My first horse auction turned into a lifesaver in a time of painful and life-changing events.
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A church door prize quilt from the 1950s gets a new life in the 1990s.
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The artist in her studio,  Goshen,  CT

Danielle Mailer,  Artist Extraordinaire

I love art but I don’t think of myself as a real collector,  although I do have three Danielle Mailers!

Several years ago we were invited to an auction fundraiser by our friend H.  At the time he was director of Wellspring,  a residential treatment center in Connecticut for teens and young adults with addictions and other mental health issues.    Of course we were delighted to go and were impressed by the testimonies given by young people who’d been helped by the program.

And of course we bid on many of the items being auctioned,  among them a work by a local Connecticut artist named Danielle Mailer.   We went home with her print entitled  Downward Dog,  a representation of a woman in a yoga pose,  but with a lyrical and fanciful touch.  The more I looked at it,  the more I loved Mailer’s bright pallet,  and her expressionistic style.

A year later we went to the same fundraiser and came home with another Mailer print  –  as a local resident the artist is very generous in donating her work to our friend’s center.   That print the artist had entitled The Other Side of Fifty,  which by then I surely was!

And by then we had also seen the wonderfully colorful 186’ X 22’ mural entitled Fish Tales painted by Mailer on a wall facing the Naugatuck River in Torrington,  our Connecticut town.   The artist had been granted funds to create a mural to celebrate the return of many fish species to the once polluted river.

And recently we spent a delightful afternoon visiting  the artist in her studio,  and of course bought another work entitled Bella in the Tree.   Bella is the artist’s daughter we learned,  and although we didn’t meet her,  the red chair she posed in was at the studio.   And of course the black cat in the print made it irresistible to us cat-lovers.

We’re thankful we went to that first auction,  bid on a painting that caught our eye,  eventually bought two more,  and finally met Danielle Mailer,  artist extraordinaire!

– Dana Susan Lehrman

In a Basket Raffle, you deposit your raffle tickets only in the baskets of the items you want to win.
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... my name was called, the first and last time I won this organization's raffle. The people at the table were delighted I won ...
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Who would spend $1,000 on a serving for four of plastic dishes and mugs adorned with a photo of the class guinea pig, Buster?
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Dangerous!

I read banned books – to protest their banning of course,  but also because they’re invariably such good reads!

As you may know,  countless modern classics have been banned or challenged at one time or another,  among them The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  As I Lay Dying,  Beloved,  The Catcher in the Rye,  The Color Purple,  The Good Earth,  The Grapes of Wrath,  The Great Gatsby,  The Handmaid’s Tale,  Heart of Darkness,  Lady Chatterley’s Lover,  Lolita,  Lord of the Flies,  Naked Lunch,  1984,  Of Mice and Men,  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  The Satanic Verses,  To Kill a Mockingbird, Tropic of Cancer,  The Unbearable Lightness of Being,  and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And of course the book often called the greatest novel of the 20th century was banned,  deemed pornographic,  and the subject of a famous 1921 censorship trial –  James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses.   (See  My Love Affair with James Joyce)

Translated into more than 20 languages,  Ulysses has spawned thousands of critical studies,  college courses,  doctoral theses,  workshops,  panel discussions,  readings,  literary celebrations,   and stage and screen adaptions.

In a fascinating work entitled The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses,  Harvard professor Kevin Birmingham discusses the writing,  legal fights,  and eventual publication of that amazing and revolutionary novel.

But are banned books – like Ulysses – really dangerous?   I guess you’ll just have to read them yourself and decide!

– Dana Susan Lehrman

This is not my story. It is the story of my friend and longtime neighbor, “L”. Last year L approached me to ask for my help in documenting her story of escape and struggle. A refugee’s story.

In 1959, at age nine, L and her parents fled Castro’s Cuba. It is a story I never knew and, to my shame, had never sought to know. Until now.

In the first few years of Castro’s regime the government was happy to let the professional classes leave. Families that sensed the danger, that were prepared to relinquish the only lives they had known for an uncertain future, would first be visited by a government official. Said official would make a detailed inventory of all their household goods. If on the day of a family’s departure even the smallest item were to be found missing, their visas would be revoked. (Indeed, in some cases one’s colleagues, neighbors and/or employees would prove to have been informants.) Their homes, their businesses, their money now belonged to the Cuban government.

But earliest on, leaving demanded total secrecy. And so L.’s parents made their plan. They would fly out of Havana on the premise that L’s father was going to a conference in the U.S. Their little girl would not be told, for fear she might unknowingly reveal these details to classmates.

To support their story they carried just two suitcases onto the plane. The only things L’s mother took with her were family pictures and a plaster statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. These most valued possessions would stand in a place of honor in their home the rest of her days.

Within 24 hours of their departure the government had sealed off their house.

Once in the U.S., Cuban men and women like L’s parents, who had known a life of security and belonging, now scrambled to secure humble, hard work to survive in a new culture. Their English was minimal. L.’s father, who had been a dentist in Cuba, was told by the ADA he would not be allowed to practice in America. He would have to earn his degree, again. He was in his mid-forties, with nothing. It was impossible.

What came next is just too much to recount here. As L describes it, their early life in America was cold, lonely, harsh. For her as a child it was an abrupt and distressing adjustment. And yet when my family came to know them, they were welcoming, warm and joyful despite their straitened circumstances. Through the years I would hear the sounds of L’s father playing the plaintive Cuban music he composed for piano. I saw him painting, outside, remembered scenes of Cuban people and places. When members of the local Cuban diaspora gathered at their house I would hear the rat-a-tat-tat of Spanish, a tongue I did not understand.

Often L’s family and their friends would bring out an album full of old photos of their relatives still in Cuba and of their former town and activities. I think that at first they thought they might be able to return. Over the decades their hope dimmed. They were Americans now.

If you would like to know more about the Cuban refugees, I would recommend the memoir of Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana. Eire is a professor at Yale. He was one of the 14,000 Cuban children aged six to eighteen who were clandestinely airlifted, without their parents, out of Cuba from 1960 to 1962. The story of his life after “Operation Pedro Pan” is heart-wrenching and, ultimately, triumphant.

L tells me now of the life they left behind, the life that should have been hers but was not. The turquoise sea, the brilliant flowers, the exotic fauna, the wafting winds, the warmth of her lost homeland.

In the Catholic tradition, I tell her, perhaps her family’s experience was meant to be. Perhaps it was the occasion of what would be their extraordinary faith and gratitude, so inspirational to others, and of her many contributions to students in her career as a teacher.

But surely I presume. For who among us can imagine this fate for ourselves, the fate of the refugee?

The plan was to recruit male volunteers to be “sold”, for a term of some hours, at a “slave auction”.  It was 1967, in the middle of civil rights protests.
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