The beauty of armchair travel

While a number of my friends are happily planning trips now that pandemic restrictions are eased, I'm not one of them. The exceptions are my upcoming summer sojourns on Linda Lane's land near Guffey, a beautiful place where my tiny house sits; the other, a trip to Chicago, where until last year I travelled every year to visit family and friends. What I'm talking about here are the other kinds of trips, the ones to new places or adventure opportunities. 

Despite my love of travel--I've had so many opportunities, especially during my Japan years--I find that the relative solitude of the past year jumpstarted a new appreciation for travel via a screen. In January I decided to do an informal project--look for international films that would give me the sense of having visited places. I looked for films from countries I never had the chance to visit, and given the narrowing window of opportunity brought about by getting older, I probably never will. Consequently, I avoided historical dramas or fantasy in favor of more current offerings, preferably those including a road trip or characters using a lot of shoe leather on city streets. The project is still ongoing and is still very limited in scope, but I'd like to share a few of my favorites from the past 5 months. If you're in the "I've seen everything already" doldrums, here are a few you might have missed:

1. Cuba and The Cameraman. This 2017 Netflix original documentary by Jon Alpert covers 45 years of this journalist's visits to post-revolutionary Cuba. The film got a rather stunning 100% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and  I think it's deserved. Alpert, who gained the trust of Fidel Castro early on, had unprecedented access to the late leader. Brief interviews are sprinkled throughout the film, but what really makes it outstanding is its focus on stories of ordinary Cubans over time. On each visit Alpert looks up the same people, and if you're like me, their stories, told with humor and heart in the face of suffering and resilience, stay long after the film is over. (113 minutes in English and Spanish)

2. One Man and His Cow (La Vache). This French language 2016 film directed by Mohamed Hamidi takes viewers on a road trip from Algeria to Paris. It's a"charming and feel-good" production which will take you to Paris, mostly on foot, from a small Algerian town  where our protagonist devotedly cares for his cow, Jacqueline. After years of unsuccessful tries, he finally gets an invitation to enter Jacqueline in a Paris agricultural fair. Along the way he meets a variety of kind and eccentric people, gets embroiled in a social media scandal, and in the end transforms just about everyone's life or viewpoint in both countries. Yes, I'm betting you'll cry and laugh, as I did, wishing it were a whole lot longer. And, of yes, you'll see a lot of scenery along the way. (91 minutes.Available for rent on Amazon Prime, Vudu or Apple TV)

3. Atlantics. This 2019 drama from Senegal is a genre-bender, blending social commentary with the paranormal--generally not my favorite genre. A group of desperate construction workers, unpaid for months, set off by boat for Europe, but their boat capsizes and they are lost. How they "return" is the mystery of the film which is beautifully photographed and directed by Mati Diop, a woman making her debut as a director. The protagonists of the film are the women left behind and the lost men who are "with" them. It took me awhile to figure out just what was going on, but when I did it drew me in through its beauty and message. (105 minutes, original language Wolof, subtitled in English. On Netflix)

4. The Mole Agent. This 2020 documentary from Chile got a 95% rating from Rotten Tomatoes for its portrayal of the residents of a home for the elderly. Our protagonist, an 80-something widower, is hired to infiltrate the home and check to see that a client's mother is being treated properly. You'll quickly see that this is less an investigation of possible abuse and more a look at the varied stories of residents and workers there. Our investigator knows how to listen with an open heart and he is valued for that. The film ends with a message for the client and a feeling among viewers like me that we've gotten a view of Chilean society that would be impossible to get on any tour. (90 minutes, on Hulu. In Spanish with English subtitles)

5. The Disciple. This 2020 music-filled drama comes from India, a recent addition to Netflix that has a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's the story of a vocalist who has devoted his life to the spiritual practice of Indian classical music. However, he struggles with his ability to achieve his goal of mastery amid challenges both internal and external. This is no standard drama of success after beating all odds. Rather it's a very nuanced look at talent, perfection, a media-saturated music environment, and the necessity of choice in an imperfect world. (127 minutes) As a traveler-viewer, you'll ride with our protagonist on the streets of Mumbai and attend a number of concerts. It's too good to be depressing, but feel-good is not the first word that comes to mind.

6. Magical Andes. This two-season series of short half-hour episodes was my favorite pre-bedtime viewing for several weeks. It is an incredible photographic journey along the Andean mountain range which extends through various countries along the western edge of South America. Each episode focuses on a different area and introduces you to locals whose livelihoods or passions are connected to this amazing 7000-km long mountain range. It makes no attempt at social commentary in favor of letting viewers tag along for the ride. I've mentioned this series most often when people ask what I've been watching. May well watch again for the sheer beauty of the photography and the joy of visiting 7 different countries--Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia. (On Netflix)

7. If you're in the mood to stay awhile longer in South America, consider El Pepe: A Supreme Life in Uruguay. It's a 2018 documentary about Jose Pepe Mujica, known as El Pepe, a 1970s revolutionary who later became president of the country and then a farmer devoted to teaching kids about sustainable agriculture. Based on interviews conducted by Serbian director Emir Kusturica. I watched this film in January and it still echoes with me. "My youth belongs to the world of illusion", El Pepe tells the camera. The real revolution is in our minds and cultural values. 

Happy viewing and traveling, reader.

Remembering Joanne Hauschild Kastrul

 In sorting through my digitized family photos lately, I've been especially touched by those of my oldest cousin, Joanne. She died last year in February, just days after her 84th birthday, of pancreatic cancer. Because it was a cancer with a poor prognosis and often rapid spread, Joanne chose to forego treatment for that reason and another more important one: She had met the love of her life just 15 years before. "He is the most wonderful man I've ever met," she told me just months before her death, saying that she wanted every moment of quality time with him--without the side effects of treatments unlikely to extend her life. The wonderful man was Jack Kastrul. Joanne and Jack married in 2008--her for the first time, he for the second--at the tender ages of 72 and 71.

Another wonderful man in Joanne's opinion was Joe Biden, who she thought was just about the kindest man she had ever heard in the political arena. She would have proudly cast her vote for Joe and Kamala had she lived, and when Joe and Kamala succeeded, I felt I had to celebrate double--for me and Joanne, and of course, for the world too.

Here are Jack and Joanne on their wedding day. In front are me--one of the lucky maids of honor, my sister Joan and brother-in-law Jim. Also part of the wedding party were Sandee Kastrul, Jack's daughter, and her partner Kim Crutcher. We all felt like we were creating a new family that day.

Joanne and Jack's wedding reflected one of the important things that brought them together: love of the Bible. What was somewhat unusual was that Jack was Jewish and Joanne Catholic. Their wedding, at the Catholic church Joanne had long attended in her Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park, included a priest and a rabbi--something unthinkable in my Catholic childhood. They continued attending services--both at a church and a synagogue--for several years after their marriage. They also shared a love of music, having met in a choir. It seemed to me that for the ensuing decade each gave the other what they most needed--a family. Joanne, who had no siblings or children, had lived with her late mother, Marie, for decades. Jack had lost his beloved first wife, Clair, to cancer years before.

Before their marriage, I had met Joanne yearly on my visits to Chicago, and our relationship bloomed again after years of relatively little contact. Starting in the late 90s, we would usually make a date to go to the cemetery, where my mother, her mother and adopted father were buried. Joanne had been tending their graves regularly for years, and she understood, after my mother died in 1994, how healing cemetery visits could be. Then we would go out to dinner and talk and get-reacquainted telling family and teacher stories. Joanne had been an elementary school teacher all of her life, most of the time teaching second graders, and she had the energy and enthusiasm that I've seen with others who spend their daytime hours with young children. Here she is (circa 1980) with her mother, Marie, my mother's oldest sister.

Joanne blossomed after her marriage. She cut and dyed her hair--previously worn in a graying bun--and started calling herself JoJo. She and Jack built a life together in an apartment on North Kedzie Avenue, traveled often, and developed a close relationship as a couple with Jack's daughters, Sandee and Kim. Every year when I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Chicago, we would visit them. We'd talk, eat pizza, and sometimes Joanne would play the piano and sing. Here's a picture from the early years of their marriage.

The sadness and suddenness of Joanne's passing was all the more jarring because she was the last of a generation in my mother's family. She was already a grown-up--age 14--when I celebrated my 3rd birthday in 1950. She's sitting across from the cake next to her friend, Babs in this photo:

To me, Joanne always seemed part of a bridge generation--almost like a much younger aunt. I was still in elementary school when she graduated from college--the first in our family to go. Her choice of career was a surprise to no one, as I remember when I was a young child, she would play school in her bedroom when we visited, and her young cousins were willingly corralled as students. Later, when she had been teaching for a few years in Arlington Hts., she was courted by the principal. Everyone expected them to marry but in the end she backed out, choosing to live with her mom and adopted dad, Jack Beck. Her birth father, Bill Hauschild, had died early in her life, and Jack was Marie's loving husband, the one who entered later in her life and became her real dad.

Joanne's death came just weeks before the world shut down due to Covid, but already it had become unsafe to fly. Add jury duty for me and an incipient snowstorm in Chicago in the days after her death. I was unable to attend her modest funeral, though I plan at some point in the future to do some tending to her grave and our respective parents' graves which I think would please her very much. 

Joanne's death took a toll on Jack, whose health declined and then exposure to Covid led to his death earlier this year. At that point he had lost two wives to cancer, a sadness that must have been so difficult to bear. I had written him a letter, sent just a week before he died, telling me how much I appreciated his being in our family, though I'm not sure he either received or read it. I hope so. May his memory and Joanne's be a blessing for those of us who loved them both.

Racism Part 2: My journey to understand race

My participation in Dr. King's 1965 march into Montgomery, Alabama, was the beginning of my journey to participate in the struggle for racial justice that emerged in the 1960s. As I wrote in a blog entry about that event, I joined a group of Mundelein College students who rode a bus from Chicago to Alabama. Our goal was to join the last leg of Dr. King's historic march. It was the first time I was in a racially diverse setting and the first time I saw that I could participate in the civil rights movement of that era. Of course, I still had a long way to go in my understanding of racism, a process that continues to this day. This blog is about what happened in years afterwards and how my thinking changed.

The march experience energized both the students and the administration of my college after we returned to Chicago. In 1965 the Johnson Administration launched the Upward Bound Program, and my school was among the first to sign up. Upward Bound was based on the premise that minority and inner city students were disadvantaged because of poverty and inferior schools. Many could succeed, however, if they were given a chance to get study skills, tutoring and encouragement. Colleges could play a role in bridging the gap between them and their more privileged counterparts by offering summer programs designed to provide these things. Perhaps because of my experience with the Montgomery march, I was hired for the first two summers. I think the program reflected what I then understood the struggle to be: bridging the gap while supporting all efforts to end poverty and erase prejudice. 

I loved my work as a tutor-counselor for Upward Bound and felt that I learned much. It was emotionally powerful as well. Perhaps the strongest benefit was the chance to be a tutor for the first time and also to get to know students who were African-American, the largest category of participants. Wanting to refresh my memory about the program, I started with Wikipedia, learning that the program exists to this day. And I was even more surprised to learn that a short 30-minute documentary was made in 1968 about the program. It's called A Space to Grow, and can be viewed on YouTube. Narrated by Henry Fonda, it was nominated for an Oscar.  As I watched it this morning, I was incredibly surprised to see that I was in it! (My brief scene is at 15:08.) This is the only fragment of my 20-year-old-self that I have, never having owned a video camera. Our lives are probably over-documented today, but for those of us who came of age then, finding such a fragment is is akin to a surprise discovery on an archeological dig. I digress.

As we all know, progress is not a straight line. Dr. King came to my city, Chicago, in the late sixties as a leader in the open housing marches held there. Due to what I later came to know as "red-lining"--the practice banks and mortgage companies used to limit where black people could live--Chicago housing remained starkly segregated: a largely white North Side, and largely African-American South Side. The exploitive parts of the real estate industry reinforced that through "block-busting"--the practice of selling a house in a white area to a Black family, prompting other white families to sell cheaply to avoid the threat of collapsing property values. And then there was my father. He was not a hateful man, but he nevertheless expressed a common form of racism at the time: segregation was good for everybody because "birds of a feather flock together", and attempts to change that often result in violence or economic ruin; furthermore, individuals should have the right to sell to whoever they chose. I didn't think I believed that, but I lacked a place to discuss it (Why I didn't raise the question in class I don't know.), a support group, or a way of dealing with the fear I probably felt about joining. (Marches were peaceful, I remember--except for angry whites who tried to disrupt them.) Things had seemed more clear-cut in The South: laws preventing African-Americans from voting amid the practice of Jim Crow.

In 1968 it was time to graduate and enter the workforce as a community journalist. At my first job, as a reporter for a community newspaper chain, I wrote a series with another reporter on poverty in Chicago, and I also covered a story on the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton  by police. News stories of Hampton's death, including my own story, clearly pointed to a police massacre, but those stories led nowhere. We were still decades away from a reckoning with police violence against people of color. The miscarriage of justice then was part of my growing understanding that news reports would not, by themselves, lead to any change. Other concerns were growing at the time as well: the ongoing Vietnam War and my own fledgling understanding of feminism. It wasn't until the 1970s that my understanding went to another level.

In 1977, shortly after my move to Colorado, the TV miniseries Roots was broadcast, and like millions of others, I watched it.  Much of the research behind it, based on Alex Haley's novel of the same name, has since been challenged, but for me at the time it was my first real introduction to the history and brutality of slavery. And though I may not have it explained it as such, I began to see the links between that tragic episode of racism--along with more reading about the early wars against Indigenous people in the US-- and the issues of the day. The 70s were also a time when people challenged many of the assumptions of the 60s--that government programs like the War on Poverty and Upward Bound--could reverse intractable problems like war and racism.

But there was a new program that I thought might really help. As in Chicago, housing patterns were segregated in Denver and there were calls for change. During the early 80s, for a few years, I drove a school bus for the Denver Public Schools. I was one of many drivers hired for the district's attempts to desegregate schools through busing. Every morning and afternoon I drove white kids to largely black schools and vice versa. The aim was to boost the academic achievement of minority students, but once again real change failed to materialize. Years later, after I left my driving job, the program ended, and school choice became the focus of efforts to mitigate racial disparities in education. During those years, I had no ready arguments for what should be done, and my focus shifted to feminism.

By 1981, I had joined the volunteer collective of the Woman to Woman Feminist Book Center in Denver. In the larger feminist world, white women were being taken to task for insensitivity and neglect of issues important to women of color. (See This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.) The bookstore collective, which had some diversity but was primarily white, had disagreements about many things, and in that year, about racism. White members were challenged by Jewish women and women of color, who said they, including me, were insensitive to communication differences (e.g., spontaneity vs. rules), religious symbols (a Christmas tree in the window, for example) and insufficient materials about diversity in the movement. At a collective meeting one night, four other members besides myself were told to leave. I was devastated, but the event led to a year-long study group that the five of us started for ourselves to try to understand what had happened. 

Eventually I developed an interest in different communication patterns among cultures and then followed my decision to go back to school with the aim of becoming an English teacher for foreign students. New understandings showed me that racism was not only prejudice and discrimination but also insensitivity to cultural differences and what is now called intersectionality.

By 1990 I had graduated with an MA in Education and had left Denver to teach English in Japan. During the 20 years I spent there I saw in different ways how race, gender and economic privilege can intersect and contradict each other. The setting shifted from US issues to those in Japan. For example, how did I look at my status as a white woman hired to teach a prestige language--and also a foreigner and a non-citizen in another country? There was a lot of debate among my friends about this.

At the same time, I was also absorbed in language learning and its various aspects. One was cross-cultural communication--a rather new academic field at the time. It invited us to examine how communication involved much more than learning vocabulary. Also important were a culture's values, non-verbal practices, communication strategies and cognitive processing. More and more I began to learn how important it is to really understand how our minds work in order to understand motivation, memory and many other aspects including bias and decision-making. In the 10 years since I retired and left Japan, it's psychology and cognitive bias that have come to fascinate me. More on that in my next blog: Racism: Part 3.

Aug. 26, 1970: Don't Iron While the Strike is Hot

 Fifty years ago today, I was standing in the (then-named) Civic Center Plaza in downtown Chicago, listening to a plethora of speakers talk about women and equality and the need to end the war in Vietnam. As is so often the case with my early adult life, I have no photos--only a button from the event and a memory of the slogan, "Don't iron while the strike is hot." I've had the button in my collection for the past 50 years.

I was working at my first real job after college--as a staff reporter for the Lerner Newspapers, a  chain of community papers in Chicago. I have no clip from the event, as not working was a key idea of the strike. My boss, Terry Gorman, a young man who considered himself progressive, did not object. So off I went--on my own, as I recall, to an event that did not...leave a strong impression. I don't remember any particular speech or speaker that day. The documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry has a brief scene of the Chicago event showing hundreds filling the plaza.  I could blame my faulty memory for this limited recollection, but it's more a case of my feminism being in its nascent stage then. I had yet to join any group, and in 1970, my mind was more focused on Chicago politics and the continuing, tragic war in Vietnam. The shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University by National Guard troops had occurred just a few months earlier, and with my colleagues I tried to find stories about the war protests with a "local angle". Meanwhile, another important strike was happening that August in California: Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were striking for better wages and working conditions in the fields. My roommates and I were honoring that strike. An incredibly eventful year it was.

Although I had graduated from a women's college just two years earlier, I had not yet internalized just what discrimination and systemic sexism meant and would mean for me as a woman. But I had read Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, credited today with being one of the sparks of second wave feminism. I also knew about the stirrings of the Women's Liberation Movement all around me; I just had no personal entry point yet. The abortion I needed and almost didn't get in the pre-Roe v. Wade era--was still two years away. That experience later brought me to my first feminist collective, the Emma Goldman Women's Health Center, a free well-woman clinic on Chicago's North Side.

Thanks to digital archives, I can revisit the Women's Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, fifty years ago. An article in TIME, a couple of weeks later, called it the largest demonstration since suffrage was won in 1920.  The main event was in New York, where 20,000 women and men marched along Fifth Avenue, chanting and waving banners. TIME wrote: "In nearly half a dozen cities, women swept past headwaiters to 'liberate' all-male bars and restaurants. At the Detroit Free Press, women staffers, angered because male reporters had two washrooms while they had only one, stormed one of the men's rooms, ousted its inhabitants and occupied it for the rest of the day.

"In Manhattan leafleteers collared brokers at financial-district subway stops early in the morning; teams of women activists made the rounds of corporations whose advertising "degrades women" to present them with "Barefoot and Pregnant Awards....In the nation's capital, 1,000 women marched down Connecticut Avenue behind a "We Demand Equality" banner....Los Angeles liberationists were confined to the sidewalk during their march, which drew only 500. Seven women dressed in suffragette costumes stood a "silent vigil" for women's rights during the day at the Federal Building. Easygoing street theater and speeches marked demonstrations in other cities. More than a thousand women and men sympathizers attended a noon-hour rally in Indianapolis, where they watched guerrilla theater."

For some visual imagery of the event within the context of suffrage and other women's struggles, a 3-minute student presentation is worth a watch. And for a broader understanding of the feminist movement of the 60s and early 70s, I highly recommend the documentary, She's Beautiful When She's Angry. It's available free online. 

From these archives and my limited memory, it's clear that voting was not a demand in 1970; voting rights has been a centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement, and I remember how satisfied I felt, just months after I went to Selma, that Pres. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On Aug. 26, 1970, observance of the suffrage anniversary was an entry to a new, second-wave women's movement. In the following 20 years the concept of equality was taken to every field: business, health, politics, literature, the arts, many more. And since then, we've seen third and fourth wave feminism come into being. The latter, according to a Wiki, began around 2012, focusing on empowerment of women and intersectionality, the interconnections of categories such as race, class and gender.

And now on Women's Equality Day 2020, a century after the 19th Amendment was ratified, voting is once again center stage in the struggle for justice and equality. Voter suppression is evident as the current occupant of the White House tries to manipulate his way to a second term. Perhaps we could argue we're in a fifth wave of feminism, which will challenge us to help make all of the gains of the past century a living reality for all and protect the gains we once thought we had won for good--reproductive rights being at the top of the list.

A little more than two months away from the Nov. 3 election, in the middle of a pandemic, I have no plans to protest in person. But I'll be phone banking and writing letters for the Democratic ticket, making sure my ballot is in on time.  To quote suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, "To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves."

Montgomery, Alabama, 1965: reflections on my first protest march

It's been more than a half century--a fact that still startles me--since I took an overnight bus trip with a group of Catholic nuns, lay teachers and students to join the last leg of the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The late John Lewis, a very young man, was there with Dr. King and the march leadership, though I never saw or heard him. His death and funeral service this week brought back this time to me, so writing this is a way of reliving and reflecting on these experiences.

I was 18 years old, a freshman at Mundelein College in Chicago in the fall of 1964, a rather naive young woman who had never attended a Catholic school before. I was surprised to learn almost immediately that nuns and students were planning to join the march the following spring and plans were already underway. I knew immediately that I wanted to join it. Did I really understand much of what was at stake? I like to think so, though my understanding must have come from news reports of the growing Civil Rights movement in the early 60s: the fact that freedom fighters were working for basic human rights, that many Negroes (the word we used then) could not vote, that change was underway. And there was a book: John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. Griffin, a Texas journalist and deeply religious man, had darkened his skin (with drugs and sun lamp treatments) so that he could tour the South and experience it as a Black man. The book was published in 1961 when I was in high school. I remember reading it, surprised and saddened by his account of racial injustices in the deep South.

For my trip to Alabama, all that was needed was $20 for the overnight Trailways bus trip to and from Alabama--and parental permission. The latter was surprisingly hard to get. Both of my parents were strongly opposed, being more aware than I was of the dangers involved. I persisted in my attempts to get them to sign--showing defiance for the first time in my teen life--and finally they relented. Perhaps they were mollified by the fact that the trip was sponsored by the Catholic Interracial Council, and a number of nuns would be on the bus with us. Mom and Dad would not pay, however, so I got a part-time job typing a textbook draft for a nun, and was ready to go when the time came the following March.

It may seem incredible today to say that I have no picture of myself from that event--no pictures at all. I didn't have a camera--they were large bulky things in those days. However, some photos existed from our group (taken by one of the nuns), including this one now in the Loyola University archives. I am not in it (Where was I?) But other classmates were. 

Actually, there is one photo of me which appeared in the college newspaper, The Skyscraper, a month later. You might not recognize me, however. I occasionally worked as a hair model, and had dyed my hair black the previous week.

I have no photos of the 6 religious faculty who joined us on the trip. They were members of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs), and they wore a habit identical to the one in the photo below.  This BVM, Sister Leoline of Kansas City, was photographed wearing an orange vest showing she was one of the original marchers who had walked the entire 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery.

Lacking photos,  I took notes--fortunately!-- as I was a reporter for The Skyscraper. The stories we published then are an invaluable memory aid these many years later. 

I can confidently tell you that we left one cold March afternoon from Chicago, arriving 20 hours and 800 miles later. "Welcome to Montgomery, "Cradle of the Confederacy" we saw on a Highway 80 billboard. We knew there would be tensions if not danger: angry locals and members of the Alabama National Guard who would line the route of the march the next day. But first, we'd gather for a briefing on safety and later a rally. As Brenda, my co-reporter, and I wrote, "Drive, warmth and easygoing humor" greeted us when we went to the St. Jude campground on the outskirts of Montgomery. Our bus driver left, to stay safely outside the town and to park the bus in a safer, less open spot.

It was humid and hot, as we ate picnic-style on the grounds and were later treated to a fried chicken dinner by a local resident. Other volunteers fed marchers and offered encouragement.  "Late in the afternoon", we wrote in our news story, "residents and visitors began pouring into the field and taking places in front of the makeshift stage....The dark field, lighted only by spotlights and the repeated flash of photographers' cameras, revealed a standing crowd of thousands. Dozens clung to the trees overshadowing the stage." By 9 pm., Harry Belafonte, the host of the rally, welcomed other entertainers: Nina Simone, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Dick Gregory, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennet and Shelley Winters. Would that I would have had 21st century technology to record the event!

Of course,  the rally included speeches: Dr. Ralph Bunch, UN undersecretary for political affairs, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King's top aide. Dr. Abernathy urged us "to assemble at this same spot tomorrow and join the greatest march ever held...and when it takes place, Alabama will never be the same." Prophetic words, definitely.

The march began the next morning with ranks of marchers, six deep, and marshals yelling, ."Let's have a man on the outside", as they ran along the line. Those were pre-feminist times, and that didn't phase me then. No one near us, male or female, was forced to fend off an attack, as we moved forward singing and chanting. Songs are the lifeblood of any movement and several are still alive in memory: "This Little Light of Mine", "I'm on my Way to Freedom Land,""We Shall Overcome".Another popular marching song, "Can't turn me around" is in this 3-minute YouTube video, which also includes march scenes, words by Dr King, and commentary by Harry Belafonte.

In our campus newspaper story, we wrote, "During three-fourths of the trek, which cut through a Negro section of the city, onlookers cheered and joined in singing the freedom chants. Others watched expressionless. Several offered water to the marchers. An old Negro woman shouted that it was the greatest day she had ever seen." I felt a sense of exhilaration that I had not felt before, and a sense of gratitude that I could be there for this amazing event, like nothing I had ever experienced.

"Turning onto the downtown section a different mood confronted the marchers. Quiet heckling from a few white observers was emphasized by a large sign on one store showing Martin Luther King Jr. supposedly at a Communist training school. Confederate flags waved by bystanders, worn by some troopers and flown on top of the Capitol building itself seemed to indicate the real feeling behind the civil rights opposition."

As we reached the Capitol we were urged to sit down and rest, and the four-hour meeting opened with the movement classic, "We Shall Overcome".  The crowd raised American flags to the National Anthem led by Mrs. King. The optimistic tone of the previous night's speeches continued continued through the hours. One of the initial speakers declared, "This is a revolution that won't fire a shot....Our aim is to love the hell out of the State of Alabama with all the power of our bodies and souls." Other speakers spoke to how this march was only a beginning. Urging a continuation of the voting rights struggle in the South, Dr. King stressed that the "aim of the movement is to seek a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience." The struggle won't be smooth but it will succeed, he told us, "because no lie can live forever."

The event ended with another chorus of "We Shall Overcome" as my classmates and I made our way to 

our bus which had returned to pick us up. A day later we arrived home.

And then I went back to school for another three years, and the effects of the march continued to play out in my life then--and then in ways hidden or not, over the coming decades. Part 2 of this story to come.

 

Reflections on joining a Black Lives Matter protest

It’s been six weeks since I dipped my toe into the new protest movement centered around Black Lives Matter and long-standing abuses of police power. Nightly protests erupted around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death via a nearly 9-minute chokehold—an image that went around the world—and people took to the streets to protest. I was both surprised and excited by this—surprised that the protests didn’t go the way of previous protests against police violence: a few nights of localized protest followed by promises of better police training and then silence. This time the protests didn’t stop, and the reporting of them included investigations of just why it’s so difficult for truth and justice to emerge. 

Widespread use of cell phone cameras had given lie to police reports of civilian deaths at officers’ hands, and examinations of police unions and court decisions showed just how deep and systemic the problem was. Hence the excitement—we are at the beginning of a new movement, much like the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, a movement that will really change things—though exactly how is still unknown.

What stopped me from joining the Denver protests earlier was the pandemic. As an old person, I'm in a high risk group, and that fact ruled out joining large groups of people, many if not most without masks or ability to keep social distance. But by Sunday, June 6, an opportunity arose. Students in the Denver Public School system had organized a march for themselves, parents and staff from the downtown Civic Center to the Martin Luther King statue in City Park. The Facebook event notice requested social distancing and masks. 

As I live across the street from City Park, I reasoned that I could join safely. I left home with water, my mask, sun hat--and the retro T-shirt I wore: a souvenir of a 1980 march against violence against women. I felt the image was appropriate--and the message, while not contemporary, was certainly relevant. No one commented on my shirt--not surprising, as I didn't communicate with too many of my fellow protesters, but it was also strange to realize that more than half of the crowd had not been born when that event took place.

My plan was this: I would stand near the entrance to the park, and if it felt safe to join, I would do so for the final part of the march. That was exactly what happened. I joined in, waiting for a fairly large gap in the line. Following are two photos and my memories from that event.

Approaching City Park from The Esplanade

Waiting for the march to enter the Esplanade from Colfax Avenue, I stood in the shade. A mom and her kids were some distance away, and I asked permission to take their picture. There were so many others like them in the crowd that day, and I hoped these very young children would carry a memory and history of participation into their own young adulthood at least a decade away.

Once in the park, we gathered at the statue. We began with 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence, kneeling on one knee on the park grass. I had not realized just how long that period of time felt, and I thought of George Floyd, how frightened and hurting he must have felt. We stood up, as speakers for the rally organized for speeches. I walked away, wishing to minimize my time in a crowd, even though I was masked the whole time. For awhile I sat on the grass, watching the rally and other participants as they sat or walked toward the park exit. One thing I noted was the complexion of the crowd. Nearly everyone was white or light-skinned--unlike the more diverse nighttime crowds I had seen in the media. That observation puzzled and also pleased me: white folks were making this movement part of their lives, and that meant they were taking racism seriously. 

Since that afternoon, there have been many kinds of protests across the country and in other countries—in memory of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery (shot while jogging in Georgia), Breonna Taylor, (shot when Louisville KY police mistakenly force-entered her home) Elijah McClain (a young unarmed man who died at police hands in Aurora CO ). Mostly they have been peaceful, though some have not been; social media posts have shown police more than protesters acting without restraint. As I write this, the most troubling confrontations are on the streets of Portland, where federal troops ordered by Trump to” restore law and order “have alarmed the nation and actually galvanized protesters to unite and respond. Most moving for me was the Wall of Moms, a group of mothers who have appeared for a few evenings now, with linked arms and chants for peace and an end to federal occupation. More on the  Wall of Moms here.

Most encouraging also has been legislative follow-up. Leslie Herod, Colorado State Representative in my district, sponsored the successful Law Enforcement Integrity Act  shortly after protests began. The law, among other things, abolishes chokeholds, mandates police body cameras, has provisions for decertifying bad police, and calls for officers to intervene is one is using inappropriate force. Herod says it couldn’t have happened without protests creating the momentum for political changes. Though this movement is different in many ways from the social movements I participated in earlier in life (civil rights, Vietnam, feminism), they have one thing in common: protests and legislative change go hand in hand.

Journal of a Plague Year: My life on Zoom

It seems like I'm just as busy as I used to be. As I write, Colorado's "Safer in Place" guidelines are still official policy, and I'm doing just that: staying home, for the most part. A few businesses have been allowed to reopen, but my only interactions so far are with grocery stores. Yet, I have a schedule, not unlike the one I had before: Laughter Yoga at noon on Mondays, singing events on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, and weekly chats with friends. For the moment, I'm not counting other screen events, such as Skype or FaceTime, equally valuable, but limited to me and one other at a time. Then there's the amazing variety of free cultural events available through a screen, subject for another day.

Naomi Fry writes about how quickly the Zoom phenomenon has entered our lives in Embracing the Chaotic Side of Zoom (The New Yorker, April 20). You can read it here. The article focuses on the quirky, embarrassing or funny things we learn by chance during a zoom call: someone's cat crossing a room, the sounds of someone peeing, for example. Human connections in a two-dimensional world. I'd agree, adding the slightly voyeuristic pleasure of seeing people in their living spaces, places I may never have seen when we met in real-life rooms or meetings. 

I'm almost a bit ashamed to say how much I like Zoom. Sometimes it's hard to admit screen contact is not necessarily inferior to attending an in-person event.  I realized some time ago that I just don't like driving much anymore. How nice to just sit down at my laptop and see my friends' faces in front of me. No parking issues, driving in bad weather or Denver rush hour traffic. One of my hopes for the future new-normal is that more work will be done remotely, freeing space for drivers who actually need to get somewhere. As for Zoom replacing the human touch, I think I suffer less than others--others who are used to a lot of touch. First, I'm a senior who's been living alone for some time, and second, I've spent much, much time in environments with minimal touching. For example, my 20 years in Japan, where bowing and nods were far more common than hugs and handshakes. 

(Illustration from The New Yorker)

While Zoom has allowed me to stay in touch with much-loved friends and activities, it's also opened new activities to me. One of them is Voice Circle Colorado (you can find them on Facebook), an improvisational singing group that used to meet in West Denver. I had thought of joining them, but as I live across town and dislike evening drives, I usually put that in my some-other-time mental file. With Zoom now, on Tuesdays and Fridays, I join whoever's there, as the group organizer, Roy Willey, leads us in song or meditative chanting. Usually we have our microphones off, so there's no shyness about the sounds we're making or not making. 

Zoom is not really useful for singing together due to technical distortions, though for awhile, my choral group, Sage Singers, tried. That was before we fully came to terms with the fact that performances are on hold for the foreseeable future. Lately, however, we've been practicing a song that we hope to perform in one of those viral online song collages that are appearing on social media. Like Voice Circle, we practice with mikes off. Kevin, our wonderful and energetic director, gives us vocal tips and practice suggestions during our Sunday afternoon Zoom sessions. Equally valuable for me is the time we spend getting to know each other. We check in on how things are going, and also take turns sharing stories. Recently "tell us something we don't know about you" has been our ending activity--more valuable perhaps that the short time we used to have on snack breaks between rehearsal segments. Now, rather than having a brief chat with people I know somewhat, I'm learning more about people I knew less well or not at all.

Another Zoom benefit is that participants can join from anywhere. My laughter club here in Denver has been meeting at noon every Monday in a 24-hour laughter Zoom room, made available by Dave Berman (See Daily Laughers on Facebook. Dave seldom meets us there, as he lives in Australia. When we meet at noon, it's 4:30 a.m. in Melbourne. His hosted sessions come twice-daily, and I've occasionally joined the one at 5:30 pm my time.) My laughter club's sessions now include members of the Taos laughter club, thanks to Meredee and Davey, who host that club. They are the founding parents of our club, but we lost the chance to hear their weekly laughter last year when they moved to New Mexico. Such a pleasure to be together again--along with other laughing friends who choose to join us.

I also find that I'm having more regular connections with my friends in OLOC, a group for lesbians over 60. Every month we used to meet for lunch, social talk, and a presentation on some relevant topic, gathering in a restaurant or community center, mostly north of Denver. Often I would miss due to weather, driving reluctance or feeling a bit under-the-weather. Zoom removes those barriers for me. It may do so for others as well and may also allow us to expand group membership beyond the Boulder/Denver metropolitan area. Last weekend, when we met on Zoom, part of our agenda was a memorial service for Carmah Lawlor, one of our oldest members who died earlier this year. The service included a brief tribute followed by remembrances of Carmah's life and memories we have of her.

I've found that Zoom doesn't work well for other things, though. Exercise for one. There are many exercise classes online now, but I find a screen distracting and prefer to do my own thing. Included in that is dancing. Square dance in squares of eight dancers is impossible, of course, though The Rainbeaus have weekly chat sessions now on Zoom. For me other types of dancing are problematic too.  I have access to line dance lessons on Facebook, but they don't work well for me on a screen. Sadly, as I used to admire watching line dancers at the monthly women's dance at the Avalon Ballroom in Boulder and wanted to give lessons a try. Perhaps I'll try the online ones again when it gets too hot to be outside much, as one of my friends promises herself.

For me and so many others these days, Zoom has been a boon in so many ways--including ways I haven't personally experienced yet. Kids' birthday parties, work conferences, visits with quarantined relatives, medical teleconferencing, even dates. (In the latter case, Zoom seems to be a poor substitute for the real thing. For example, one young woman mentioned in Naomi Fry's article told how strange it felt to be on a date with a new love interest while she was in her childhood bedroom.)For most of us with Zoom capability, the opportunities will be broad enough to keep us Zoom-connected sometimes even after social distancing ends. Already news articles are talking about how these changes are expected to remain a part of our lives. 

Meanwhile, readers, enjoy wherever zooming takes you--or whatever activity you enjoy more.