In “Slaughter House Five” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I’ve come unstuck in time”. I am not sure if that is the appropriate phrase, or if we are through the looking glass, but we are definitely not bending toward Dr. King’s moral universe this election cycle; far from it. Every day brings some new, disgusting revelation, whether it be more and more evidence that Putin ordered hackers to sway the American electorate in Trump’s favor, or that the Russians have incriminating evidence with which they can blackmail him. Do we really have our first Manchurian Candidate? Someone so totally obsessed with himself and his pettiness that he really got caught with a Soviet hooker peeing on a bed once occupied by one of the smartest, most articulate, most scandal-free leaders we have ever known? Time will tell.

Trump can’t keep his grimy little fingers off of Twitter, and last weekend chose to attack John Lewis, who had his head bashed in while he marched for civil rights. Lewis said that Trump’s presidency was illigitimate and will not attend his inauguration, yet stood with Martin Luther King, crossing the bridge in Selma to get voting rights for his people. No, MLK is twisting in his grave and the moral universe is convulsing.

I remember vividly where I was eight years on January 20th. It was snowing in Boston at noon and I was on a physical therapy table, having a twisted knee worked on. Things were running late in Washington, DC and the swearing in ceremony had not yet begun, but I cried tears of joy, knowing that W was out of office at last and a man I trusted and respected was about to be sworn in. I scurried home and spent the rest of the day curled up on my couch watching every moment of the ceremony. My older son had gone to Washington to be part of history, though he didn’t have a ticket and was on the mall, freezing his buns off.

The night of Obama’s election we had been at a party. David (living in NYC, studying at Columbia) had gone to Ohio, swing state extraordinarie. He stayed with my brother in Cincinnati, doing all he could to get people to their polling places. We left the party before 11pm to be in our own home before the polls closed in CA when the election was called. We talked to each of our children and rejoiced. David told us he was in a bar with the mayor of Cinci and the crowd went wild. It was such a good night. Two weeks ago, the sign at the front of Hebrew Union College, where my brother has taught for close to 40 years, and years earlier was ordained a rabbi, had a swastika painted on it. Trump has made that OK.

On Nov 8, 2016, my husband, not believing what he was seeing, started to bed at 11:15 EST. We got a text from David, now living in London; “I know I don’t call often enough. I love you. I’ll call tomorrow”. It was past 4 in the morning, London time and he was witnessing the Apocalypse. I stayed up two more hours, coming to bed, sure that I was witnessing the decline of the civilized world, as we knew it.

Generations of politicians have tried to pass some form of universal health care. It took Obama two years, but he did it. It isn’t perfect, but it insured 20 million more people than before. Trump isn’t even sworn in and the Republicans are dismantling the ACA, replacing it with…who knows what. I heard a woman in Kentucky, interviewed on NPR a few days after the election. Her husband has kidney failure, needs dialysis and they depend on the ACA for their insurance, but they voted for Trump because they liked what he said about bringing back jobs. She said she didn’t believe he would really do away with Obamacare. Guess what, sweetie!

A woman’s right to choose…defund Planned Parenthood, which is the only way many, many woman get their health care. Republicans don’t care about facts. Pence believes in gay conversion therapy and having funerals for aborted fetuses. We are through the looking glass. The people Trump wants as his cabinet heads are, by and large, unqualified and, in some cases, defiantly against the principles of the departments they are now supposed to manage (not to mention that many have little or no management experience).

We live in a world where facts don’t matter. “I won by a landslide”. Usually losing the popular vote by close to three million votes isn’t considered a landslide in anyone’s mind, but there was Pence, saying it on “Face the Nation” again on Sunday. Basic science is ignored. Global warming is a hoax. Vaccines cause autism. Trump and his clown side-kick, Kellyanne Conway, give “spin” a whole new meaning. If you tell a lite often enough, it becomes their truth. Where he can ignore basic ethical standards to enrich himself, “I’m not going to talk to my kids about the business for 8 years”… yeah, right. You can evidently sucker a lot of Americans, Donald, but not all of us.

So we bid a tearful farewell to the classy Obama family, who had to endure hatred, obstruction, and rose above it. They accomplished a lot and now have to see it destroyed with glee by these craven sub-humans. I shudder to think how much harm will come to this country during this devastating time. How long will it be before Trump is impeached? The mid-term elections are still two years away. Can we survive until then?

 

 

 

I’ve never been big on sin. Sin belongs to a god thing full of good, evil, and punishment, straight-jacketing people with shame, and excommunicating so many nice things. Regardless of my godless stance, at age 11, I helped myself to three temptations.

First, I sought out pictures of naked women in magazines, stolen from my biggest brother’s bureau drawer. The secrets these women held helped me to elaborate upon my first temptation — sex, albeit with myself.

Second, I stumbled upon James Dean and the hip generation of the 1950s. James Dean looked the way I wanted to look, cool, with the perfect mix of hip/tough guy hair and a casual manner that I yearned to affect.

My new hero, James Dean, drove a Porsche Spyder, the hottest racing machine ever seen by this eleven-year-old boy. And the boy’s hero died in that car, on a narrow, California road, after yielding to the temptation to drive very, very fast.

But dead or alive, James Dean and his badass Porsche Spyder interfaced with temptation #3 — fast cars.

Gazed upon by pubescent boys, fast cars become sad but workable surrogates for sex. Speed and beauty carry the beholder to temptation’s fine line — danger and ecstasy, real or imagined.

At ten, already no virgin when it came to the temptation of speed, I had convinced my old man to help me build a soap box racer. At 11, I discovered “Hot Rod” magazine, a pristine rag that celebrated our post-war rebellion via the American automobile. Nineteen twenty-seven and ‘32 Fords were tops, as was the Ford flathead V-8 packed full of goodies like steep-profiled Iskendarian crankshafts and camshafts, chrome-plated Edelbrock heads, and Stromberg dual-throat carburetors.

At 15, my buddy and I defiled a classic ’36 Chrysler we found in a barn, chopping its elegant lines, stripping it down to racing trim, and racing our fast car — we called her Serafina — on the local jalopy circuit.

I had recently read a novel about a young boy who meets Frenchy Lascalle, a displaced, sadder but wiser playboy European racing driver-turned-mechanic. Parted from his exotic career through tragic circumstances, Frenchy set out to prove to our young protagonist that a tiny red MG-TC with its agile suspension and hard-working engine could beat our hero’s bullying high school antagonist in his bull-powerful but poorly suspended ’48 Ford.

Temptation reached a tipping point. The fictitious Frenchy Lascalle and his red car lured me away from hot rods and drag strips and transported me to foreign shores where I was introduced to the Ferraris, Maseratis, Alfa Romeos, Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes of European road racing.

I learned all I could about the cars, the drivers, Fangio from Argentina, Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn from Great Britain, the wealthy Marquis de Portago, a playboy who yielded to temptation and fulfilled his own death wish in a fiery high-speed crash.

Still, I was too young to race and had begun to realize — as I became aware that life was complicated and often unjust — that racing cars and the people surrounding them weren’t doing much to make the world a better place. I turned my attention to more serious matters.

*

Fast forward two years. I had graduated high school and been accepted to college. I floated in limbo between two lives, one in the New England town behind me, the other beckoning from inside the open gates of academia.

One muggy June afternoon, shortly after my high school graduation, I was driving my mother’s VW along the sinuous New England roads between my home and Fitchburg, a mill town, where I had accumulated a college fund via my work after school and in the summers.

On the way home with my $2500 bank check, I stopped, as my mother had requested, to give the VW a lube job and a tune up at an out-of–the way garage. With nothing to do except hang, I pulled a coke out of the cooler between the gas pumps, and decided to wander.

At the far side of the garage, a long tin-roofed shed stood beneath a giant maple. The shady door yawned open, so I approached. Peering inside, I could discern a tool bench with a vise, a pegboard wall of mechanic’s tools, and boxes of auto parts.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness and there, lurking in the shadows like a jungle cat, stood a British racing green Lotus Super 7 America, crouched low to the ground, ready to pounce.

I approached the gleaming car. The Lotus was designed purely for speed. With its boxy cockpit and lanky fenders, some considered the car ugly, but its beauty lay in its design and engineering, and with the lean pragmatism of its lines.

After racing my mother’s VW over the New England roads, I ached to feel what it would be like to settle into the drivers’ seat of this small, but aggressive machine and go very fast… and very loud. In two months I would be 18, old enough to race.

I walked to the Lotus and stood over it, shoulders shrugged, hands stuffed in my jeans pockets. I noticed a hand-lettered card tossed onto the narrow passenger’s seat.

FOR SALE

$2500

My own check lay carefully folded in my shirt pocket, Despite my college acceptance, I had no idea where my life was heading while, at my knees crouched a machine at the starting line of a track often dreamt about but not yet followed. My mind overheated like a Ferrari with a broken thermostat and my heart continued to pound.

I walked out into the sunlight to gain perspective. The entire scene around the garage reeked of the ordinary, from faded gas pumps to the green-leafed parasol overhead, to the clanks and whirrs of the mechanics. Was I about going to put one foot in front of another and trudge off to four more years of school? Or would I make this purchase, right here, right now, before I weakened?

Gingerly, afraid of my own footsteps, I tiptoed inside and stood once again in the aura of the Lotus.

“VW’s ready, kid.”

I spun around. The owner stood in the doorway, wiping the grease off his hands with a wad of waste.

I stood there, staring down, not wanting to break out of the spell cast by the crouching race car.

“You like her?” the owner asked.

“That car looks really fast,” I whispered.

“Wanna buy her?” he asked. “The little woman won’t let me race no more. Got a kid now.”

I could hear the crickets outside, their manic rhythms moving in and out of synch. My eyes blurred and I walked past the mechanic into the sunlight and my mother’s VW.

“How much?” I asked.

“What, for the Lotus?”

“No,” I said. “For the lube job on the VW.”

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Do You Believe ?
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I LOVE chocolate – fudge cake, fudge, frosting, M&Ms, 3 Musketeer Bars. You name it. Each has a particular association for me.

As a youngster, my family vacationed in Charlevoix, MI, a lovely resort spot on Lake Michigan. In their downtown was a fudge shop named Murdick’s. We would wander over, watch them make the fudge and buy some to take back to our room in the guest house; always chocolate for Dad and me, butterscotch for my mother. She didn’t like chocolate. I knew there was something wrong with her. Years later we discovered the same Murdick’s fudge shop on Martha’s Vineyard. I enquired. The manager confirmed that it was, indeed, the same. The store in Northern Michigan had been run by two brothers who had a falling out, so one came to our little island in the Atlantic Ocean to start his own shop. We can now buy the same velvety delicious fudge from my youth on our vacation island.

In college, the best item on the menu at the Student Union was the fudge cake. Since I was always dieting, I got it for lunch with skim milk to save calories. One must drink milk with chocolate cake. It’s in the rule book. My senior year, once Dan and I were serious, we bought a little black and white TV for my dorm room and Betty Crocker chocolate frosting to eat while watching TV. We had two spoons and just ate right out of the can; we could not devour the entire can in one sitting. I had a little fridge in the dorm room too. Looking back, it is amazing that I maintained my weight at 90 pounds.

Once married, we lived in a roach-infested apartment in Waltham, MA across from a supermarket. On Sunday mornings, Dan ran across the street to get the Sunday paper and a 3 Musketeer bar for each of us which we would savor as we read the paper. Good times.

Birthday cakes, wedding cake…always chocolate. None of this white cake. And what is Red Velvet? I wore a red velvet dress on my 10th birthday, but that is certainly not an allowable flavor for cake!

Four and half years ago, as I approached my 60th birthday, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. Despite my sweet tooth, I had always been slim, but time had caught up with me and I didn’t like the profile of my body that looked back that day, so that summer, I worked with a trainer on exercise and diet. I became a gym rat and gave up my beloved sugar. I lost 18 pounds and looked great. Chocolate was only for very special occasions. But after four long years, I grew bored and motivation lagged. My husband always has sweets around the house. I can usually avoid the ice cream, but lately, I’ve been dipping into the M&Ms and, though I am in the gym six days a week, I see the damage the sugar is doing. So, it is back to the spartan eating for me. So long chocolate. I still love you, but I love a slender body more.