Sunday, May 15, 2016

A memorial for Bobbe Ross on her birthday

Had she lived, my dear friend Bobbe Ross would have been 88 years old on May 17.  It's a birthday with a special meaning in Japan, as the characters for 88 resemble the character for rice, a symbol of purity and goodness. Not that Bobbe believed in that particular symbol, but she would have insisted we celebrate the occasion with Chinese food, which she loved. Afterwards we would have gone to a movie--something on the big screen, something with quality and heart and flair or good politics or possibly just an absurdly funny one. She had eclectic tastes.

Bobbe died in the autumn of 2013, after several years of living with Alzheimer's disease. The last time I saw her, in a Boulder nursing home a few months before she died, she looked at me and said "I love you" as I was leaving. I blew her a kiss in return. It was a very appropriate goodbye for someone who was one of the best friends I've ever had.

This photo, taken in the mid 90s with her daughter, Sable, is one of my favorites, as it shows something of her style and her pleasure in being with us that day. I think she was one of the first in her generation to get a tattoo.


Here is an edited version of a memorial essay I wrote a few weeks after her death.  Reading it again today helped me remember our heady feminist days in Denver and the friendship that continued after I left Denver for Japan.

Bobbe had a generous nature and expressed it in so many ways, especially with her time and willingness to “walk her talk”. My first memory of her--in 1977--is placed in the Capitol Hill basement where a group of us put together the feminist newspaper, Big Mama Rag. I think we had just come back from a demonstration against the Hyde Amendment, one of many which have since curtailed women’s reproductive freedom. We connected as politically active women who had started life in Chicago and had moved to Denver within the same year. There was a heart connection too. I loved her laugh and that passionate spirit--later so well expressed on her kitchen magnet, “Dance naked with your cats”. I think one reason she took to our politicized community was the fact that dancing was a part of it.  Another was her joy in finding a movement focusing on women’s autonomy--less available to her generation which came of age in post World War II America.

She had a certain style. Here she is a few years later, visiting her friend Linda Lane in the mountains and posing with someone else's motorcycle in a restaurant parking lot. (Same T-shirt, I see, the one with two women relaxing on a beach. She loved the water. )


Bobbe loved justice more than anyone I ever met. Writing for Big Mama Rag gave her the opportunity to explore more deeply the connections among racism, classism and sexism. That was the one project we shared. I went on to the Woman to Woman Bookstore Collective and she went on to several other projects--Jobs for Justice as well as much legal support work. She also supported Native American rights and followed the issues, including the Hopi/Navajo Big Mountain struggle. 

She traveled outside the US, with particular interest in countries that had had communist revolutions--Russia and Cuba. After she returned, she never really expressed any disappointment with how those revolutions had turned out. Instead, she focused on the people she had met and talked with. I think “revolution” was always a very personal matter, rooted in experience. It’s not surprising that two of her favorite writers were Tilly Olsen and Meridel LeSeur, two working class women who raised families and supported many progressive struggles in the mid-20th century. Despite setbacks, Bobbe “kept the faith”. I think the poster she kept on her wall for years showed that--the one with the smiling Chinese girls holding a net full of brightly colored fish. It stayed there, long after the abuses of the Mao years were revealed, a symbol of what remains possible.

Like all of us, I think she understood that political activism is a story of dealing with loss more than victory. She was prone to episodes of depression periodically--which she usually shared with me after the fact. I think that understanding of the nature of loss helped her be the empathetic friend she was. When I was going through a crisis with the Woman to Woman collective in the early 80s, she shared her own experiences dealing with embarrassment, disappointment and anger. A very understanding friend indeed. 

Shortly after that, when I became a part-time foster mom for a little boy named Gabriel, she was understanding there too, being a mom herself. Though she worried about her own parenting, past and present, as well as how the future would turn out for her kids, she often expressed her pride in how they were creating that future. If she could come back today, she would be so pleased to see how their lives have continued to unfold, all filled with love and good work in the world.

When anyone jumped on her choices--whether it be smoking, driving habits or refusal to do something for her own good--she could be fiercely stubborn, defending her right to do as she pleased. But in turn, she supported my right everyone's right to do the same. However, after years of hearing her rail against “professionals” who could or would not support the grassroots, I wondered how she’d feel when I chose to go back to grad school to get a Master's degree. I need not have wondered. She was totally supportive.

After I went to Japan in 1990, she continued to be a dear friend. She wrote letters and sent funny cards. On my visits back to Denver, I always stayed with her. We often went to plays or movies. She also joined me at the reunions I had with old friends at The Mercury Cafe. This photo, taken in 2005, is the last one I took of her.


Every year we laughed and talked a lot, and every year, at the end of the visit, she said, ”This was the best one yet!” After I bought my cabin and put it on Linda Lane’s land in Florissant, she came out to visit. She loved the beauty of the sky and the expanse and the majority of my neighbors--llamas and alpacas. I remember her sitting in the pasture several times just watching them. And of course, if a dog appeared with a radius of 50 feet, you know she’d be there making friends with him or her and the accompanying human.

After Bobbe died, her children scattered her ashes in Nebraska. Her roots were in northwest Nebraska, near Crawford, where she had spent summers as a girl. Once I traveled with her and Sable for a visit. I saw and heard about some of the things she had loved in this small town--especially her joy and skill in swimming and stories of an early romance. Later, she returned to be with her cousin Mary when Mary died. She returned home, saying, “I know now that death isn’t something to be afraid of,” adding that she could see what a peaceful departure it had been for her cousin.  I don’t know whether that subconscious understanding carried her through her own passing, which happened under more difficult circumstances. But it’s clear that Nebraska is the very best possible final resting place for her ashes. Her spirit is certainly already there--as it is in our hearts as well. I am so honored to have been her friend.






Wednesday, May 11, 2016

1968 and 2016: Older Self and Younger Self talk politics

I never had a a rebellious daughter--or any daughter for that matter--but I get a taste of how that feels now and then. My younger self comes to visit sometimes, and when she does, she's apt to scold me. We talk about politics and elections and what must be done to end war and bring America into a new era. She brings me back to 1968, an election year that looks very much like this one. Both had and have a lot at stake.

She is 21, newly graduated from college (with a social science/political science degree no less!) and ready to take on life in this most extraordinary year. So extraordinary that a major museum exhibit traveled the country in 2015, dedicated solely to the tumultuous events of 1968.

April, 1968: Younger Self is excited and happy because the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the Bernie Sanders of his day, has just won the April 2 Wisconsin Democratic Primary. She and a few Mundelein College classmates traveled from Illinois to join hundreds of other young people working for him. The issue--the only issue for many--was the Vietnam war and the military draft, which was taking unwilling young men into war and sending thousands back home in caskets.

"This war is unjust and McCarthy can bring an end to it--I know it! she tells me. But I know she's also here to chide me. "Why aren't you working for Bernie? You've been for Hillary all along, haven't you? What happened to you!? What will happen to me?!" she suddenly realizes. "She disappears and returns just to shout, "I'm not going to become you! I'm just not!"

She leaves before I can explain myself: that I think Hillary has the ability to work with a very divided nation in a way that Bernie does not; that she's better than what the left and far right media have said about her; that 50 years of observing political campaigns has taught me that outside-the-mainstream candidates don't often fare well in a general election. Most of all, I believed--before the Republican implosion--that the Democrats could not afford dissension. Hillary has worked for it, she can do the job, let her run unimpeded. The general election will come, and I'm convinced that the Republicans are masters in well-funded deceitful campaigns, that sexism continues to affect how candidates are evaluated, and that Hillary's personal style doesn't always serve her well.

Younger Self returns periodically, and I keep returning to memories and images of 1968.

Here's Sen. McCarthy at a rally. He was a rather urbane, intellectual man who had once spent months of his youth in a monastery. I don't recall him ever raising his fist.


His supporters went "Clean for Gene"--the guys, for the most part--by shaving their beards and cutting their long hair, all traces of counterculture trappings removed. We were out to convince Middle America--and many were already questioning, if not convinced, as Walter Cronkite, the almost universally respected television commentator, seemed to be on our side. I remember seeing the photo below in a Wisconsin newspaper. I regret I've lost the news clipping of my classmate, Eibhlin Glennon, talking to a voter on the phone. Ah, the days when voters answered phones and wanted to talk with you.... I digress.



Younger Self doesn't yet know about cell phones or caller ID. A cell phone camera might have been handy then, as I have no pictures of myself on the campaign trail--precious few from my college years. I don't think I even had a camera. Or perhaps I just had the romantic view that I need not live life through a camera lens. Surely I would remember all the important things. Ah, yes.... Anyway here's one of the few close-up college photos I have, taken after a blood donation. You got paid for donating then, and the money always came in handy when buying textbooks. No doubt the smile is similar to the one I had when McCarthy won in Wisconsin. The smile hides Younger Self's often self-righteous and argumentative tendencies.



President Johnson, whose ratings had once soared after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, shocked everyone when he withdrew from the race just before the Wisconsin primary. McCarthy won his second victory after New Hampshire. Two days later Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. By then the popular Robert F. Kennedy had joined the race and was set to eclipse McCarthy--until he was assassinated in June following his win in the California primary.

"We wondered, didn't we," I muse, "whether adult life was going to be like this always." Younger Self nods; she's come back, a bit mellower, perhaps hoping to change the course of her future self.  "I know our generation has a really big part to play. Compromise won't get you anywhere," she insists. I look dubious, remembering those political science courses. Compromise is the life blood of politics, I would argue.

Democrat and Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Establishment candidate. He was the Hillary Clinton of his day, a man with a long record on behalf of Civil Rights and other progressive causes, but tainted by the Johnson Administration's war policy. There was a third party wild card--segregationist George Wallace, a precursor of Donald Trump.

Younger Self returns. It's now July, 1968. "I'm volunteering with this group called the Coalition for an Open Convention," she reminds me. " If McCarthy can't get the nomination, we're going to lobby for an anti-war plank in the Democratic platform. This war must end!" I listen to this, trying to remember exactly how we thought we were going to do this. I believe we talked a lot, issued press releases, and tried unsuccessfully to get a permit to demonstrate.

Younger Self revisits in late early September. She's wearing a "plague on both your houses" button. The hawk Richard Nixon is leading the Republican ticket. Humphrey got the Democratic nomination, as expected. The peace plank efforts failed. The convention, held in late August in Chicago, was marked by Yippie protests and police violence. Younger Self was not part of that--the gathering of hundreds of protesters in Grant Park. "I feel a little embarrassed", she confesses, "but I'm relieved I didn't get assaulted or arrested. Her education had made her a sort of establishment protester it seems. I point this out to her, not unkindly.

November, 1968: Younger Self writes in McCarthy for president--a way of staying true to herself. Nixon wins the presidency. Humphrey comes close in the popular vote, but not in the Electoral College. Segregationist Wallace carries the Southern States--traditionally a Democratic stronghold. Without his candidacy, would the Democrats have won?

December, 1968: Younger Self has put the election behind her, focusing on her first real job--as a reporter for the Lerner Home Newspapers in Chicago. She wants to make a difference, to focus on her writing and learning more about Chicago politics. I tell her I understand. "Keep on learning and looking honestly at yourself--that's the key." "She leaves before I can add, "We're different, but I'm so glad I was you once! And yes, Bernie Sanders rocks! He's part of our generation, after all."








Monday, May 9, 2016

Laughing for no reason with Laughter Yoga

I'm enjoying a quiet morning indoors here in Florissant, looking out the dining room window at passing wildlife (raven, squirrel, deer)--and laughing. I just finished watching Day 130 of Dave Berman's Laugh of the Day on youtube. It's part of Daily Laughers, a channel Dave created for his daily 5--10 minute laughter sessions with Laughter Yoga teachers around the world. It's become part of my daily practice, and today I decided to do 3 sessions in a row, as I'm missing a session with the laughter club I'm part of in Denver. A great day to start the day--or in my case--put some energy into my mid-morning. I'm an early riser this week, as the cats I'm caring for expect their breakfast at 6:15, and being their devoted servant, I oblige.

Laughter Yoga is a practice, a way to benefit from the joy and healing power of laughter without need  of jokes or humor. It began with Dr. Madan Kataria in India 21 years ago and has since expanded into thousands of laughter clubs throughout the world. Dr. Kataria's great insight was the fact that laughing for no reason can produce the same physical and mental effects as laughing at a joke: increased endorphins (pleasure-inducing chemicals in the brain),  bonding with community (oxytocin) and all of the other positive effects of letting go of stress. The yoga part of the practice started with Dr. Kataria's wife, Madhuri, a yoga teacher who believed that yoga's breathing, meditative and spiritual aspects had a place in this healing art. Laughter yoga sessions often end with quiet time and a reflection on spreading world peace through laughter.


Over time I've gotten to know the friends I met through my laughter club, and part of the fun each Monday is going out to lunch afterwards to talk and, well, laugh some more. I first discovered Laughter Yoga toward the end of my stay in Japan when my friend Denise Olivieri took me to a World Laughter Day in Tokyo. (Yes, there is such a thing! First Sunday in May every year.) There I was with dozens of others simply laughing for no reason via a variety of short (a minute or so) exercises. Breathing, clapping, laughing--those are the elements of Laughter Yoga. Here's an example of a laughter yoga session on Youtube.  No doubt one laugh equals 100 words or more. You can watch this 3-minute clip here.

When I moved back to Denver two years ago I found an on-going club which meets weekly at noon at the Unitarian Church at 14th and Lafayette.* The number of participants varies from just a few to perhaps 15, depending on everyone's schedule or inclination. There is no fee or need to sign up for a course. Starting in June, the group moves to nearby Cheesman Park and continues there until fall.

Here we are one morning in the upstairs room at the church, where the stained glass window creates a beautiful light.



As this blog is part memoir, I wonder, as I write, how my laugh has changed since I was a child. I remember taking a voice class once and being told "Your voice is not your voice. It's a collection of habits, mostly unconscious, that you have heard and adapted." I imagine the same is true of laughter. I have no videos or other recordings of my earlier selves laughing. Probably, as a young child, my laughs and giggles were a lot more spontaneous, but then came my teen years and an infusion of self-consciousness. If laughter reflects our self-confidence, our emotional depth and sense of freedom, then I know my laugh is stronger and freer now than it was during my more timid adolescence.

Laughter yoga has its offshoots and one of them is Laughter Wellness, developed by Sebastien Gendry, a laughter specialist, I guess you could say, based in California. He started Laughter Online University, through which you can get certification in leading Laughter Wellness groups. I enrolled this year, and my goal this month is to finish the program. When I return to Florissant in June, I'd like to bring more laughter skills with me and lead a session or two here. I led my first session in Japan when I returned for a visit in March. It was at the annual retreat of WELL (Women Educators and Language Learners), a group very dear to my heart. About 20 participants turned up for a 9 a.m. session and I was delighted with their enthusiasm and creativity. Later I visited Denise--the friend who had introduced me to LY--and I visited a Tokyo laughter club (see info below). Here we are looking a bit flushed and relaxed after that session.



*Anyone interested in finding a laughter yoga club in your country/area can go to this website. A great source in Japan is Mary Tadokoro. She and her husband are experienced laughter yoga trainers in Tokyo. You can reach her via the Kichijoji Laughter Club. The link for Laughter Online University is here. There are also a growing number of Skype laughter clubs in various countries. You can get the call times at this link. What a way to travel--hohohahaha!