pull up a chair

these are dark times. chaotic times. times so upside down and alarming, i’m groping for what i can do. sometimes i think the solutions are way, way above my paygrade. 

what i know i can’t do is whistle in the dark. blather on about incidental ponderings, pretend that all this will soon go away. it feels as if we’re witnessing wide-eyed the wielding of sledge hammers to bedrock pillars of democracy. who are these 19-year-olds re-writing code in the department of treasury? why in the world would anyone waste a minute of breath renaming a mountain, a gulf, except for extreme case of hubris? and what of claiming gaza, the land of a people who have sustained unthinkable horrors to simply exist on the land of their ancestors, a land now so deeply bloodied i fear it seeps to the core of the planet? to say nothing of erasing the existence of aid to the poor, the hungry, the marginalized around the globe. to strike language and data from federal websites, all but telling vast swaths of humanity they’ve been expunged. to imagine the labs where cures for disease are suddenly stalled, where lives––like mine––depend on those cures.

i have aimed from the beginning not to bleed into politics here. and i still hold firm to that core. what i address here, what i disdain here, is something far more foundational, a vengeance fueled by a mindset that it’s always always us v. them. a philosophy of division, of payback in the cruelest of iterations. a credo of greed. let the weak be weakened, and the few take the pot. and let it all be built on a mound of mistruths, fictions of wild proportion. 

we’ve an unspoken bond here at this table that once a week i will leave some platter of words that might open a window. even a crack. let light in to our collective souls. so maybe in these dark times my place is shifting. maybe i’m meant to listen in silence, to keep close watch, to defend the tenets of the God of justice and love. a God whose wisdom is not twisted, turned on its head, shoved to the side for malevolent purpose. 

maybe the chair, in these dark and cruel times, is simply a place to swing by, to listen for voices wiser and keener than mine. maybe the chair is a place to come catch your breath. to embolden your spirit. to find brief reprieve. 

until the darkness lifts––and wise and faithful souls believe that it will, that We the People in our undeniable goodness and courage shall overcome––i’ll do what i quietly can. my platter today comes with two poems and a slather of chocolate. yes, chocolate. though in this case, it’s the priceless morsel of the story behind katie hepburn’s very own chocolatey brownies that might best the brownies themselves. you decide. 

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a beauty of a new poem found on diana butler bass’s straight-talking, life-sustaining, deeply soulful the cottage….

WHAT COMES NEXT
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Love relentlessly.
—Diana Butler Bass

Love relentlessly, she said,
and I want to slip these two words
into every cell in my body, not the sound
of the words, but the truth of them,
the vital, essential need for them,
until relentless love becomes
a cytoplasmic imperative,
the basic building block for every action.
Because anger makes a body clench.
Because fear invokes cowering, shrinking, shock.
I know the impulse to run, to turn fist, to hurt back.
I know, too, the warmth of cell-deep love—
how it spreads through the body like ocean wave,
how it doesn’t erase anger and fear,
rather seeds itself somehow inside it,
so even as I contract love bids me to open
wide as a leaf that unfurls in spring
until fear is not all I feel.
Love relentlessly.
Even saying the words aloud invites
both softness and ferocity into the chest,
makes the heart throb with simultaneous
urgency and willingness. A radical pulsing
of love, pounding love, thumping love,
a rebellion of generous love,
tenacious love, a love so foundational
every step of what’s next begins
and continues as an uprising,
upwelling, ongoing, infusion
of love, tide of love, honest love.

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an ode to kindness….aptly titled…

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
—Danusha Laméris

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and now, for katie’s brownies, the story of which first appeared in the letters to the editor of the new york times….

July 6, 2003

To the Editor:

Re the death of Katharine Hepburn last Sunday: For many decades, my father used to walk across town to do his food shopping on Second Avenue. He often shopped at a Gristede’s around the corner from Miss Hepburn’s town house on East 49th Street.

One day he suddenly came face to face with Miss Hepburn, who was also picking up groceries. He acknowledged her with a nod, and she responded in kind. He began thinking of her as a neighbor.

In 1983, my senior year at Bryn Mawr, Miss Hepburn’s alma mater, I was frustrated and was doing poorly, and at Christmas break, I decided to quit. I had the romantic notion of running away to Scotland to write screenplays. My father was frantic. My mother had died two years before, leaving him with all the responsibility for his headstrong daughter.

He knew that Miss Hepburn had gone through her own struggles at Bryn Mawr, so he wrote her a letter asking her to intervene. ”She’s a great admirer of yours, and perhaps she’ll listen to you,” he wrote. On the way to the grocery store, he dropped the letter in her mail slot.

At 7:30 the next morning, the phone woke me up. I answered it and heard that famous voice, crackling with command. ”Is this the young woman who wants to quit Bryn Mawr?” I said it was. ”What a damn stupid thing to do!” she snapped. She went on to give me a lively lecture, the gist of which was that I had to finish my studies and get my degree, and after that I could do what I wanted to do. There was no arguing with her imperiousness. Then she said she wanted to meet us for tea.

The day of our appointment was gray and wintry. Walking the long blocks to Turtle Bay, my father and I didn’t speak much. It felt as if we were about to meet the Queen.

Miss Hepburn greeted us warmly. With casual hauteur, she provided us with tea and some of her famous brownies. Though she was in her 70’s, she had a youthful look, enhanced by her girlish clothes: a turtleneck, a black cardigan and shabby khaki-green pants.

We talked about many things, including Bryn Mawr. She said that she was miserable there and still had nightmares about it, but she was glad she went. At the end of the afternoon she told me, in a rather grim tone, ”You’re smart.” It was a compliment, but also an admonition not to be foolish in the future.

My father was invited to visit her a few times after that. Once, he had heard that she was recovering from a serious car accident, and he stopped by to drop off a package of homemade brownies and a get-well note. To his surprise, he was ushered in and invited into her boudoir, where she greeted him in her nightgown. She sampled his brownies.

”Too much flour!” she declared. She then rattled off her own recipe, which he hastily wrote down. ”And don’t overbake them! They should be moist, not cakey!”

I’ll always be grateful to Miss Hepburn for making me stick it out at Bryn Mawr and for giving me these rules to live by: 1. Never quit. 2. Be yourself. 3. Don’t put too much flour in your brownies.

KATHARINE HEPBURN’S BROWNIES

1/2 cup cocoa
1 stick butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 cup broken-up walnuts or pecans
1 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Melt butter in saucepan with cocoa and stir until smooth. Remove from heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Mix in eggs, one at a time. Add sugar, flour, nuts, vanilla and salt. Pour into a greased 8×8 square pan. Bake 40 minutes. ”Don’t overbake!” They should be gooey. Let cool (an essential step) and cut into bars.

Heather Henderson
St. Paul, Minn.

how, pray tell, are you finding your way? chocolatey or otherwise…