Just As I Thought (35 page)

Grace: Because I saw you bought a stunning new winter coat and were about to become too sentimental.

Interviewer: Why are you so hard?

Grace: Well, am I? You do have to come out of late middle age into this older time with your muscles of imagination in good shape, and your muscles of swimming against the tides of misinformation pretty strong—as well as the usual back and abdominal muscles, which are kind of easy to exercise in the morning.

Interviewer: You’re not so easy to deal with.

Grace: Why should I be? Like most people my age, I’ve accumulated enough experience to be easy or difficult, whatever the provocation exacts. Your trouble is you don’t have a gift, or the character, for normal tragedy.

Interviewer: That’s not really fair. I suppose I have to let it go at that, but I do have a few fairly simple questions I’d like to ask you. What have you liked about your life?

Grace: I’ve liked being Jewish. I’ve liked being a woman. When I was a little girl, I liked thinking I was a boy. I loved growing up in New York City, the Bronx, my street—and I’ve tried to give those advantages to my children.

Interviewer: What do you miss?

Grace: My mother, who died before we had all the good talks that are now in books, thanks to the women’s movement. I miss my children’s childhood. Now that I live in the country, which I love, I miss my political, grass-roots life in the New York streets. Vigiling in a shopping center in New Hampshire is not quite the same.

Interviewer: Do you mind having to get older?

Grace (
somewhat annoyed, but luckily slips into another story
): When I was twelve and a half, I was walking along Southern Boulevard in the Bronx on the way to the Elsemere movie house with a boy named David, with whom I was in love. He was fourteen and very sophisticated. “What do you think is the greatest age for a woman?” he asked. I pretended to think, though I already knew. “Eighteen,” I said. “Oh no,” he sighed, “twenty-six, twenty-six—that’s the age a woman should be.” “That old?” I asked. “That’s awful. It’s disgusting.” David looked at me as though he had never noticed how young I was. He dropped my hand.

By the way, my answer to your question is, I feel great. I like my life a lot. It’s interesting every day. But it so happens I
do
mind.

—1989

Life in the Country: A City Friend Asks, “Is It Boring?”

No! Living in the country is extremely lively, busy. After the gardens have gone to flower, to seed, to frost, the fruits canned, frozen, dried, the days and evenings are full of social event and human communication. Most of it dependent on the automobile or phone, though a few tasks can be accomplished on foot or ski. Even if you are not worried about the plain physical future of the world, there’s a lot to do. If you are concerned about your village, there are zoning meetings, water-board meetings, school meetings and school-board meetings, PTA meetings. There’s the Improvement Society, whose main task is sustaining the life of the Green or Common as the elms die away from us. There’s also the Ladies Benevolent, whose name explains itself. For some there is the interesting Historical Society of their town; there are selectmen meetings. There’s the conservation committee, the agricultural committee for those who count the farms each year and find several missing. There are the food co-op meetings: one for ordering, one for distributing, one for the co-op board. For those who love theater, there are groups flourishing in several of the towns of the county, all requiring lots of rehearsal, costume making, and, in the event of a success, traveling to other towns. Of course many of these meetings happen in bad weather, ice, sleet, and require pot-luck suppers, so there is a great deal of cooking and baking.

All of this liveliness happens after the workday world and the meetings of that world, union or managerial. Nor have I mentioned purely social events: returning a neighbor’s dinner invitation, going to a church supper, a fair, the high-school basketball game, or a square dance for the pleasure of it.

Many of us, fearing the world’s end and saddened by our country’s determined intervention, have been involved in political work, and this requires the following: one meeting every two weeks of our affinity group, a meeting every month or two of a coalition, the special legal meetings which usually precede and follow illegal actions. Then the frequent meetings once an action has been decided upon. If these actions include civil disobedience, there will be training meetings as well as legal ones, so that by role-playing and other methods we retain our nonviolent beliefs and strategies.

And then there is ordinary life. For instance, there is keeping the mud and hay out of the house, and stacking the wood in the woodshed. There is also stuffing newspapers and rags into the cracks and chinks that each new descent of temperature exposes. There is also skiing across shining fields and through dangerous woods full of trees one must avoid.

And of course there is standing in the front yard (or back) staring at the work time has accomplished in crumpling the hills into mountains, then stretching them out again only a few miles away into broad river plains, stippling white pink rust black across the wooded hills, clarifying the topography by first aging, then blowing away the brilliant autumn leaves. Although here and there the wrinkled brown leaves of the oak hold tight, and the beech leaf, whose tree will die young, grows daily more transparent, but waits all winter for the buds of spring.

—1991

Across the River

There was the pretty town. There was the beautiful farm full of orchards and fields. There was the big barn. It burned. Silo and all. Cattle horses pigs the chicken house one-third of the orchard.

Almost immediately, in order to raise money, the women of the community began to design a patchwork quilt. It would be patched with the old cotton dresses of their little girls and their grandmas’ stored remnants. Little by little it became the history of the beautiful farm, with solid-colored dates, polka-dotted outhouses on backgrounds of flowering cattle, light green hills specked with golden dandelions. Raffles were sold at all the banks, but the event itself was saved for Labor Day, so that the summer people could contribute to the good work.

There was also the small, well-endowed college nearby. On its handsome campus, silk-screened posters appeared asking for contributions to help restore the big barn to the beautiful farm.

One day in early June, the trash truck came up the hill to our house. There were a young trashman and an old trashman on the truck. The young trashman shyly worked at our spring cleanup mess. I said to the old trashman, Isn’t it hot for May? —No rain either, he said. —Awful day right now, I said. —Desperate for rain, he said.

There must be lots of fires, I said. Many, he said.

I asked, Do you know that big place across the river, burned up, people are collecting money for it?

I do, he said. Terrible fire. Collecting money, that’s good of the kids. He looked sideways at our woodpile for a couple of minutes. Have you thought of this? he asked, turning to me. Now what if a poor man’s place burned? Small barn, a couple of cows, no insurance. Why, who’d help him? Maybe a couple of fellows from the firehouse or the Legion’d help nail some old boards. Would there be a collection? Would those college boys be running from door to door? No, they wouldn’t. The poor farmer would have to begin again like always, like when his last barn went probably when he was young and there was help. And if this farmer was old and his boys disgusted with farming, why—the old trashman shrugged and heaved a great black plastic bag of last summer’s junk into the truck—why, it’d be too bad for that poor fool of a farmer, wouldn’t it?

—1978

In a Vermont Jury Room

We had been in the jury room of a Vermont county court for hours, waiting for deals to be made and justice to be defined. In the courtroom itself the defendants were probably watching the important backs of the lawyers and the face of the judge. We waited as juries often do when secret information is being exchanged and the area of the case narrows. The idea that the jury’s best verdict can be reached by what seems to be the smallest amount of information is amazing to me. My co-jurors agreed. We were all feeling left out, mocked by the rules of the game.

While we waited and talked, a woman taught me how to insert a red thumb in a blue mitten. She had knitted perhaps three hundred mittens. People asked each other where they worked. Two women worked in small textile factories sewing skirts, one woman worked in a furniture factory. Two women worked for welfare, one woman was an aide in the local hospital. One man trucked fuel; another drove for the college. One man leaned back in his chair and was silent.

When I finished my thumb I began to read the business section of
The New York Times.
“Right here on the third page,” I said, “it says that people are getting interested in the small farmer.”

The eleven other jurors and the two alternates laughed.

Mrs. Crile, the woman who’d taught me mitten thumbs, said she was a small farmer. Then she corrected herself: her husband was a small farmer. “You, too, are a small farmer,” I said.

“Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. “You’re talking about women’s lib, but you know, he won’t let me in the barn. He’s a loner, you know. And he loves his cows. Milking time, he don’t let anyone in. If the inspection man came, he’d keep him out with a hunting rifle. He says it turns the milk, strangers. He knows every cow. You know, they’re different. There’s some cows don’t like their calves. Well, then you have to feed them yourself. But there’s cows are adopters. You know, a calf is born, they don’t let anyone near. They adopted it. They don’t like the mother near it.”

“Well,” I said, “this is what it says in the paper,” and I quoted: “‘Merrill Lynch, Hubbard, and the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company have proposed an Agricultural Land Fund under which pension funds and tax exempt institutions could buy farms and get managers to run them. This would save the small farm, Mr. Mooney, the president of Merrill Lynch, etc., said.’”

Guffaws, this time, from everyone.

“Save it?” said Mr. Fuller, the silent man. He looked sick and left for the bathroom.

Mr. Vann said he’d like a little tax exemption himself; he couldn’t run his farm except into the ground.

“Go on there, Vann,” said Mrs. Griffith, “you needn’t of said that. You didn’t do that, you just got squeezed; the milk company squeezed you and you sold off bit by bit.”

“And if I had another couple of bits, I’d sell them tomorrow.”

“My granddad,” the furniture worker said, “did that. He sold out eighteen years ago up toward Warren and he got maybe thirteen thousand for it; it was just sold, I read in the paper, for a hundred and eighty-seven thousand.”

“You know, I believe I knew your family,” Mrs. Crile said. “That old farm wasn’t too far from where ours was in those days. We rent now, you know.”

The furniture worker continued: “And that old hill farm that he nearly killed himself on, there were a couple of owners, and the last one they say is the pilot of the Shah of Iran. I mean it, and he’s made a condominium to ski off of. He gave the town two thousand dollars to help pay for the schools,
and
he’s got no kids. No road repairs. He got a better road than the county road. Folks like that don’t cost the town services.”

“Ayup,” said Mr. Fuller, who’d just returned. “And when there’s no oil and it’s too expensive to roll all that food in from California, and when there’s a drought like there is now, try gettin’ our farms back to planting. When they got those hills scattered every which way with them chalets, why, the game is gone. What’re you going to do? Lyman, you don’t remember the Depression, but in our village no one starved. Vann, you remember, we went out, every nightfall we brought it home—something for the families, rabbit, deer, possum, what-all … no one starved. But now, where’s the land, where’s the game?”

In the courtroom the lawyers argued and cut the facts to their legal bone. Here in the jury room, the people were talking about their lives with all the information they had, which was not inconsiderable.

—1977

Introduction to a Haggadah

I lived my childhood in a world so dense with Jews that I thought we were the great imposing majority and kindness had to be extended to the others because, as my mother said, everyone wants to live like a person. In school I met my friend Adele, who together with her mother and father were not Jewish. Despite this, they often seemed to be in a good mood. There was the janitor in charge of coal, and my father, unusually smart, spoke Italian to him. They talked about Italian literature, because the janitor was equally smart. Down the hill under the Southern Boulevard El, families lived, people in lovely shades of light and darkest brown. My mother and sister explained that they were treated unkindly; they had in fact been slaves in another part of the country in another time.

Like us? I said.

Like us, my father said year after year at Seders when he told the story in a rush of Hebrew, stopping occasionally to respect my grandmother’s pained face or to raise his wineglass to please the grown-ups. In this way I began to understand, in my own time and place, that we had been slaves in Egypt and were brought out of bondage for some reason. One of the reasons, clearly, was to tell the story again and again—that we had been strangers and slaves in Egypt and therefore knew what we were talking about when we cried out against pain and oppression. In fact, we were obligated by knowledge to do so.

But this is only one page, one way to introduce these Haggadah makers, storytellers who love history and tradition enough to live in it and therefore, by definition, to be part of its change.