"continue" by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou wrote this poem as a birthday gift. When you wish someone happy birthday, you are marking another year, another trip around the sun, and wishing that the next orbit will be filled with health and happiness and goodness. It rings true to me as a way to ponder the meaning of our next trip around the sun that begins today, the New Year of our calendars rather than our birth day.

“continue” 

      – by Maya Angelou

On the day of your birth

The Creator filled countless storehouses and

stockings

With rich ointments

Luscious tapestries

And antique coins of incredible value

Jewels worthy of a queen’s dowry

They were set aside for your use

Alone

Armed with faith and hope

And without knowing of the wealth which awaited

You broke through dense walls

of poverty

And loosed the chains of ignorance which

threatened to cripple you so that you

could walk

A Free Woman

Into a world which needed you

My wish for you

Is that you continue

Continue

To be who and how you are

To astonish a mean world

With your acts of kindness

Continue

To allow humor to lighten the burden

of your tender heart

Continue

In a society dark with cruelty

To let the people hear the grandeur

Of God in the peals of your laughter

Continue

To let your eloquence

Elevate the people to heights

They had only imagined

Continue

To remind the people that

Each is as good as the other

And that no one is beneath

Nor above you

Continue

To remember your own young years

And look with favor upon the lost

And the least and the lonely

Continue

To put the mantel of your protection

Around the bodies of

The young and defenseless

Continue

To take the hand of the despised

And diseased and walk proudly with them

In the high street

Some might see you and

Be encouraged to do likewise

Continue

To plant a public kiss of concern

On the cheek of the sick

And the aged and infirm

And count that as a

Natural action to be expected

Continue

To let gratitude be the pillow

Upon which you kneel to

Say your nightly prayer

And let faith be the bridge

You build to overcome evil

And welcome good

Continue

To ignore no vision

Which comes to enlarge your range

And increase your spirit

Continue

To dare to love deeply

And risk everything

For the good thing

Continue

To float

Happily in the sea of infinite substance

Which set aside riches for you

Before you had a name

Continue

And by doing so

You and your work

Will be able to continue

Eternally

Moon and stars

One thing about being old is that every once in a while you’ll think of some trivial thing that you haven’t thought of in forever, something that existed or a way people used to do a thing, something that is S-O-O-O different from how things are now that you laugh to yourself and think, “If I told a young person that that’s how this thing was back then, they wouldn’t believe me.”

And usually, that thought’s the end of that, because it really isn’t important and there’s really no reason to mention it to anyone. But I always want to anyway, so here’s one: Tonight I went out for a walk when sunset was just an orange glow along the horizon and just above it in the cloudless sky was the

moon and a star (Venus actually, I’m sure), but I thought “moon and star” because it reminded me of one of those things I hadn’t thought of in years . . .

In the early 70’s when I was in my early 20’s, I was walking along the drag among the artists and craftspeople, stopping here and there to admire their work, and some earrings caught my eye. They were very tiny gold studs, a pair of crescent moons and next to them, a pair of stars.

And I asked the jewelry maker, “Could I buy one moon and one star?” At first she said no. What would she do with the mismatched leftovers? No one would want them.

Because – this is the part no  one under the age of about 60 would believe – back then, people only wore two earrings that were the same, one in each ear. And those people were always women (unless you were a pirate, I guess).

Anyway, I finally talked her into it. I couldn’t afford to buy them both. They were gold! She decided that she could make one more star and one more moon and have her two matching pairs to sell again.

So I put them in my ears and pretty much kept them there except for an occasional alcohol rinse for the next ten years or so.

Now what makes it really something that most people younger than I am would find hard to believe is the way other people reacted to them. I’d be talking to someone I’d just met and at some point, nine time out of ten, they’d just stop talking and stare . . . And I’d stare back, puzzled (because I always forgot) . . . until they said, in a shocked tone, “Your earrings. They’re not the same. . .”

Well, yes, that was exactly the point, besides the fact that a gold star and a gold moon is pretty. One major point of being a hippy was to break rules that made no sense whenever possible.

For some of those rules, it was very, very important to break them, like a rule that says you must support a war against people on the other side of the world who pose no threat to you or a rule that says you must hate and fear gay people.

But some of the rules were just silly, like only women (and male pirates?) can wear earrings and if you are female you have to wear two and only two earrings, one in each ear and they must be the same.

Of course, men who had hair half way down their back or in braids or a ponytail weren’t going to abide by a dumb rule that said only pirate men could wear earrings, so led by gay guys (who were themselves increasingly breaking the rule that made no sense about hiding who they were in the closet), men started wearing one earring. Having only one made it masculine, you see. And I heard, though I had no idea if this was true or if true, if it was rigidly enforced, that which ear your one earring was in announced whether or not you were gay or straight.

And eventually, there were women and men who wore earrings that didn’t match and more than one in an ear, and nose rings and eyebrow rings and various other similar things and then there came the tattoos, and it’s been like that for so long that that’s why I say, you might have to be over 60 to remember a time when a person would find a woman wearing earrings that didn’t match so shocking that it would leave them speechless, at least for a few moments.

As I said, I wore the moon in one ear and the star in the other for many years and it felt like part of my identity in the way I’m sure many people feel about their tattoos today.

Terry, who later became the father of my child, came across a single earring that had a star inside a moon and he wore that for a long time. So we matched, in a way.

Seeing the moon and “star” tonight looking so beautiful inspired me to go looking for the earrings and I found them!

I’m not sure the other one is Terry’s. I remember his as being simpler, more like mine. I think I bought this one because it reminded me of him and I was feeling sentimental. But that’s the other thing about being old. Your memory is probably not as great as it once was, but more to the point you’ve had longer to be convinced that we all, at every age, don’t remember things as well as we think we do, especially about things that happened a long time ago.

So that’s my story about something that’s really of no importance except to remind us how much things change and no one really notices or thinks of it once the change is done. Except those of us who were there, and once in a while are reminded, “Can you believe that it used to be that . . .?”

Well, that was a lot of words about something of no importance, really, which is why I don’t usually bother to write these, “I just remembered how it used to be and it seems so weird now . . .” thoughts down. In the meantime, my moon and star are back in my ears as I write and maybe I’ll go back to wearing them all the time.

Melanie story

Low to the ground, so good for a short person (Melanie was 5'3"), and
smooth riding on the highway, but really heavy.

For a while, Melanie's only transportation was a Honda 350 motorcycle. One day, when she was looking for a job, she stopped by the Texas Employment Commission office to see if they had anything interesting listed and parked it on the sidewalk by the front door.

Problem was, there was some kind of battery problem that she hadn't gotten around to doing anything about that made the electronic ignition erratic. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. If it wasn't working, the bike could still be kickstarted, but Melanie wasn't strong enough to hold the bike upright and kickstart it with one leg. She had figured out, though, that if it was on the centerstand it was stable enough that she could stand on the pegs, jump down onto the kickstart lever and  . . . vroooom!

When she came out of TEC, ignition wasn't working, bike was on the side stand - because she also wasn't strong enough to get it up on the centerstand. What to do?

Aha, luck! Walking down the street toward her was a young man with a motorcycle helmet in his hand. Since he clearly knew his way around a motorcycle, Melanie asked him if he'd mind helping her get it up on the centerstand. He did.

She did her "stand on the pegs and jump onto the kickstarter" routine. As she sat on the bike (now running nicely) putting on her helmet, thanking the guy for his help, getting ready to ride off, he asked, "Why didn't you just ask me to start it for you?"

Her reply:

"I have *some* pride."

13th and a half street and Rio Grande

When you live in the same town your entire adult life, one of the things that happens is that by the time you're old, all of the places you pass by are what they are, but they also have a kind of ghostly overlay of all of the memories of the things that happened there.

There must be a hundred places in Austin where I could stand on a street corner and tell not just one, but multiple stories about what happened there.

This is 13th and a half street between West Ave. and Rio Grande.

Along 13 1/2 St. is the parking lot to Austin Community College's Rio Grande campus. When I went to the Women's March, (which is already a significant memory that I could tell my grandchild about - except she was there too), I parked there because it's only a few blocks from the capitol.

As I was walking back, I was thinking about the house across the street, on the corner of 13 1/2 and Rio Grande, which even though I was only in it once or twice, completely shaped my life in a way. Given its importance (to me), it occurred to me that I should take a picture of it.

That story is just one that plays in the background as I stand in the parking lot looking at the house. At about the same time as Jan decided to go upstairs at the house on the corner, Steve and I were living in the tiniest apartment imaginable (made from half of a two-car garage) - if you cross Rio Grande and walk down the alley between 13th and 14th to the brown roofed house at the edge of the picture, the door to the tiny apartment is off the alley.

When Steve and I lived there, what's now ACC was still Austin High. There were several Coke machines around the high school that dispensed soft drinks in actual glass bottles. The kids were supposed to return the bottles to wooden racks next to the machines, but of course the bottles ended up everywhere except where they were supposed to be. If you walk down West Ave. to 12th St, you'd drop off the lower left corner of the picture, but a block down the hill was a small HEB, Steve and I would walk across the campus and retrieve bottles from under bushes, out of trash cans and flower pots, continue on to the HEB, redeem the bottles for 5¢ each, and use the money to buy something to cook for supper. And as we walked around, I'd wonder . . . did my mother sit on this bench? Hang out with a friend under this tree?

Further back in time, before I was born, so not a Memory but a Family Story, my mother went to Austin High School. My grandmother was convinced that my mother was far too brilliant to be held back by the inadequacies of the high school in the dusty little town of Bangs, Texas, so she packed her off to live with her older sister, my Aunt Kat (Kathleen) in the Big City of Austin, where there was a fine university (that my grandmother had attended, I think) and presumably a decent high school.

This is the house that my Aunt Kat was living in at the time. It doesn't look that impressive, but it was bigger than it looks inside and in a very nice neighborhood a block from the Law School and across the street from Eastwoods Park. My grandfather bought it as a wedding present for my aunt and her husband. I imagine it was quite expensive at the time. I heard about it a lot from my father, because it pissed him off that my grandfather only gave him and my mother a rundown woodframe duplex in Beaumont when they got married. Kathleen was my grandfather's favorite.

And my mother was my grandmother's favorite. The sibling rivalry was downright toxic. When Aunt Kat (who had somehow tracked me down) would come over to hang out at my house when my daughter was a baby, she was in her sixties by then, but she was still going on about the unfairness of my grandmother's preference for my mother. 

So, when my grandmother decided that Kathleen, in her early twenties and newly married, was going to have to take in her teenaged sister, she didn't react well. She made my mother live in the apartment upstairs over the garage (it was still a garage then) there on the left in the photo. You can see the door to the stairs peeking out behind the fence. My father told me that Kat would buy groceries for my mother and drop them off, but my mother had to make her own meals. He said that when she got there, the utilities weren't even turned on, no electricity, water, gas, and she had to figure out for herself how to get them turned on.

She was thirteen. Maybe twelve. She'd skipped at least one grade, maybe two.

So she was on her own. Far from her parents, the town she grew up in. Her sister didn't like her and obviously tried to have as little as possible to do with her. She probably walked to school. It's a bit of a hike, almost two miles, but walking to school was what most kids did. Even now, the school bus only picks up kids that live more than two miles from school, otherwise they're expected to walk. The straightest route was to cross the UT campus, so I imagine she did. 

I've spent a lot of time thinking about my mother's time at Austin High, living in a garage apartment behind my aunt's house. What must it have been like, living alone at twelve or thirteen years old, walking across the university campus, with its imposing buildings, tower, huge trees and lush lawns, not to mention thousands (literally) of College Students filling the sidewalks and malls.

UT students in the 1940s

And then, walking into that huge high school. What must that first day have been like? I would have been terrified. A year or two younger than even the freshmen, how could she feel like she belonged?

Photo of Austin High School in 1934. A few years before my mother got there but not by much - 

she probably started school there in 1937 or 1938.

Mom says . . . (for Sierra)

Mom must have said to me (and Fredda) a thousand times, "You'll just never know how much I love you 'til you have a little girl of your own."

She was right. I did, and now I know.

And I said to my little girl a thousand times, "You'll just never know how much I love you 'til you have a little girl of your own."

And you did.

So now you know.

Now

DEAR MR. EGGLESTON by Greg Bottoms

"I bet you take photographs—of a light bulb in a red ceiling, a dinner table just before people sit down to eat, an old man sitting on a bed . . . . To say This is, this right here is absolutely real in space and time, irreducible and ineluctable, and I witnessed it and I captured it; I lived deeply inside of this particular now.

And when I hold your photograph, as I am doing now, I’m looking at our car in the Sears parking lot in 1976, and time has collapsed, there is no now and then, only this transitive, shifting place of memory, and life and representation and what it can mean get mixed up, and everything is a little more real than real, and you’re helping me to hold my dead father’s hand, and I’m holding it tightly, holding it now, and he’s just let one rip, and it still hangs in the air in sound and smell, and our moment of heightened awareness crumbles into laughing, laughing until tears come, and this laughing, because of a fart, is the purest expression of our love I know, captured, transformed, transferred through time, sparked into a memory, and re-imagined into new life. I was there. You made a photograph. And I was there again. What magic is worth believing in if not that, Mr. Eggleston?"

[Cover of William Eggleston's book 2 1/2. "Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer," and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston."]

Two of my favorites

From the Symphony of Science series (sorry about the stupid ad):

Wish I could tattoo this on my forehead

“One thing those of you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hyper-sensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors – we’re not that way from perversity, and cannot just relax and let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to,” – Piers Anthony.

. . . en la sierra de Madrid

This stuff makes me nuts

I did, in fact, like the movie Lincoln very much. I'm not a historian - I don't think I could qualify even as an "amateur historian," but I have been finding reading and listening to American history the past few years both exciting and rewarding. It started with Battle Cry of Freedom and the Civil War remains the part of our history that I keep returning to - it still seems to me the time that defines us. So I was a little sad to think of all of the important parts of the story that got left out, but the thing about movies is that they are very limited. Limited time means limits on what can be shown. But seriously, wtf? Is there any reason at all to actually falsify the historical record when that record is unambiguous?

Joe Courtney, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut, recently wrote to Steven Spielberg to complain that “Lincoln” falsely showed two of Connecticut’s House members voting “Nay” against the 13th Amendment for the abolition of slavery . . .

Courtney is pushing for Spielberg to acknowledge the falsity in the DVD, a quest that takes on more urgency now that Spielberg has agreed to provide a DVD to every middle and high school that requests it.

Tony Kushner . . . completely rejects the idea that he has defamed Connecticut, or the real lawmakers who voted “Aye.” He said that in historical movies, as opposed to history books where you go for “a blow-by-blow account,” it is completely acceptable to “manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth. History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama. It’s ridiculous . . .

Spielberg’s production people called the National Archives in 2011 to get a copy of the original voting roll and to plumb deeply into the details of the vote on one of America’s most searing moral battles, even asking whether the vote was recorded in a bound volume or on loose ledger forms. That roll shows that the first two votes cast were “Nays” by Democratic congressmen from Illinois, Lincoln’s own state. Wasn’t that enough to show the tension? . . .

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian attached to the film, pointed out the mistake to Spielberg and Kushner . . . But Kushner said the director left the scene unchanged because it gave the audience “place holders,” and it was “a rhythmic device” that was easier to follow than “a sea of names.” They gave fake names to the Connecticut legislators, who were, he said, “not significant players.”

Yet The Wall Street Journal noted, “The actual Connecticut representatives at the time braved political attacks and personal hardships to support the 13th Amendment.” One, the New London Republican Augustus Brandegee, was a respected abolitionist and a friend of Lincoln. The other, the New Haven Democrat James English, considered slavery “a monstrous injustice” and left his ill wife to vote. When he said “Aye,” applause began and the tide turned . . . .

I think Spielberg should refilm the scene or dub in “Illinois” for “Connecticut” before he sends out his DVDs and leaves students everywhere thinking the Nutmeg State is nutty.

Kushner says that won’t happen, because this is a “made-up issue” and a matter of “principle.” But as Congressman Courtney notes: “It was Lincoln who said. ‘Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.’ ”

The part that makes me nuts is, why do we teach our children lies about American history? Why do we teach our children lies about anything, actually? I'm a strong believer that children, depending on their age, are better off with some things simply not discussed until they are older, but flat out lying to them? Nope. A parent commenting on this column said it best,

My son started junior high in the autumn of 1999. For the first time, he studied history in some depth. He'd long had a keen interest in history. In the Spring of 2000, he asked, "Were New Englanders in history really so heroic?

The momentous Vermont Civil Unions debate was unfolding. Rutland Herald was one of the few newspapers on-line at the time. My son liked going to my office when I taught night classes, complete his homework, and surf the web. I showed him the Rutland Herald, told him to watch the story develop, think about the risks pro-vote legislators took, and they'd answer his question for him. Three times a week we talked about it on the drive home. Then the bill passed and Gov. Dean signed it.

He also knew about the threat of the mob to democracy and read how Terry Randall's attempt at mob bullying was thwarted when the Vermont hearings limited testimony to Vermont residents. My son talked about the threats to vote out of office those who voted yes.

In November of 2000, after the Bush theater, I looked up how many Vermont legislators lost their seats. It was 30+. After my son read that, I asked if he understood why New Englanders are considered heroic. He said it was like watching the courage in the Revolutionary War time.

That's what Spielberg and Kushner are stealing with their lazy dishonesty - the courage of a region's culture and the real courage of two Americans - and stealing from each child's parents the lesson that honesty is a foremost value. - Liam Jumper, South Carolina

The best Superbowl ad ever

I loved this one so much that the year it ran I brought the videotape (!) of the game to school and showed it to all my classes. More than once. The repeats were by popular demand.

Adam and Dog

Yay grrl geeks!