) Break up a bar of dark chocolate–I used 70% dark, but you could use semi-sweet, too. I used one bar and it coated about twenty marshmallows.

4. Melt the chocolate and dip the marshmallows. You can dunk them or dip them.

5. Dab and dress the marshmallows up with chosen accessories. Here’s my version of desirable food porn:

6. Let the chocolate set outside if it’s wintertime and you live in a wonderfully wintry place. Keep a close eye out for bandits! Only takes a few minutes for the cold to roast the chocolate and create that perfect coating of crunch.

7. Check them out!

8. Wrap them up. I use butcher’s string to tie the sandwich bags. I cut off the zip-loc tops.

ONE TASTE HITS THE SPOT.

Habitat for Humanity. Building Soul.

First home. It’s a little house on the prairie or in the big woods. It’s a flower-laden cottage in the English countryside. With bunnies. It’s a Gilded Age grand slam on the coast of New England. It’s a tiki hut, well hidden, in a grove of bamboo along a river that runs to the sea, on the island of Kauai. (Three waterfalls crown the hanging valleys all around it.) It’s a castle in Scotland. A townhouse–in Paris, or Rome, or New York City.

It’s the first fort you built in the woods where you played all day without a helmet on, or a cell phone in your pocket, or a friend. You were all alone. It took you about three whistled and hummed versions of “Hey Jude” to ride your bike there. (The fat-tired junker from the town dump your dad fixed up. The bike had a fender, with a rack over it. You could stack and tie salvaged wood to the rack and haul it to your own building site in the forest. You took the wood from scattered piles of scrap around the construction sites of new homes that were popping up, like swarms of giddy grasshoppers, from the glacier-scraped flatlands of Indiana to form America’s newest suburban dreamvilles.)

Not yet ten years old–you staked out your fort’s foundation, leaned walls in on each other, and when you set the roof, your heart skipped a beat. You crawled inside and sat like a little buddha, all the world’s mysteries at rest inside the tranquil float of your newborn gypsy soul–the one you cleansed every Saturday morning in the confession stall at church. Where you told lies. Because you never kept track of your sins.

Gardens, you soon thought. Now that I have a home in the woods, I ought to tidy up the land around it and make everything look really nice. And you arranged rocks into nice rows, raked out the dirt, made little seats with logs.

************

I was displaced–always on the lam for a new home–throughout my life. From the time I was a baby until after college, I lived in about 13 different houses, in three disparate regions of America–the midwest, the southwest, and the northeast. I attended seven different schools from fifth grade through 12th grade. “Did all that moving and all of those schools have an effect on you?” Someone once asked me.

Here’s one story about it: My parents, who had seven children, (the last one was born in Arizona), scrambled through the economic classes in the blink of a childhood–mine. Mom and Dad’s first house looked like the houses in the picture below which stand across the street from where our house was–now there’s just a vacant expanse of grass near a warehouse in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where the ideals of home started for my family.

Mom and Dad bought a new house eventually. (But kept the first one as rental property–a key move for building wealth.) The new house wasn’t much bigger. Dad built a garage behind it. (Sweat equity.) They planted a little tree in the front yard. It’s the only big tree on the street growing in any front yard–still. That tree is the most regal thing we left behind. A good way to leave your mark! “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther.

Mom and Dad had more babies and bought another house. Mom began to design houses. She taught herself how to invest in real estate and the stock market. (Mom graduated from high school early, at 16, but never went to college.) Mom designed another house and they built it. The post-war boom years were losing steam. So Dad accepted a job opportunity in Mexico, just over the border from Arizona. Mom got her driver’s license and we all headed west in two station wagons. I’d been dreaming of becoming a hippie and going to California. But I ended up in the desert in Arizona. We lived, at first, in a house on a highway near the truck stop in the picture below. Pretty depressing. Then we moved to two apartments in a resort area–Mom, Dad and the littlest kids bunked down in one apartment. The older kids (including me) partied in the other. Mexican border+young kids in their own apartment+Led Zeppelin+late-night TV and poker games. Mom and Dad built a nice house for all of us eventually, but our family was like the rest of the country–as the Vietnam War faded and Watergate ushered in many more “gates” to come–we were kind of dazed and confused. After almost three years, Mom and Dad abandoned Arizona and we headed east. We moved to a town on the Connecticut shoreline when I was sixteen. I got my own bedroom. I learned about LL Bean and bagels and jocks and college. I unraveled the experiences of loneliness, alienation, being uprooted–and I came to realize that it doesn’t matter if you’re a gypsy or if you came over on the Mayflower and established a compound where your family has lived forever–if you’re on the lam from yourself, and you never find a place to call home, life won’t ever be special.

Mom and Dad’s sweat equity helped all seven of their children end up in college. We were like every other family–the wars inside of each of us, got mixed up with the wars between each other, got mixed up with the wars from intruders and events beyond our household. But–no matter where we lived–Mom and Dad made our house a home. We kept our homes fixed up, we planted gardens, and we ate dinner together.

************

A gypsy kid never forgets how cruddy it feels to be an outsider. When everything else is foreign to you, a home isn’t. It’s the one place where you can land and try to get it together and find someone to love. So, when I was approached, recently, by the Massachusetts Master Gardeners Outreach Coordinator and asked if I would consider volunteering as a garden designer for Habitat for Humanity, I didn’t even have to take a minute to think about it.

Habitat for Humanity was founded on, and remains devoted to, a non-denominational Christian housing ministry. People with scant resources who desire to own their own home (such a sacred dream!) can apply for a home through Habitat for Humanity regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.

Volunteers must support the organization’s mission statement: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities, and hope.”

Habitat for Humanity is not a give-away. Applicants agree to invest 500 hours of sweat equity into the building of their own homes and they agree to help build other homes or, if they are disabled, they agree to work in other, suitable capacities. They pay their own mortgage. And–this is where I get to be involved–the new homeowners need to learn how to keep their homes looking nice outside and how to take care of their property. If any of them would like to learn how to become gardeners, (and some have already expressed interest), we will coach them and encourage them to do that also.

The first garden I ever had was outside my apartment building in Boston. It was about the size of my childhood bed–where I passed many nights pretending that someday I would be rich and have a swimming pool. That dream ended when I became a camping girl and my dream house started to look like this lean-to in Vermont with a view to the Green Mountains: If you look closely, the lean-to has a desk and a bookshelf in it.

************

Habitat for Humanity believes sweat equity can build decent housing and dignity, it can create stability for families, it leads to health, safety, and security in communities, and–it opens up job and educational opportunities. I believe in sweat equity, too. It’s the one resource you have, when you begin with nothing, that will transform your life and enrich your soul.

“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.” Dorothy Day.

Everyone needs a place where they can set their soul afloat. And what a dream-come-true it would be, if you could call that place, home.

Words. Images. Communication.

The ancient art of satire and the art of cartooning can so effectively catch us off guard and make us laugh at ourselves. In the same way that you might learn more about someone when you discover what their favorite books are, or their favorite bands, or their favorite places to travel–the comics and cartoons they enjoy also reveal personality quirks.

I started out reading comics in the Sunday newspapers. The funny pages, as we called them, had a lot of uses: we’d press Silly Putty onto the colored pages to lift off imprints, we made hats out of the festive pages, and we used the Sunday comics as wrapping paper. Mom and Dad posted comics on the fridge:

Family Circle

If I had some extra money, I’d buy comic books:

I really liked Charlie Brown.

When I was a pre-teen obsessed with cute things, I collected the love is comics.

My university had a funny cartoonist, Paul Catanese. His comic strip, “Bedlam Hall”, branded all of us as last-minute crammers who couldn’t hold our liquor and couldn’t stand the dorm food. But we all thought ducks were cute. Here’s one:

It says: First square: Engineering nerd with glasses: “Snake sent me here. He says I’m too naive.” Dude with a goatee says: “We can fix that…Dregs will demonstrate how to use a bong.” Second square: Dregs is smoking a bong while the others watch. Third square: Dregs is starting to lift off. Fourth square: “Of course, a hit like that takes years of practice…”

My kids liked Calvin and Hobbes: Here’s one about how much Calvin hates everybody: “My parents are the two stupidest people on Earth.” “Just my luck they’d get married and have me.” “I hate everybody.” “I don’t see how anyone could ever fall in love. People are jerks.” Hobbes chimes in: “Sometimes they are, but look at all the colors on the trees today.” Calvin still grumbles: “Yeah? So what.” Hobbes: “I think it’s more fun to see something like this with someone than just by yourself.” Calvin thinks. “I guessss so…but I’d still rather see this with a tiger than a person.” Hobbes: “Well, that goes without saying.”

And, my kids liked Garfield:

It says: “Check out that cute girl over there!” Garfield warns: “And check out her big boyfriend returning with ice cream.” John returns with the ice cream cones plastered onto his chest: “Actually, it’s kind of refreshing.”

I have some old comics still on the fridge:

The commiseration: “I, too, am disappointed. But perhaps the joy was in the journey.” (F-Minus/Tony Carillo) I suppose you only like this cartoon if you grew up playing on playgrounds.

There’s another one on my fridge, by Tony Carillo, that I posted above a picture of my son, (the drummer and multi-talented musician), and my daughter, (the piano and guitar player who likes to sing):

It says: “Although your baby is quite healthy, our preliminary tests indicate that the child was…born to rock.” And the doctor looks really grouchy, like music department teachers look when they find out kids would rather devote their physical and mental efforts to rocking and rolling instead of playing in the marching/pep band for the football team.

And, just yesterday, I found a funny cartoon worthy of the fridge, which doesn’t happen often. (Bizzarro by Dan Piraro) It’s a couple of cowboys riding through the Old West and one is riding a donkey piñata.

Then, today, I found another cartoon to keep. This one will be posted in our barn. It’s Doonesbury (part of a series saga, but this little excerpt works fine for us on its own):

Hippie Mom and Dad huddled together near a fire hose: Square one, Dad says: “Everything under control, Inspector?” Fireman answers: “Seems to be, you folks okay?” Square two: Dad: “Well, we’re understandably shook up. Any idea what caused the blaze?” Inspector: “Yeah. It started in the barn…” Square three: Inspector: “Looks like it was caused by a burning cigarette. My guess is it was a marijuana joint.” Square four: Dad: “Hear that, Honey? It was those damn kids!” The inspector advises: “You should have kept it locked. That’s what I do.”

I found this cartoon in the New Yorker the year my son was accepted at Bard College. I couldn’t believe it. We delivered him to Bard in our motorhome–where he’d spent all the years of his youth traveling throughout the northeast. It’s a drawing of a boy with a Bard sweatshirt meeting another boy who says to him: “I was motor-home-schooled.”

Here’s one my son drew when he was little. I think it’s about me.

Boy watching TV, Mom nags him: “That stuff’s boring! How do you watch it?” And, later, when Mom is gone, he is free and happy to watch, un-assaulted, whatever boring stuff he wants to watch: “Today…on, A Napkin’s Life Cycle…”

Here’s one of my son’s later creations, fifth grade. His characters Lizardo and Dude:

And lastly, here’s a little cartoon, which is a refrigerator magnet. I bought it in Acadia National Park last fall. I guess this represents something that is always on the minds of those of us who wish the people of the world would learn to stop harming each other with such useless violence.

Homage to a Country I Love. France.

I love France and I love the French people. I am usually puzzled by people who tell me they don’t like the French. I am sure I can convince them to like France and the French. But they do have to like artists. Great food. Wine and champagne. Fresh-baked bread. Persnickety personalities, eccentric souls, beautiful churches, parks, gardens, chateaus. They should probably have an appreciation for rebel beings. Passionate lovers. Beloved dogs. Everywhere. And children, with impressive manners. Oh, France. When we are there, the French let me sit with a drink and my paper and pen in a cafe for as long as I want. They help and assist me and encourage me. I have so many memories of contentment in France. And some of conflicts, too–but that isn’t what stays in my heart. The French expect that when I am there, I become as French as possible. What an honor–that they believe I can do it!

Both of my children studied French in high school. I am old enough to know that no matter what language or culture you study, or fall in love with, within every culture there is good and bad. But it was the spirit of my son’s French teacher, (a native French man who had the courage of all of his own beliefs in how to best teach know-it-all Americans), that caused me, when it was time to find a college for my son, to go looking for one that still believed in the freedoms of speech and expression, and the dignity of individuality.

My son was a free-thinking boy who, throughout his years as a schoolboy, had taken hits (suspensions) for his penchant for satire and rebel writings and for defying the gods of music departments. His first experience of censorship involved two rowdy cartoon characters he invented when he was a fourth grader: Lizardo and Dude. (Dude was a dude and Lizardo was his sidekick, a big lizard.) I remember when one of his cartoons was censored and another parent (who had grown fond of Lizardo and Dude) said: “We need to make ‘Lizardo and Dude Forever’ t-shirts!” It was all innocent and safe, here in America.

I was glad to discover Bard College, on the Hudson River in New York, for a kid like my son. One thing that I stumbled upon, during my search for a college, had a powerful effect on me. It was a commencement speech given at Bard College in 1996 by Salman Rushdie. I am going to type the speech entirely on my blog. I do this because I want it to be read. I do it also because it is something I still find inspiring. And, to sit here in the safety of my home in America, as a writer and an artist, typing out the words of an artist condemned to death and forced into hiding by the powers of evil because of his work, will be a useful meditation in gratitude and inspiration, as I think of France and the overwhelming grief and anxiety the people in that country must bear during these dark days. Salman Rushdie takes us, in his speech, from the present day all the way back to the Greek myths–where we are continually reminded that humankind has been the same for a long time, and that the battles for good over evil will never end. He also graciously thanks Bard College for offering him shelter, at a time when fear caused many in his world to abandon him. And at last, he encourages us to battle evil–with our peaceful hearts and our minds and our pens, pencils, and paintbrushes. To be courageous, creative beings. And, most of all, to rise to our best selves when the battle shows up, and to recognize what is good and what is evil.

TEXT OF COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BARD COLLEGE, MAY 25th, 1996 SALMAN RUSHDIE

Members of the Class of 1996, I see in the newspaper that Southampton University on Long Island got Kermit the Frog to give the Commencement address this year. You, unfortunately, have to make do with me. The only Muppet connection I can boast is that my former editor at Alfred Knopf was also the editor of that important self-help text, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life. I once asked him how it had been to work with such a major star and he replied, reverentially, “Salman: the pig was divine.”

In England, where I went to college, we don’t do things quite this way on graduation day, so I’ve been doing a little research into Commencement and its traditions. The first American friend I asked told me that in her graduation year–not at this college, I hasten to add–she and her fellow-students were so incensed at the choice of Commencement speaker–whom I suppose I should not name–oh, all right then, it was Jeane Kirkpatrick–that they boycotted the ceremony and staged a sit-in in one of the college buildings instead. It is a considerable relief, therefore, to note that you are all here.

As for myself, I graduated from Cambridge University in 1968–the great year of student protest–and I have to tell you that I almost didn’t make it. This story has nothing to do with Politics or demonstrations; it is, rather, the improbable and cautionary tale of a thick brown gravy-and-onion sauce. It begins a few nights before my graduation day, when some anonymous wit chose to redecorate my room, in my absence, by hurling a bucketful of the aforesaid gravy-and-onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of my record player and my clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge pride themselves, my college instantly held me solely responsible for the mess, ignored all my representations to the contrary, and informed me that unless I paid for the damage before the ceremony, I would not be permitted to graduate.

It was the first, but, alas, not the last occasion on which I would find myself wrongly accused of muck spreading. I paid up, I have to report, and was therefore declared eligible to receive my degree; in a defiant spirit, possibly influenced by my recent gravy experience, I went to the ceremony wearing brown shoes, and was promptly plucked out of the parade of my gowned and properly black-shod contemporaries, and ordered back to my quarters to change. I am not sure why people in brown shoes were deemed to be dressed improperly, but once again I was facing a judgment against which there could be no appeal. Once again, I gave in, sprinted off to change my shoes, got back to the parade in the nick of time; and at length, after these vicissitudes, when my turn came, I was required to hold a university officer by his little finger, and to follow him slowly up to where the Vice-Chancellor sat upon a mighty throne.

As instructed, I knelt at his feet, held up my hands, palms together, in a gesture of supplication, and begged in Latin for the degree, for which, I could not help thinking, I had worked extremely hard for three years, supported by my family at considerable expense. I recall being advised to hold my hands way up above my head, in case the elderly Vice-Chancellor, leaning forward to clutch at them, should topple off his great chair and land on top of me. I did as I was advised; the elderly gentleman did not topple; and, also in Latin, he finally admitted me to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Looking back at that day, I am a little appalled by my passivity, hard though it is to see what else I could have done. I could have not paid up, not changed my shoes, not knelt to supplicate for B.A. I preferred to surrender, and get the degree.

I have grown more stubborn since. I have come to the conclusion, which I now offer you, that I was wrong to compromise; wrong to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons. Injustice, today, still conjures up, in my mind, the memory of gravy. Injustice, for me, is a brown, lumpy, congealing fluid, and it smells pungently, tearfully, of onions. Unfairness is the feeling of running back to your room, flat out, at the last minute, to change your outlawed brown shoes. It is the business of being forced to beg, on your knees, in a dead language, for what is rightfully yours. This, then, is what I learned on my own graduation day; this is the message I have derived from the parables of the Unknown Gravy-bomber, the Vetoed Footwear, and the Unsteady Vice-Chancellor upon his throne, and which I pass on to you today: first, if , as you go through life, people should some day accuse you of what one might call aggravated gravy abuse–and they will, they will–and if in fact you are innocent of abusing gravy, do not take the rap. Second: those who would reject you because you are wearing the wrong shoes are not worth being accepted by. And third: kneel before no man. Stand up for your rights. I like to think that Cambridge University, where I was so happy for three marvelous years, and from which I gained so much–I hope your years at Bard have been as happy, and that you feel you have gained as much—that Cambridge Univerisity, with its finely developed British sense of irony, intended me to learn precisely these valuable lessons from the events of that strange graduation day.

Members of the Class of 1996, we are here to celebrate with you one of the great days of your lives. We participate today in the rite of passage by which you are released from this life of preparation into that life for which you are now as prepared as anyone ever is. As you stand at the gate of the future, I should like to share with you a piece of information about the extraordinary institution you are leaving, which will explain the reason why it is such a particular pleasure for me to be with you today. In 1989, within weeks of the threat made against me by the mullahs of Iran, I was approached by the President of Bard, through my literary agent, and asked if I would consider accepting a place on the faculty of this college. More than a place; I was assured that I could find, here in Annandale, among the Bard community, many friends, and a safe haven in which I could live and work. Alas, I was not able in those difficult days, to take up this courageous offer, but I have never forgotten that at a moment when red-alert signals were flashing all over the world, and all sorts of people and institutions were running scared, Bard College did the opposite–that it moved towards me, in intellectual solidarity and human concern, and made, not lofty speeches, but a concrete offer of help. I hope you will all feel proud that Bard, quietly, without fanfares, made such a principled gesture at such a time. I am certainly extremely proud to be a recipient of Bard’s honorary degree, and to have been accorded the exceptional privilege of addressing you today.

Hubris, according to the Greeks, was the sin of defying the gods, and could, if you were really unlucky, unleash against you the terrifying, avenging figure of the goddess Nemesis, who carried in one hand an apple bough and, in the other, the Wheel of Fortune, which would one day circle round to the inevitable moment of vengeance. As I have been, in my time, accused not only of gravy abuse and wearing brown shoes but of hubris, too, and since I have to come to believe that such defiance is an inevitable and essential aspect of what we call freedom, I thought I might commend it to you. For in the years to come you will find yourselves up against gods of all sorts, big and little gods, corporate and incorporeal gods, all of them demanding to be worshipped and obeyed–the myriad deities of money and power, of convention and custom, that will seek to limit and control your thoughts and lives. Defy them; that’s my advice to you. Thumb your noses; cock your snooks. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

The Greeks tell many stories of quarrels between us and the gods. Arachne, the great artist of the loom, sets her skills of weaving and embroidery against those of the goddess of wisdom herself, Minerva or Pallas Athene; and impudently chooses to weave versions of only those scenes which reveal the mistakes and weaknesses of the gods–the rape of Europa, Leda and the Swan. For this–for the irreverence, not for her lesser skill–for what we would now call art, and chutzpah–the goddess changes her mortal rival into a spider. Queen Niobe of Thebes tells her people not to worship Latona, the mother of Diana and Apollo, saying “What folly is this! To prefer beings whom you never saw to those who stand before your eyes!” For this sentiment, which today we would call humanism, the gods murder her children and husband, and she metamorphoses into a rock, petrified with grief, from which there trickles an unending river of tears. Prometheus the Titan steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind. For this–for what we would now call the desire for progress, for improved scientific and technological capabilities–he is bound to a rock while a great bird gnaws eternally at his liver, which regenerates as it is consumed.

The interesting point is that gods do not come out of these stories at all well. If Arachne is overly proud when she seeks to compete with a goddess, it is only an artist’s pride, joined to the gutsiness of youth; whereas Minerva, who could afford to be gracious, is merely vindictive. The story increases Arachne’s shadow, as they say, and diminishes Minerva’s. It is Arachne who gains, from the tale, a measure of immortality. And the cruelty of the gods to the family of Niobe proves her point. Who could prefer the rule of such cruel gods to self-rule, the rule of men and women by men and women, however flawed that may be? Once again, the gods are weakened by their show of strength, while the human beings grow stronger, even though–even as–they are destroyed. And tormented Prometheus, of course, Prometheus with his gift of fire, is the greatest hero of all.

It is men and women who have made the world, and they have made it in spite of their gods. The message of the myths is not the one the gods would have us learn–that we should behave ourselves and know our place–but its exact opposite. It is that we must be guided by our natures. Our worst natures can, it’s true, be arrogant, venal, corrupt, or selfish; but in our best selves, we–that is, you–can and will be joyous, adventurous, cheeky, creative, inquisitive, demanding, competitive, loving, and defiant.

Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay. Be guided, if possible, by your better natures. Great good luck and many congratulations to you all.

Pablo Neruda. Gypsy Camp Visitor.

Gypsies don’t have televisions in their bedrooms. But they have books. This morning I reached for Stephen Tapscott’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor. 100 Love Sonnets. The collection arrived to the world, in Spanish, in 1960. It was the same year I was born. No one in my country of birth knew of Pablo Neruda then, but it would happen soon—that he would become known as a man to revile, during the tumultuous and despairing times of the Cold War, for his political passions and involvements—which spanned the globe.

The book came to me through my son, who read it in high school for an English class. There is some marginalia on page 15 that I recognize as his handwriting: “Sunday: NOTICE NATURE. Bring it in.” What an absurd school assignment for a gypsy child. But it was 2008 or 2009, and, by then, many children in my country had stopped wandering off into nature. (Neruda wrote that he made his sonnets out of wood.) The page also has my son’s drawing of a bird, or maybe it is a bug—with wings—holding a bow and arrow. There are two hearts drawn, shot through with an arrow. They are marked with my son’s initials and those of someone he was thinking about during class. The drawings are underneath Neruda’s unabashed sensuality, represented by words, on the page. Here are the last lines:

“But my heart went on, remembering your mouth—and I

went on.

and on through the streets like a man wounded,

until I understood, Love: I had found

my place, a land of kisses and volcanoes.

On page 7, there is a graphic doodle on the left side of the page my son did during class. And many years later, I added my doodles to it.

And, at last, on dog-eared page 171, is the sonnet I found again this morning.

“De viajes y dolores yo regrese, amor mío…”

“My love, I returned from travel and sorrow

to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar,

to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses,

to the night that circles through the sky.

I ask for bread and dominion for all;

for the worker with no future I ask for land.

May no one expect my blood or my song to rest!

But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon,

the barcarole, on the fluid guitar,

till my head lolls, dreaming:

for all my life’s sleeplessness has woven

this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies,

watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.”

Neruda’s dedication in the book, to Matilde Urrutia:

“Señora mia muy amada…”

“My beloved wife, I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal, or cannon fire. But–with great humility–I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.”

In my gypsy life, I fell in love with a guitar player. We got married. We found an old barn and took great care in choosing all the wood we used to build the barn up after it had been abandoned and left to die. Inside this little shelter of ours, I read poems out loud. I do it in the same way that my true love plays his guitar—for the simple joy of doing something that brings me pleasure.

Gypsy Tricks. Late Bloomers.

My daughter is the only member of our family who has read the complete series of Harry Potter books. She has read them several times. She became Hermione when she was ten and slipped away from dull suburbia by often placing an artistically, hand-rendered note on her tent during our campouts: “Do Not Disturb.” We knew she wished to be left alone, immersed in any one of the Harry Potter books and her most exciting, magical world of true friends.

I was the first in our family to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. My son followed suit, in one long sway on a hammock at Nickerson State Park, Cape Cod, when he was five. We had a Harry Potter birthday party for him that fall season, right around the time of Halloween. It was epic. I was Minerva McGonagall, the Deputy Headmistress. My husband was Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster. Our gypsy wagon, a monstrous and beloved RV, filled the role of the Hogwart’s Express and delivered the party wizards to the local indoor pool where we played our own version of Quidditch. Pool noodles served as broomsticks and every boy believed he soared through the water on a Nimbus 2000.

In those days, few children knew about Harry and Hogwart’s, so I had to scour the countryside for Chocolate Frogs and such. There wasn’t one iota of commercialism surrounding the soon-to-be-blockbuster books. Our imaginations ran wild planning the party. We transformed our home into the Leaky Cauldron Cafe and the basement became Professor Snape’s Potions Mixing Class. It was scary—some kids preferred to stay out of the basement.

My son read every book, except for the last one. By then, his own life was being transformed by a dreary New England prep school where the whole business of real battles for good and evil were well underway, in the flesh.

My husband never read any of the books. Nor did he watch any of the movies. But, one day, in New York City, while he was waiting for me to finish drinking a cup of tea, he turned on the TV in our hotel room. There, on the screen, he witnessed dragons being born into the hands of Harry Potter and his friends. Soon, the screen erupted into dragon-dark mayhem. “Wow,” my husband said. “Did our kids watch this when they were little?”

Later, we set out to find New York City’s version of a Diagon Alley magic shop. It still exists, but who knows for how long. The shop—Tannen’s—has been in business since 1925. It’s small, the lights are dim, and no one protects you when you choose to go through the door—where spirits and ghosts remain. The shop is in Herald Square, 45 West 34th Street, on the sixth floor. It is down the hall from the vestiges of Martinka and Company, which only exists in cyberspace nowadays, but was once presided over by Houdini. In fact, on the wall inside of Tannen’s, there are a few Houdini artifacts worth mulling over.

Once inside Tannen’s, magicians and tricksters will play with every unknown thought pattern that runs through your mind. They will make your eyes get bigger and bigger. They will draw delight from all the recessed memories of your childhood. They will cause you to stumble and fall and laugh about it. I recognized some of the magicians—many of them were the odd little children that hovered next to me on the outskirts of schoolyard playgrounds. They ate glue with me and licked their lips incessantly and couldn’t stop blinking their eyes or looking for something else to do besides sit still and ace worksheets. Their pants were too short, their hair never behaved, and they couldn’t read or spell or memorize their times tables. They never cared that what I wanted more than anything else was to be a boy. I dressed like a boy and acted like a boy, but when the bullies came after us, I failed at fighting like a boy and ended up in a heap, with the others, on the edge of the playground.

The magicians inside Tannen’s must have all received their letters of admission to Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as the years went by. They now know that the rest of us are Muggles and they are not. They performed simple and complicated card tricks, juggling tricks, and foamy ball tricks. There were human-scaled boxes I could use to saw my husband apart and boxes I could use to stab him repeatedly with swords.

To walk into Tannen’s is completely free, as is the entertaining hocus pocus that ensues. I drank up and let the tricksters have their way with me. My husband, on the other hand, felt his mind twisting inside out. It began to occur to him that his Muggle parents might have destroyed a long-ago letter of admission to Hogwarts, with his name on it. The cases filled with magical madnesses intrigued him. He purchased invisible decks of cards and video instruction on how to realize your repressed wizard self.

Yesterday, I came home late from a meeting. My husband entertained me with a magic trick. I was duly impressed and asked him how he learned to do it. He admitted that, instead of checking his endless email and phone messages, he listened to and watched his instructive magic video the whole ride home from work, on the commuter train from Boston.

I thought it so wonderful! After years of stressing out as a Muggle, working late, dragging his feet over to Boston’s South Station to take the train home—he had finally found his way to King’s Cross Station, Platform 9 3/4, and broken through the barrier to climb aboard the Hogwart’s Express!

Not only that, but he is an uber gypsy dude—the only one heading west from Boston, out to the suburbs, being educated via magic-instruction videos. Perhaps it’s a newfangled version of a Hogwart’s “on-line” degree for late bloomers.

Gypsy Grit. Endangered.

It was our own hideout for the year 2014. Not like the Alhambra, which existed for a time as an abandoned, magnificent shelter for vagrants with dreamy souls. Nor like Rudyard Kipling’s Naulakha in Vermont—a place for gypsy wanderers to sit awhile until The Landmark Trust restored it and took control of who sleeps inside the storied home.

Our hideout was a hotel, near the seductive whirls and whams of Manhattan. We found it when our son moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (All gypsy parents camp out as close as possible to their gypsy babies.)

The hotel charges us just over $150 per night, including taxes! We park our car, nearby, on the street—for FREE. There is a robust and adequate breakfast in the morning. A lovely shuttle ferries us to the 7 train which delivers us in no time to Grand Central Station and beyond. (During our most recent visit, the cheerful man who drove the van had really good tunes playing.) Upon our return, (unless we are very late), the shuttle is there waiting to take us back to our room. Our rooms have been known to feature a king bed, a whirlpool tub, and a view of Manhattan that rises along the horizon, complementing the industrial meadows lining the East River. The gypsy souls that join us in our hideout come in all colors and speak many languages. They have beautiful children—families, traveling together, to play in one of the greatest amusement parks in the world.

New York City—we need a place to bunk down for a day or two when we go. The financial toll can leave you feeling mugged and bedraggled, but New York City might forever remain the most confusing mindtrip we can’t quit.

Long Island City, Queens, New York. Today I read a little paragraph in the New York Times that revealed the location of our hideout as the go-to place for cheap lodging in New York City.

Gypsy Grit. Endangered.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Parenting

Romancing the Mind.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

Habitat for Humanity. Building Soul.

Words. Images. Communication.

Homage to a Country I Love. France.

Pablo Neruda. Gypsy Camp Visitor.

Gypsy Tricks. Late Bloomers.

Gypsy Grit. Endangered.