To My Troll, TwoBlack Jet:

My Mississippi Grandmother, Ida Mae and my Syrian Immigrant Grandfather, Charles
Brooklyn, New York
mid-20th century*

What was that you were saying, again, about President Drumpf's big heart?*

My tiny little mother mind™ wants to know.


Sincerely,

Elizabeth


P.S. After this weekend's hideous anti-Muslim executive orders and the installment of Iago*** in the National Security Council, Drumpf has proved himself to be heartless in addition to incompetent and megalomaniacal. I am not as much scared as enraged, and when I'm enraged, it's best to write. It's hard otherwise to make sense of this man destroying so much in only nine days.







* The picture of my grandmother and grandfather above is one of my favorites. My grandfather was a Christian Syrian from Homs and immigrated to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century with his family. While I realize that were he to do so today, he would actually be admitted to the country because of his religion, but I find it repellent that we, as a country, have gotten to the point where half of us have elected and continue to support a leader who is making a mockery of whatever ideals the country purports to have --  our country is after all, one of ideals and ideas, constantly dynamic and improved and improved. Messy and inclusive. We the people, etc.                                                                                    

**My troll, TwoBlackJet, asked me and other blog readers why we women marched the day after the inauguration and then engaged us in a sometimes amusing but ultimately frustrating conversation on the old blog. You can check it out by scrolling down to the post that has a bunch of comments, but you might want to pour yourself a shot of vodka, light up a joint or put on some music. When you're finished, I recommend a shower or some naked gardening.  If you don't have the time to waste, I'll just tell you that TwoBlackJet insisted that Drumpf has a big heart yet provided no details or examples to explain her/his/its convictions. While I understand it is the intent and nature of the troll to stir things up, I've seen similar comments and invective on conservative websites and social media threads, so I honestly DO want someone to answer these questions without doing what TwoBlackJet did which was to eventually go on a ridiculous personal tirade (provoked, I admit, by a condescending comment I made about her writing style -- a comment for which I made apologies)

***One of the blackest of hearts in Shakespeare is Iago from Othello whom I remember whispering evil things into Othello's ears. While I don't at all believe Drumpf to be an Othello, I do see his consigliere, Bannon, as a sort of Iago, twisting a naive and sick mind to bad. Whatever did happen to Iago, Reader? I can't remember.












#RESIST

Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

Years ago, I used the word shit during a speech at my first wedding. Yes, I had a first marriage. I have a past, as they say. Anyway, I used the word shit, and quickly apologized, mainly because my sweet grandmother was sitting right next to me. She laughed her musical laugh, and told me in her soft, southern accent that shit didn't take the Lord's name in vain and was therefore not a curse word. All of this leads me to actually taking the Lord's name in vain because what that means -- in vain -- is what I felt right after I watched this video about disabled children in Russia.

Jesus Christ! I said, and it's definitely in vain because these things are happening every single day and no greater power seems to be in power. In fact, it's difficult to not feel cynical and powerless, to not want to retreat into a cave, close yourself off. God works in mysterious ways, be damned. What can we possibly do to alleviate all of this suffering? Yes, this particular video hit particularly hard for obvious reasons. Not only is it horrifying, but it gives me perspective on my own relatively sumptuous life, and that perspective, however hard won, has been buried under a bunch of woe of late. I've always struggled with relativity -- yes, it's all relative, but then it's not. Suffering is in degrees, if you feel it as so, and my suffering -- hell, Sophie's suffering, is relatively miniscule compared to these children and young adults in Russia in the year of our Lord 2014.

Good god almighty! Jesus Christ!

I'm taking the Lord's name in vain, over and over and over.

Oliver asked me the other day whether I believe in hell. I told him that I did believe in hell but not as a place or a time or something fixed. There is hell all around you, I told him. As there is heaven. I told him I actually believed the words of Jesus Christ when He apparently said, The kingdom of God is at hand. I believe that to mean that it's here and now, the present moment -- the kingdom of God. At hand. Here. Now. The present moment. And hell? Apparently, it's in Russia at institutions for the disabled.

My Syrian Grandfather

Here is my Syrian grandfather and his family, in the early part of the twentieth century. I don't know whether they had left Syria, yet. My grandfather Charles is the young man on the far left, in the back row. I have always been enamored of the woman on the right's wasp waist. I believe she might be my Aunt Hafeezah, remembered for her plastic-covered furniture, dusty hard candies and wet kisses. My grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1907. I am told that he was very handsome, then, so handsome that as a lifeguard on Coney Island, he was picked to be an extra in a Valentino film. He died when I was sixteen, so my memories of him are not clouded. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes-- a lot -- even after lung cancer and the removal of part of his lung. He had strong and often angry views, would holler about them with his children (my mother and my aunts and uncle). He was loud, cursed in Arabic (in fact, the only Arabic word I know is shit, pronounced a guttural cutta). He pushed meat through a meat grinder attached to the kitchen table, grew eggplants and string beans in a backyard garden and called me Rosalita because I looked like the other side, my father, the Italian Catholic who married his youngest daughter.

This is a picture of my Mississippi grandmother and her family. My grandmother, Ida Mae, is the little one in the front, shielding her eyes from the sun. She grew up on a cotton farm in the Delta. All of her brothers had Biblical names, and I believe the baby in her mother's arms is my Aunt Bessy Lucille who married a man named Artie when they were around fourteen years old. Aunt Bessy and Uncle Artie were married for nearly seventy years, I think, and I remember they were always holding hands. My grandmother died when I was around 38 years old and she was 92. She was tall and graceful, soft-spoken and dear, the definition of a lady. She told us stories in her soft southern accent, stories of growing up in the south, how she was bitten by a snake, how her brother cut the spot, sucked the blood out and then ran through the fields to get her father. She had pale blue eyes, suffered from macular degeneration in her old age, had a tinkly, gentle laugh.

So, this man

met this girl

when he was a traveling salesman, peddling lingerie in the south. He married my grandmother when she was eighteen years old and took her back to Brooklyn, where she lived with him and his mother, at first. Ida Mae learned how to speak Arabic, cook Arabic food and then raised five children in a tiny brownstone in Brooklyn. When I asked her many years later why she'd married Grandpa when she was so young, she told me Well, honey, he was tall, dark and foreign.

I'm telling you this story now because I can't get them out of my mind these days, particularly as I watch and listen and read about the conflagration in Syria. I am one-quarter Syrian. That quarter is from the city of Homs which has been in the news of late as one of the tinder boxes of the civil war there. My grandfather Charles was a Christian Arab who fled persecution with his family more than a century ago, and he never let us forget whose side he was on, barking his views from the Barcalounger he seemed to be reclined in for my entire childhood. Israel, Palestine, Jews, Muslims, Christians -- these were words I heard over and over on those weekends my cousins and I ran through the house and outside to the garden, or sat and colored while our grandmother shaped raw lamb into kibbeh and our aunts and uncle argued.

I don't know what to think about the whole thing other than it's a fucking (there's really no other word) tragedy of a colossal scale. Pure madness. All of it. I can't say I feel comforted to see President Obama sitting grimly next to John McCain as they collude on how to persuade our legislature to vote that we strike Syria. I can't say that I agree with them. I don't see the sense of bombing as punishment. I can't say I feel neutral, either, when I read of hundreds of thousands of people brutally murdered, citizens of one country killing one other barbarically and millions displaced, wandering.

I remember the fighting and yelling in my own extended family, though, over what seems like the same old shit.

Pure madness. All of it.

I don't know if I have any relatives in Syria, but I imagine someone whose blood and genes I share is running around there, throwing rocks or bombs or fleeing with her children to neighboring countries or even receiving the gas meant to kill from her own government.

I don't know what to think.

غائط
(Arabic for shit)

Good Lord! -- Part 4,562,896 (with clarification)**

I bought these Cadbury candy-coated dark chocolate eggs today at Target and never imagined the colors would look like this. Good Lord! They're beautiful! I put them in a glass dish that belonged to my Mississippi grandmother, Ida Mae. My good friend D has been bugging me to tell more stories, to "anchor myself in my family," so I'll leave you with that tantalizing bit of family lore. Good Lord.

Oliver disappeared into the bathroom after school, and since we live in a tiny bungalow, I heard him talking from my bedroom where I stood folding laundry. I couldn't make out what he was saying, but he appeared animated, and I know he wasn't on the phone (he doesn't yet have one).  I called out, What are you doing? He yelled back, I'm in the bathroom! I heard some more conversation, so I said Who are you talking to? He yelled back something something, so I put down the five millionth pair of white socks, walked out into the hallway and said through the closed door, Who are you talking to?

SIRI!!!!!! he shouted.

Good Lord, I thought and walked back to fold the rest of the laundry.

**As the wise Ms. Moon pointed out in the comments, if he doesn't have a phone, how was Oliver speaking with Siri? Well, Reader, Oliver is not insane. He actually has an iPod Touch 5 which apparently does have Siri. Good Lord.