Usually I write the story first and then look for a song for the title. This time I picked the song first. It is the third week in January, the week between Martin Luther King’s birthday and the ending of the Obama Administration. I feel like it is the last week before our country descends into hell. I am trying very hard to believe we will be able to come back out of it, to overcome, not just some day but before the damage is irremediable.

I first learned the song We Shall Overcome when I went to Lincoln Farm Work Camp as a teenager. We learned all the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and sang them in multi-part harmony. We even performed an oratorio about the I Have A Dream speech, which I can still sing somewhat fifty-plus years later. (For more about this wonderful camp, see my story Summer Memories.) The world was changing for the better. The movement was making great strides, it seemed, and discrimination would soon be a thing of the past. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had room for everyone.

By the time I got to college, the antiwar movement had replaced civil rights as the main focus of protest, at least in my world. When we went on strike in the spring of ’69, we started out with 6 demands, 3 related to getting ROTC off campus, and 3 related to stopping Harvard’s expansion into working class neighborhoods. When the black students joined us, we added a 7th demand, for the creation of an Afro-American Studies department. I do believe that all these demands were met. This led me to think that we really could overcome. Power to the people! Big bad Harvard University actually listened to us.

Even Richard Nixon, the President who seemed the personification of evil, was not unaffected by protesters. He finally brought all the US troops home from Vietnam as a result of the years of protest. He resigned from the presidency to avoid being impeached after Watergate. Funny to think that Nixon seemed like the worst thing that could happen, and now he looks benign compared to the incoming President.

So much time has passed since the Sixties and Seventies, so many battles that we thought we had won. Now, terrifyingly, it is all coming undone.

We are in the throes of a desperate struggle. African-Americans, who had made so much progress, who had even seen one of their own elected President, are losing ground at breakneck speed. Women are also in dire straits. We thought we too were going to elect one of our own, and then this tragedy struck. Now the Republicans intend to take away our right to safe and legal abortions,which we have had since 1973. In many states, between defunding Planned Parenthood and dismantling the Affordable Care Act, they will take away the right to any decent healthcare at all. Blatant discrimination and persecution against the LGBTQ community, Muslims, and of course Jews has been occurring ever since the election. Every day another new horror is revealed.

This Saturday I will join with millions of other women, and the men who support our cause, in the Women’s March, which is taking place all over the country. I have my sweatshirt and I am ready. In some sense it will feel good to be marching again, but not so good to contemplate the uphill battle we are facing. I have to keep singing it to convince myself.

“Deep in my heart, I do believe, that we shall overcome some day.”

 

I guess this is just getting back to the story of me being a 32 year old baby again I had to learn everything all over how to walk how to write left-handed after being right-handed for 32 years,,, my last 10 days at the civilian hospital I was at Brigham Women’s General where my vertebrae were refused together I had a throat trach that was removed from my throat good chance of damage vocabulary days after it was removed and supposed to be cleaned thoroughly was not had gangrene in my throat smells like something dead crawled up my nose real nasty before I got someone’s attention that something didn’t smell right anyway it was tooken care of and clean properly,parts if neck around the hole nothing but dead rotten flesh or was taken care of Before I was shipped off to a VA Medical rehab hospital in West Roxbury Massachusetts,,,  the title was WEST Roxbury VA Medical Center   …. Before leaving and in the ambulance I had my girlfriend meet me there so before they loaded me I could take that first drag of a cigarette she met me the drivers let her give me some cigarettes I remember taking two Puffs before I was being wheeled back in I thought to the same Hospital but it wasn’t I had been out for 45 minutes the cigarette messed me up bad my stay at this Hospital was a blessing to myself and to all the other patients that came after me because I was a wake up was told they hadn’t had a patient like me in years I was labeled a incomplete quad which meant I had feelings and Sensations even though my neck was broke I pinched my spinal cord between C6 and C7 giving me a two and a half inch screws on my spinal cord the doctors couldn’t exactly say which passageways would heal well today 2017 I have pushed myself and never giving up hope my strength and faith towards the man that died for my sins I got Road up close to 27 times because of my mouth but each time only thing that was recorded was my mouth my statements not that there was a reason behind each outburst I had to sit in a boardroom with the president of the hospital my nurse my lawyer physical therapy occupational therapist kinesiotherapist to decide whether or not to be kicked out of the hospital but once the president heard my reasons for some of the right Up’s he tore up the paperwork and wrote new rules and regulations benefiting patients like me and other patience I was at this hospital for Mom clothes for a year before I was released at my hundred percent that the hospital could do for me I came back and forth for months for therapy before heading out on my own into the world as a totally physically different person and let me tell ya folks, it’s been somewhat of a journey I falling forward busting my head totaling 50 or more stitches 1 fall backwards with a total of 9 stitches to the base my neck and skull and one more car accident total land falling asleep at the wheel going to pick up my mother from the hospital came out of it with no scratches I read in the Bible anger could be used in a good way and it did for me it was only thing that fueled me to better my circumstances and get me out of the position I was in I was going to be getting everything my savior was giving me back and I push for every service that they were giving I left the hospital label to be bedridden not my world soon as I got to the door of my truck I knew was parked in the yard I knew nothing could hold me back except for my savior I have seen life Inn so many eyes from the nastiest places on the street neighborhoods drug infested Street to the most luxurious house you could ever imagine since 2000 I haven’t stopped traveling looking for me looking for my reason my purpose !

The thrill of the hunt, the lure of the new. No, I’m talking about shopping.
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Hello again readers  and again my first attempt to try to write, which I can’t,because I’m partially paralyzed on my right side can’t use my hand move my fingers can use my arm and such, this is from an accident that occurred months after the incident of me getting out of a moving car doing 35 miles an hour like a fool ,anyway this  accident occurred at a friend’s home and property he had a 650 on and off road dirt bike which I loved to ride only thing I couldn’t kick start it it had a air leak in it somewhere my friend weighed over 200 pounds and could kick-start it easily where me it would be one out of 20 kicks was at his house doing a side job when the morning I arrived and we were drinking coffee and smoking some loud when he told me he fixed the bike found the air leak and told me it would be no problem for me to start it so I got up and did so and proceeded to ride it on a track he had through the woods when coming out of the woods in his backyard I attempted a jump which didn’t go as planned I lost control of the bike but holding on to it keeping it from hitting a tree I attempted to stay on it slowing it down which was the last thing I remember before waking up 2 weeks later paralyzed from the neck down ! The report that was given to me from my friend as I came off the hill landed my feet came off the pedals and I was riding the bike like Superman when I hit a tree causing me too fly forward over the handlebars hitting the tree as the bike hit the tree I glanced off to the right luckily the surgeon said by me not having a helmet on probably saved my life I crushed C5 and broke C6 and C7 they had to fuse my vertebrae together with three titanium 8 inch plates, the surgeon that fused my vertebrae together told my girlfriend I had a 1% chance of ever moving below my shoulders ! Could anyone ever imagining after 32 years waking up and being told you’re never going to move again below your shoulders ? Can anyone even imagine the thoughts that can run through someone’s mind as they lay there and can do nothing but think can’t talk because you have a trach in your throat can’t scream all you can do is lay there and cry 4 day after day that is all I did then 20 some days later I barely moved my left big toe and that is where my 32 year old baby experience started !

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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Do you believe ?
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