Elinor Nauen

Sponsored by Dell'Arte Opera, it was an hour of music at the Campos Garden on 12th Street, one of the many building-size community gardens in our neighborhood. Four singers each performed two or 3 songs. By "throwdown" I'd gotten the idea we were going to gong 3 of them off the stage & declare a winner. I quite enjoyed the competitive listening but turned out it was a performance not a contest. Which was fine! 

I love my neighborhood. People DO things. We saw a play in a courtyard on Avenue B ~ we would have watched longer but couldn't quite hear. There's always something to startle & thrill. 

Shabbat shalom from Sholom, my favorite chabadnik, who has been visiting me for 10 years in a good-humored non-insistent futile attempt to get me to study Tanya, which is a Hasidic text. We read Bereshit this week, the beginning of the Torah, "in the beginning," & this Sabbath, he says, is when we make changes ~ rather like New Year's. Not resolutions as much as leaving ourselves open to transformation. Sounds good! A brand-new me! 

Johnny was there too, lots of laughing, lots of relaxing, & a nice salad. Her jacket is based on work of Joe Brainard. 

Grief Haiku 

An hour or less

stuck in endless service

just to say kaddish

I wrote it & Liza made it a poem. It's someone else's found poem, I guess. 

If you were the tweezers I keep in my office, & you weren't in the one place I keep them, where would you be? If you were an extra hour of time in my day, where would you be hiding & how can i coax you out? If you were a pile of dry words, how could i set you on fire? ("It only served to w(h)et my appetite, which was already damp.") If you couldn't keep your eyes open, blueberry pie.

The scientist is a builder. Collecting scientific data can be compared to gathering stones for a house; a stack of data is no more "science" than a heap of stones is a house. Unstudied scientific results are just a dead heap of stones. 

~ Kristian Birkeland, 1903

Birkeland is a Norwegian scientist who studied and explained the Aurora Borealis. I'm reading The Northern Lights, by Lucy Jago, a fascinating account of science, biography, & Arctic exploration. 

Sheesh! Can you see that the left side of the cornice is barely attached? I sent this picture to the landlord, who said, "It's being taken care of." I've been telling him for months, maybe a year. I will feel way worse than he will if it crashes down & hurts anyone. Well, it'll cost him money so maybe he'd feel worse, at that. 

Will I keep my vow to leave the country every year? Not looking promising for 2021. Will I see the beautiful skyline of Barcelona anytime soon? Eat tapas with my Catalonian sister? Happy birthday, my Mercè, on La Mercè, Barcelona's annual festival, & yes, that's why she was named Mercè. Born any other day, she would have been named ... I forget. 

Now that it's fall, I can start anticipating winter. To kick off the runup to my favorite season, I watched Ice Ball, a terrific short documentary about harvesting ice in northern Minnesota, featuring explorer Will Steger, & then I joined the American Polar Society. 

I wish I could go do readings in Australia but having poems in this very terrific magazine, The Rochford Street Review, will have to do for now. Tonight starts my next class, Norwegian V (aka Norwegian: Language and Culture), so I'll probably be fixing the heck out of these poems soon enough. I sort of feel like I've gotten up on stage at Carnegie Hall after 6 tuba lessons, before I understand how impossible it is. 

Not infrequently, I catch myself singing the weather ball jingle. The weather balls were scattered around Sioux Falls, on top of the several National Bank buildings. When we were driving downtown, we would twist our heads out the car window & up to see what was coming. One decoded the colors based on the jingle (which could be heard incessantly on the radio & never wore out its welcome — we sang along every time; call me if you need to hear it!): 

Weather ball, white as snow, down the temperature will go [the melody sank]

Weather ball, red as fire, temperature is going higher [the melody soared]

Weather ball, emerald green, forecast says no change foreseen. 

When colors blink in agitation... there's going to be ... precipitation! 

WATCH. THE. BALL! 

Those are the utterly correct lyrics, but some people must have grown up in one of the other cities, largely in the Midwest I think, that had weather balls. Sioux City's jingle is pretty much the same as ours — what I remember as "blink" could easily be "flash." Eric Renshaw (Forgotten Sioux Falls) has a lot of info, including stodgy lyrics but also photos; the weather ball was, of course, way more impressive when it was doing its thing.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

~ W. G. Sebald

For want of a nail.... the small things are the large things... 

I sat in this park way on the Lower East Side (Grand Street between Jackson & Madison) waiting for my appointment in the mammogram truck. My city council member Carlina Rivera had arranged it. It took a while because the truck was in a bus stop waiting for a spot on Jackson, which turned out to be too skinny for the city bus to get by, so the truck ended up back where it began, 2 hours later. But Carlina & her husband, Jamie, came by with their dog Toshi, Carlina as warm as ever. The people who want her gone think she wants to destroy the East River Park. Is her plan the best one? The people who understand the engineering of this narrow, threatened strip of land disagree. And who "wants" to destroy a park? I didn't ask her about that. She hugged me hard when I told her about my mom. A beautiful early fall day. 

Like me, Lefty appreciates one of the greatest lines in English literature:

The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky

Happy birthday, Hank Williams. 

And happy birthday, William Carlos Williams. And as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome I could cry. 

Tonight starts Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. I've gotten used to not being or feeling prepared. By which I usually mean switching slowly to decaf so I don't get a caffeine detox headache while I fast & pray. That's a little flip, as what we're really doing is making an honest accounting of our lives over the course of 27 hours. The fasting is so we don't distract ourselves from that work. 

No blog tomorrow. An easy fast to those who indulge. 

It's the weirdest feeling, as if I was picked up & put back down on Jupiter & now I weigh 400 pounds (how can a planet that's all gas weigh so much? well, how can clouds hold up all that precipitation?). I can't quite think & I can't quite feel, & where does that leave me? 

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. 

~ Russell Baker

Randomly chosen, not pointing at any in particular of the many terrible things being done. I'm too sleepy to think. Hey, folks, any comments? Anyone wanna do the thinking for me?

It's confusing to have so much to think about. And yet, I have the leisure to grapple with my mother's passing on my own schedule. There are many compensations in the midst of grief, such as seeing her laid to rest next to my dad—that is, knowing where she is. The terrible anniversary of September 11 reminds me that many, many people don't have parents who live as long as mine, or the embracing closure my family did. I avoided the commemorations until someone sent this intense piece by the daughter of a member of my synagogue who worked on the tower for one of the TV stations and died on that day. 

My dad died more than half my life ago. I was young, impetuous, & missing the fences that come with age, karate, religious observance, marriage, & who knows what else. I went to the bad. It's only been two weeks but I've managed to so far counter that feeling of desperation with all of the fences I didn't have then, along with Angela Thirkell, my favorite middlebrow writer of English country manners in the mode of Trollope. I just reread Wild Strawberries, my first Thirkell & still one of my favorites.

I can kind of see that all my posts are going to be incomplete for a while. 

Woke up this morning feeling more like myself. Feeling like I have begun to return to myself. Tuesday & Wednesday were Rosh HaShanah, which also has a theme of teshuvah, which literally means return. In this case, it implies repentance and the desire/struggle to return to better ways. 

Many struggles this stretch of time. 

Grief is exhausting. 

Little by little, we find a way. 

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they are not familiar.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

That was poetry's usefulness to me this week, making the familiar unfamiliar, but better, making the unfamiliar part of a world that I recognized, when so much seems to have changed. The only time I could focus was reading Basil Bunting, Whitman & others, randomly, whatever my hand landed on. Each time I was centered. 

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

~ Oscar Wilde

I've been careless, damnit.

In 8 years I haven't taken a week off from this blog, but I think that's what I'm going to do. On Tuesday my mother will be laid to rest, as they say, next to my dad, in Arizona. There's a memorial service in St Paul on Thursday & then I'll be back in New York. So there's a lot of flying & a lot of crying coming up this week & I think I'll clear my head for that. We'll see. 

Here's her obituary. 

Joyce Nauen

January 15, 1924 - August 26, 2021

Alice Joyce Phillips was born in Liverpool, England, the third child (of four) and only daughter of Charles John "Jack" and Alice Woodland Phillips. As a girl and young woman, she lived through the Depression and World War II (including the Blitz) and soon after the war married, briefly, an American GI and emigrated to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In 1949 she married Hans Nauen, a German Jewish refugee and the love of her life. She embraced his daughter, Edie, and his religion, becoming a lifelong, active Jew. Her survivors include their four children: Lindsay (Richard Weil, Noah and Ben Weil), Elinor (Johnny Stanton, Tara Lannen-Stanton), Charlie (PJ Pofahl, Rachel and Hannah Nauen), and Varda (Jeffrey Burton, Zoe and Henry Burton), Edie's daughter Ilona Mettala (Marty Hindsley), uncountable cousins and other family members, great-grandchildren, friends, admirers, and "adopted" children.

Her accomplishments were many and varied. She was a bronze life master in bridge, only 14 points shy of silver. She was president of the NAACP in Sioux Falls and a Weight Watchers regional director, and she recorded books for the blind (they loved her English accent and perfect diction). A trained musician, she starred as Golde in a Sioux Valley Auxiliary production of Fiddler on the Roof, sang at many weddings, and played organ and sang for Mt. Zion, her home synagogue in Sioux Falls, for 30 years. Visiting London in 1980, Joyce was impressed by the work of the Memorial Scrolls Trust in repairing Torah scrolls saved from the Nazis, and was the prime mover in bringing one of those scrolls to Mt. Zion. The fact that she wasn't an American citizen didn't stop her from taking a passionate and knowledgeable interest in politics, but in 2016, at age 92, she became a citizen in order to vote for a woman for president.

In 1984, after several years as snowbirds, she and Hans moved permanently to Sun City West, Arizona, where he died in 1986. She lived there into her 90s, when she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to be closer to family. She survived Covid last year, and died peacefully and unexpectedly in her sleep in the early hours of August 26, 2021.

Her family invites you to honor her life by, most of all, embracing open-mindedly and with good humor everyone you meet, and by donating to causes that support justice, Judaism, art, and music. They only wish they could convey the extent of their gratitude to Sholom Home and Joyce's loving, skilled caretakers there.

Joyce Phillips Nauen

January 15, 1924- August 26, 2021 (18 Elul)

That's her brother, my beloved Uncle Earl (1926-2004), on the left. 

I will say more as I am able.

Body, Recovered

                          with W.B.

I heard a thump

& my cat was dead

I have 3 urns

of my cat

her name was Venus, Vivi

I called her

a Maine coon cat

she attacked me

I fed her

from a spoon

I found this polaroid on the street, I think Second Avenue, but so long ago that I don't really remember. Were there more or just this one? If there are more, where are they? How did this one float into view after being in a drawer somewhere for years? It's like rocks in a field. You plow & next year more turn up. 

Jeg fant dette bildet på gaten, jeg tror 2 Avenue, men så lenge siden husker jeg ikke helt. Var det flere eller bare denne? Hvis det er mer, hvor er de? Hvordan fløt denne til syne etter å ha ligget i en skuff i mange år? Det er som steiner i et åker. Du pløyer og neste år dukker det opp flere.

All you can learn from Southern planters is bad temper, bad manners, poker, and treason. And how power works when held by inadequate hands.

~ Henry Adams, 1860

Henry, still timely in his own supercilious New England way.

Here's a new one to me: Tropical Depression. It's a category of storm, apparently, & yes I could look it up but I can't quite get my mind off Haiti. Even with all that's convulsing Afghanistan right now, Haiti is down there in any depression you can name. Assassination, earthquake, hurricane, what hasn't hit that poor country this year? How to help a country noted for the misuse of aid money? The Jewish attitude is that it's better to risk some money going to the wrong place than not getting it to someone who needs it. The word Tzedakah, often translated as charity, really means justice. We're obliged to help, to be partners in lifting all boats in whatever storm is trashing the world.  

I was aware that citizens were examining photos & videos of the January 6 coup attempt to try to identify and bring to justice the traitors who attacked the Capitol, police & democracy. Here's who they are: Sedition Hunters, "a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) working together to assist the U.S. FBI and Washington D.C. Capitol Police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6 riots." I'm relieved not to recognize anyone in their extensive rogues' gallery although I would relish turning in anyone I did. As someone said in a Washington Post comment, they're doing the lord's work. (Discussion ensued about the heinousness of religion; nope, it's an expression.)