When I was growing up, and even into my young adulthood, I was not interested in pursuing information about my ancestry. Of course, I knew that I was born of 2nd generation Polish and Italian parents, but in the 50’s and even longer there was great prejudice against both ethnicities, causing me to feel shame about my heritage. Some areas in West Hartford, CT, a town in which I attended a private Catholic girls’ high school, banned those of Italian background from buying homes there.
Read moreTHE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
That was a phrase I used in my eulogy for my mother, as a way to describe the space felt by such a loss, and I came across it again in an astoundingly good book I’ve just finished, Lost and Found, by Kathryn Shultz.
It seems like a perfect description of what we are all experiencing right now.
Everywhere we look there is absence. On our calendars, on grocery shelves, in our children’s classrooms, in restaurants and theaters, in the once-familiar texture of our days, in life as it used to be. The relentless disappearance of all we’ve long taken for granted is a fact with which we must reckon daily. We can no longer truly see each other, masked as we are—we struggle with the absence of spontaneity, the lack of joy, the unbalancing of constant uncertainty.
Read moreNO EASY ANSWERS
Were there ever?
Yes, when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, there absolutely were. Abundant in our catechisms and missals, the Sunday sermons, the Catholic school classrooms where we knelt by our desks for prayers several times a day, the pronouncements about what was right and would get us to heaven, they gave us a facile map to follow. “Sister says,” was a common mantra we learned to accept because our parents insisted we must. Questioning the priests and nuns who ruled our worlds was bad, maybe even sinful.
Read moreDISENTANGLING THE TANGLE
The weight of the world feels so intense, and I am so tangled in it.
I just completed a half-day online mindfulness retreat and boy, did I ever relate to that reflection. I’d recently finished Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, described by The New York Times book review as Rhodes “going out into the world to understand how it has become such an illiberal authoritarian mess.” He feels we, as a country, particularly due to the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 banking collapse, are largely responsible for “disseminating the toxins that now infuse the world.
Read moreCOMING OUT
It’s been awhile.
I wrote a whole blog post before we left on vacation, wanting to feel the sense of freedom that a completed task list could offer for the next two weeks, but the narrative just struggled too hard to make its point or tell the story I wanted to relate.
My husband, best reader and critic, shook his head after reading my third attempt. “It’s just not your usual good writing, Sharon.”
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