Jun 25, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’ve signed at least two on line petitions this week to abolish the Confederate Flag. Though my husband says, “why would you do that? “what about free speech?” Me, I’m thinking it would be great never to see that symbol of divisiveness and bigotry waving like a slap in the face to any African American person. And in fact, I’ve never forgiven the ACLU for supporting the Nazi’s right to march in Skokie all those years ago. I’d be only too happy to attend a ceremonial Confederate Flag burning. After all, waving a Confederate Flag isn’t that much different than waving a Nazi flag. If you think that’s an exaggeration, just check out what was happening when each of these flags were in their hey days!
 |
 |
| Nazi Flag |
Confederate Flag |
| Jew is a non person, can’t own property |
Black is a non person, can’t own property |
| Jews work as slave labor for a variety of industries: Bayer, Grumann, etc. |
Blacks work as slave labor on plantations |
| War to declare Jews non-people |
War to uphold slavery |
| Miscegenation illegal |
Miscegenation illegal |
| Families Split up |
Families split up |
| Women raped by soldiers |
Women raped by slave owners |
| Mixed race differentiations i.e. Mischling |
Quadroons, Octoroons |
The lists truly go on and on.
That’s why I like those multi colored New Age flags for sale in Tibetan Shops, and yoga studios. And the peace flag too! Let us not forget that nice looking peace flag.
Isn’t it time the South just gives it up and says “we’re sorry, =our ancestors were brutes.. We won’t wave that revolting symbol of everything that’s wrong with this country ever again. And take the damn thing down and put it quietly away?
What have we got to lose? A proud tradition of hatred, murder, national divisiveness?
The Battle Hymn of the Republic has always been a much better song than Dixie, which my friend Andre thinks is the reason why the North won the war.
Think of what would have happened if the South won the war.
Think of what would have happened if the Nazis won the war.
(I for one wouldn’t be sitting here typing on my computer!)
May all beings everywhere be happy and free from suffering.
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Jun 16, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’m more than halfway convinced the golden calf slain by Moses was really a golden dog. An effigy of the tribe’s favorite dog, the one who wagged his tail, laid his ears back, stuck out his tongue and smiled—and made everyone worship him. Of course the golden dog is male. As in the sacrifice of Isaac, the prized object, be it animal or human is always male.
When Moses destroys the golden calf as he does in the bible story, (he’s a cat person) it’s meant to be the beginning of monotheism—and the emergence of Judaism as an intellectual philosophical force. Down with polytheism (all those sexy female deities!). Up with an-eye-for-an-eye and the one and only male God.
I’ve been thinking along the lines of the golden dog ever since we got Henry and began to worship at the universal church of canine, probably the largest single group of true believers on earth.
My little golden idol is presently curled up at my feet. It’s a hot day, the first hot day since I arrived on Long Island a couple of weeks ago. He’s lying across the quarry tile floor because it’s cool there and he’s hot after barking his head off at the guys who were blowing leaves outside the windows. You can’t get away from the leaf blowers. And their evil fumes. Though here where there are trees and a relative lack of air pollution, the noxious fumes dissipate quicker than they do in Los Angeles. And for that I and my sinus cavities are grateful.
I’ve just spent the past hour helping my friend pick up her beloved golden dog (actually a white Samoyed named Natasha) who has been in the deep freeze at the vet’s since last winter. For the past week, L. has been digging a hole in her back yard for her dead pet. Every morning when we meet very early at the beach to let the dogs run, she tells me about the hole. “It’s two feet by now,” she says. “It’s at least three feet.” This morning she said it was “up to my waist.” And could I go this afternoon to help her carry Tashi from the car to the backyard.
I could.
All the way over on the drive to the vet, L told me something I’ve heard from other worshipers of the golden dog, that “Natasha is in heaven.” Also, the bizarre and beautiful fact that Natasha chose to die on the same day in December her brother Stoli had also died some years ago. “Three hundred and sixty-five days and why would they both go on the same one?” L mused.
You get to know all the names of the dogs who people have worshiped. The living and the dead. I never met Tashi, who has been too ill to come for the early morning walk at the beach. Nor did I meet Stoli, the brother who died on the same day, or Hammer, the American Bulldog who weighed more than I do.
Frozen Natasha, who we carried in a plastic cradle, (I thought as we were lugging the thing of Hiawatha’s linden cradle) was wrapped in a white cotton blanket. Underneath the blanket was plastic, the body bag where she’d been stored at the vet’s office. When we got back to L’s house, we lugged the plastic cradle to the back yard. And then we lifted Natasha’s frozen body onto the grass. I’ve never understood how all these dog lovers eat meat. Tashi certainly felt very akin to a large frozen roast. But no one would think of defrosting her, studding with garlic and perhaps some rosemary and cooking her at 360 degrees, a little pink in the middle. No one I know anyway.
“I’ve got to make sure they didn’t give me the wrong dog.” L said with a little laugh, and gently tore into the plastic. “It’s not gruesome, don’t worry.”
And it wasn’t. I saw a bunch of white hair, a little face, and my friend bending over the dead frozen dog, who would no doubt, soon be defrosting on the first hot day of the season. And kissing her.
Is it the golden calf/dog or is it just love? I don’t rightly know. But it’s a beautiful thing to see that kind of love. It’s what unites man, woman and beast and makes the humans among us, more human.
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Jun 10, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’m a mother. And the candidate is my only child. So when I heard the other side was having a breakfast to do, I couldn’t resist taking a look at his opponent. I put on my new blue jean jacket, a clean shirt and drove myself to Southampton a few mornings ago to the church where the speakers were going to be. I had a few questions of my own.
I was shocked that I couldn’t get in the door without paying. I even tried to talk myself out of the fee. But no go. They wouldn’t let me in without my 25-buck contribution. I gave my name and my cash, they gave me a name tag, and I went in. I should mention I go by my maiden name—and vote that way.
My son is a a Republican. I’ve never voted Republican and neither has the candidate’s father. Nor did either of my son’s dead (rolling in their graves) Grandparents on either side. I’ll leave it at that.
I chatted around for a while. Shook some hands. I met the head of the Town Democratic Party, a silver-haired gent with a mellifluous voice who could easily have been an actor. I also met the man my son hopes to replace, who maxed out on term limits and now seeks a different office; he was genial and pleasant, if slightly disengaged.
Everyone was very cordial. Everyone was friendly, I was asked to sit down and join several different tables. Not so bad, I thought, and actually felt a bit better that my son wasn’t going to be facing a pack of wolves, and might not get the proverbial knife in the back we always hear about politics these days.
Then I met Her, the woman my son is running against. We shook hands. We looked each other in the eye. She’s a tall pleasant- looking woman at least twenty years older than my son. I extended my hand and introduced myself. I even said I was having a book signing that night at the East Hampton bookstore.
Since she didn’t know who I was, I couldn’t resist. I looked her in the eye, and said as innocently as I could, “Now tell me about your opponent.”
The tall woman turned cold and mean.
“I don’t speak his name,” she said emphatically. I was shocked, and asked, “why ever not?” As if she hadn’t heard me, she added menacingly, “if anyone speaks his name at Headquarters, they are fined! They have to put a quarter in the jar.” Surely she must be joking, I thought, but her face was steely and devoid of any irony or humor.
Oy, I thought, as the mother of He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named. This is going to be a nasty race. I felt immediately protective of my son, who while being a tough customer, also has a really soft heart. It was upsetting and frankly bizarre to hear a fellow mother speak of my son in such a dehumanized way. I’ve certainly heard my son speak her name: with some bravado sure, but always with respect. I wished I had a roll of quarters, like I used to get from the bank before I had a washing machine. His name is ____, I imagined yelling, before plunking down quarter after quarter.
I drifted around the room some more. The breakfast buffet looked sort of crummy, cold bagels and runny eggs; some greasy potatoes. I’d been there about forty minutes. I was curious what they’d say in their speeches. Were they going to say something awful about my son? Would I be able to stand it?
The gent who looked like an actor approached me. And he didn’t look so friendly anymore. “you’re ______’s mother aren’t you?”
I admitted I was and I couldn’t have been more surprised. Flabbergasted is a better word.
In fact, I hadn’t felt so busted since Nodie Williams and I got caught smoking cigarettes in the men’s bathroom at St. Vincent’s Academy at least five hundred years ago. I could feel my face turning red just as it had when Sister Paula Marie forged through the door and suspended us both on the spot.
“I’m sorry!” I said and I was. I think I might also have said something about wasn’t this a free country? Hadn’t I paid my twenty-five bucks to see what the candidates said? Wasn’t I a voter too? I felt his eyes watching me carefully.
I talked to some other people. Presumably word had not spread through the entire crowd as to my dubious bona fides. A pretty woman about my age and I talked about fashion, I smiled at several other folks.
Feeling decidedly unwelcome, I decided to go back to the Chairman of the party and bid my adieu. “I’m a mother,” I said to the guy, “I meant you no harm. If you like, I will go now before the speeches start. You may be mad at me, but now I have to go back and tell my son what I did.”
“Yes, that’s probably best,” he said.
Several hours later when I told my son, he laughed and thought the whole thing was highly amusing and told me he loved me. He was much nicer than the politicos of the party I’ve always voted for.
I didn’t get to hear the speeches. And I didn’t have the chutzpa to ask for my money back. I wish I had though.
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May 28, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Sometimes one doesn’t want to freeload on friends. Sometimes, especially if one is married, one wants to be alone.
When that happens, and I’m in NY for a night or two, I try and stay at the Excelsior if I can get a deal.
I’m at the Excelsior now, typing this in the lobby and checking my email. I lived here, when I was first in New York. It was cheap enough to live by the month. And I did that, off and on, until I could get a place of my own. I was young, green and I didn’t really get it that older successful men asked young girls out to dinner to talk about business chiefly to see if they could get laid.
I’d known him through my first real job. I was writing publicity at that time and he liked my work enough to invite me to dinner with him and his girlfriend when we were all working on a project in another city.
He was the American president of a very old English firm whose name practically anyone would recognize. I called him when I moved to New York, to touch base and ask for freelance work.
He replied by asking me to dinner.
I assumed the girlfriend would be there. And the wife would be home in the suburbs. I could tell the woman he traveled with was his girlfriend. And in the press release I had written, I had the info that he had a wife and three children and they lived in the ‘burbs outside of NY.
I guess, on a subconscious level l also knew I wasn’t his type. So I felt safe.
After dinner, he offered to drop me home and the struggle began almost immediately, the second we got in the cab. He was winning; the cab driver was doing nothing to help me out. And I was calling for help and pleading with the man who was pinning me down.
“I’m not even your type, I can tell I’m not. Why are you doing this?”
He took a beat. He thought about it. We were tussling.
And yet he took the time to tell me, as if he were proud of it, as if it were a totally original idea, like the theory of evolution or something.
“I like your wrists; they’re so small and vulnerable.”
Maybe he gave up. Maybe it was too much work. The cab was stopped at a red light. We were on the Upper West Side. And this unpleasantness had been going on since West 9th Street or thereabouts. I escaped.
I stood on the sidewalk and stared at them both:
“Shame on you!”
Then ran down the street to the Excelsior.
It was old and scary in those days. Not like it is now, this pleasant place where I’m sitting in a padded seat and can look up and see the nicely dressed attendants and the prosperous looking guests. There’s a restaurant with a fancy name—back then it was just above an SRO. The denizens were down and out, the elevators were slow, the hallways creepy.
When I got back to my room the phone was ringing. Those old hotel phones really knew how to ring. Nothing like the simulated computer ringing of one’s cell phone. I went for it, thinking it was a guy who I was crazy about sneaking out to the nearest phone booth to commit telephone adultery. It was the president rapist on the line. Why, oh why had I told him where I was staying?
I’ll never forget his calm implacable voice.
“I’m downstairs. Are you sure you haven’t changed your mind?”
“Yes I’m sure.”
He took a beat. I heard him breathe.
“OK,” he said at last, then he broke the connection.
I could see him downstairs in his expensive suit getting my room number, maybe even with a twenty, getting a key as well. I shoved the dresser in front of the door; underneath I found a dead roach and a condom still, thank God, in the wrapper. I lay awake for most of the night, waiting for the dresser to move.
Flash forward a few years later. I am walking on the sidewalk in front of MOMA at my lunch hour. I am very pregnant. I’m so big that the next week my advertising agency sent me home because I was scaring everyone. I even think they gave me two weeks severance. And the opportunity to get my job back six weeks after the baby was born. It wasn’t exactly a very enlightened time. My boss, a charmer, who the following year stiffed me out of a three thousand dollar job, was in the habit of chasing me around the office telling me pregnant women turned him on.
There he is on the sidewalk. The Queen had just knighted his direct boss.
“RAPIST!”
That’s what I shouted at him. I saw him cringe and turn away, running scared of me this time.
I just googled him. Nobody’s heard of him anymore. Not even Google. Good. Excellent. Just someone with the same unusual spelling of his name and the right age, living in Summit, New Jersey.
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May 19, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Pile the bodies high in the Palisades and Malibu,
Shovel them under, and let me work, I am the grass
And I am dead— (apologies to Carl Sandburg)
Even though it rained last night, a really pounding rain, and this morning it’s drizzling, it’s not enough and won’t last long enough to do any good. For months now, whenever I walk the streets of my neighborhood, I think of the grass poem by Carl Sandburg. I am the grass I cover all. My version: I am the grass and I am dead.
We need snow in the mountains, and 40 days of rain down here. The kind of rain that causes mud slides and floods. We are drying up here in Southern California. Literally dying for rain. Still, I have to say, for the present moment, it is wonderful to go outside without the blasting sun beating down. My dog Henry, who while born in Arkansas, on Nodie Williams’ Frayed Knot Farm, is freaked out by the rain. He would barely go out for his early morning stroll in the drizzle, and because he wouldn’t do his biz, a measure of how freaked out he is, an hour later, I’ve just come in from taking him out once again. He sniffs around like something strange is going on. I don’t think he remembers too much about the rain, though he’s been in rain in New York. He doesn’t think it’s natural. Or maybe he thinks he’s getting a bath. Henry is three years old and most of the time he’s in LA. He doesn’t have much first hand experience of rain.
A majority of my thrifty neighbors in Little Osaka have already let their little patches of St. Augustine go–or have planted Astroturf–we don’t have any grass, our landlord has sustainable plantings on our little patch of soil. Though, I’m used to it now, the patches of dead where there used to be soft green grass. If things keep up like this, there won’t be grass in the park down by the ocean where we like to stroll. Then no more of Henry doing that hilarious dog maneuver where he rolls over on his back, and does the Hoochie Koochi with his paws in the air so he can feel the soft grass against his back.
I am the grass and I am dead.
I was talking to a friend of mine and complaining about the water bill, ours is about a hundred dollars a month just for water. She owns a rental property in Santa Monica with three units and it’s a thousand dollars a month for water. A thousand dollars a month! Just for water.
I am the grass and I am dead.
Apparently other than agriculture, almonds in particular, the biggest offenders are the great green lawns in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Outside of town, trees are exploding. There’s no way to water them and suddenly on hot day, one will just blow up. Cattle ranches are closing (I guess that means, more dead animals). The huge Mormon Church that’s a couple of miles from here has let its vast green expanse go. I haven’t been over to see it. Because it’s just too depressing. The private golf clubs seem unaffected by the petty concerns of the hoi poloi, when I drive by, they appear as verdant as ever.
They say we have one more winter. And after that, the water is gone.
I am the grass and I am dead.
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May 15, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I can’t imagine the great B.B. King ever resting in peace.
I imagine him up in that great Blues Club in the Sky. He’s leaning into the microphone. It’s smoky in the club, the lights are blue and it smells like booze and sweat and the sweet perfume that some of the ladies are wearing.
Photo by Charles Sawyer. Copyright © 1997
Lucille is wailing and Bobby Blue Bland, who went before him, is beside B.B. and they are singing a duet of “The Thrill Is Gone” (one of the great pieces of music ever written in my book).
Some years ago, the King of Sweden recognized Mr. King for his contribution to music. I love the idea of the son of a sharecropper, born in Mississippi, making it all the way up to the King of Sweden, on account of his genius.
The Thrill is certainly gone from the world now that the great, the incomparable, B.B. has left the planet. May his soul soar as he made our spirits soar!
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