Corporeal Politics

photograph by S. Herman

On Friday afternoon I joined a group of women from the Catholic community in my neighborhood and visited the Islamic Center of Los Angeles in our neighborhood for prayer. I confess that I was reluctant to do so for selfish reasons having to do with organized religion, but after brooding about it for a day or two, I realized that my discomfort was just that -- discomfort bred by ego. I was struck, especially, by one of the "twenty lessons from the twentieth century" that I posted the other day.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Corporeal politics.

The mosque was filled, crowded with members there practicing their religion and with people from the community of diverse faiths, including a contingent of Latino men. We were there to pray with our Muslim brothers and sisters and to show solidarity with the Muslim people of our community and world, particularly in the face of the Trump administration's oppression of civil liberties.Those of us who chose to do so wore appropriate head coverings and went into the room for women, while others sat in the vestibule. The imam led all of us in prayer and then gave a beautiful talk about inclusivity, emphasizing that we are all God's people and intent on peace everywhere in the world. Afterward, the women of the mosque invited us into the kindergarten room to share in treats.

It was a profound experience for me, underscoring my conviction that we must continue this uncomfortable and difficult work to resist those who would divide this country and go against every ideal that we have ever professed.

Here's a wonderful and prescient poem by the great suffragette, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who wrote it in 1914. I listened to and read it this morning at the Brainpickings website. You can read more about Ella's exhortation against silence here. Listen to the poem, too.

PROTEST

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticize oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and child-bearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.

Ella Cox Wheeler (1914)

#resist

How We Do It, Part LIX in a series

We live on a markedly diverse street with people of all races, nationalities, religious and sexual identities. African American, Caucasian, Korean, Philippino, Chinese, Orthodox Jew, mixed race, mermaid. Until this morning I have wondered whether we ever really see one another.

"I admire your courage, dedication and great love, " my neighbor said as I walked across the lawn, lifted Sophie into the car and twisted my head toward him to avoid her head banging mine. I had already loaded the wheelchair, bashed my head once. My tail of years glinted in the sun blue green. Swish.

The sea. To see.

He was in his pajama pants, an older African-American man walking his very old and very slow dog. He has chastised me in the past for not keeping my own on a leash. I see him daily. 

"Thank you, " I said.

That's really all it takes, good people, to see us through.

Speaking of Russians (see yesterday's post)

This morning, Oliver screamed for me to come and look because the workers who have been constructing a McMansion directly behind our home were cutting down the old trees that lined our property. These trees are on their side of the property line, so they are certainly free to do whatever they'd like, but several months ago, when I'd objected to them cutting down those that line OUR property. the developer assured me that he would let me know when any more tree-cutting would happen.

I wrote him an email that expressed my dismay and called him out on his lack of communication and disregard for our community. He replied with his own email, calling me nasty and antagonistic.

Okay.

Like the proverbial fly to shit, I replied and disagreed that I'd been nasty and antagonistic, that I'd only expressed my dismay that he'd neglected to inform me when he was going to cut down the old trees and that I was concerned about the lack of privacy that would result.

The developer -- let's call him Mr. Potter, shall we -- then had a mini-tirade and, in a nutshell, called me a communist seeking to dictate what sort of changes he should make to his property. Because, you know -- communists do love trees.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. 

I told Mr. Potter that if discussion with members of one's community about radical changes to one's neighborhood constituted communism, then I was a proud member. I signed the email:

товарищ Элизабет

I really did.*

Then I said, Mr. Potter, you're nothing but a scurvy little spider. **

Not really.

Then I riffled through my Barbie closet for this little green communist cap with the red star that one of my roomates in college brought back from Communist China for me many years ago. I thought it'd be fun to parade around in my backyard naked with only the cap and perhaps scare the workers from continuing their work on the second story of the McMansion. I'll come up with a system to do the same when the McMansion goes up for sale. Mr. Potter will have to come up with some kind of disclosure to the future owners of the $3 million dollar heap (yes, that's how much these houses cost and are TRIPLE the size of ours) that a Naked Communist Woman lives directly behind them, and she's closer in form to a Russian gulag operator than Madame Butterfly.






That lonely outpost on the Arctic Circle is looking ever more attractive. I hope Slava will welcome my children and goofy dog as well.















* That's Russian for Comrade Elizabeth


** I'm referring to George Bailey calling Mr. Potter that in It's a Wonderful Life

Citizen's Arrest!

I'm not sure I've complained here on the old a moon, worn as if it had been a shell about the McMansions going up in my neighborhood. What happens is that one day you wake up to hear enormous groaning sounds and crashes, look out your back door and see an 80-year old perfectly respectable cottage flattened. This can happen in under two hours, as can the knocking down of equally as old and perfectly healthy sycamore trees. What goes up in their place are gigantic modern dwellings that might fit into a wooded landscape but look preposterous on the postage stamp lots. The fact that these McMansions dwarf the houses around them, have balconies that allow the owners to peer down into our humble backyards and not onto sweeping ocean vistas or have interiors that quite emphatically mimic Ikea display rooms doesn't prevent people from coming in and spending upwards of $2.9 million on them. There's one going up just behind my house right this very moment, and nearly every morning when I open the back door to let my dog out, I am literally assailed by the sounds of the workers' music. They play the music loud enough to muffle the sounds of their drills and hammers and all manner of construction noise, so you can imagine how loud that must be. I have a neighbor who lives right next door to them who has three little children, one a baby not a year old. We have commiserated over the music for months. No stranger to discrimination, as an Orthodox Jew she was very sensitive to what she called the workers' culture and felt uncomfortable asking them to turn down their -- I'll be blunt -- mariachi music. Let's face it. Most of the construction work in this city is done by men of Latin origin, and when they work these long, brutal hours putting up McMansions, they listen to Latin radio. I actually like mariachi music but not at 7:00 in the morning and onward for eight hours. If Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Otis Redding and the Byrds were standing on the top floor playing music for eight hours, I'd probably go insane as well, but there's something particularly hellish for me about the incessant buoyancy and happiness of mariachi music untempered by, let's say, something mournful or blue.

Anyhoo.

Oliver has gone out with his megaphone and yelled at them to turn it down, to no avail. I've walked around the corner and given them my best uni-brow glare, but workers on McMansions could give a damn about women and their issues. I've thought about running around and doing what Gomer Pyle called a citizen's arrest*, but mostly I've just stewed in my own house.

This morning, I opened my bleary eyes to hear it reverberating even over the usual crows who cackle so loudly some mornings that I fantasize about shotguns. I emailed my neighbor with the subject line Have you made a pitcher of margaritas, yet? and she replied that she is thrilled to have my baby continue sleeping in a closet. Dark humor is the great uniter and binds me to people tighter even than blood. I imagine my neighbor and I, armed with shotguns, could bring down some crows and blow out some boomboxes as well. This morning, she gave me the number of a police officer in our neighborhood who she said is very personable and would respond if I called. It sounded very Andy Griffiithish (I mean, this is LA!), and I won't mince words but admit that I'm not exactly a law enforcement fan. There's something about all those mirrored sunglasses and the knee-high shiny black boots that give me the creeps, but I digress. I made the call.

Reader, Barney Fife (that's what I'll call him) told me he'd look into it and get back to me. An hour or so later, I realized that all I heard was the wind through the palms, the tinkle of the chimes on my porch and the chittering of the insane squirrels that romp on the wires that criss-cross the air. There might have been just the faintest sound of a leaf blower somewhere and the whir of a helicopter because it wouldn't be Los Angeles without that constant drone,but otherwise -- silence. And Officer Fife had actually left me a message that he'd stopped by and asked the workers to turn down or off their music.

Next thing you know, I'm going to be bringing brownies round to the police station and a pitcher of margaritas to the workers at the McMansion.






*Just in case you forgot about it:

This Is Also Los Angeles With Sophie

I took Sophie with me to the place across La Brea where they make a sparkly soda drink with lemon and thyme. We hobbled along, Sophie leaning into me, my too-big shoulder bag slipping down, my mouth set as it so often is until I consciously think relax. While we stood at the corner and waited for the light to change, Sophie kept trying to take steps. She can keep walking, but she can't stand still. I wished for a person in her life that might bring her on a walk, play with her for a couple of hours, give her and me and us a break. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll always be paying someone to do this, so it is -- in the end -- a matter of money. I've tamped down that frustration for a lot of years, When's the last time anyone offered? Never. I can't remember. I make those excuses. It's hard. I make those justifications. Everyone has their thing. I am understanding (they just don't know because how could they?) until I am not (no one gives a damn). On the way, I skirted the corner because a man in a bikini top and a pair of blue jeans was dancing around the Lenin statue, and he made me nervous. Every time I turned my head to check, he was standing and staring at us, staring at Sophie and her awkward gait. I should have whipped around and taken his photo, a #dontstarepaparazzi, but I had Sophie, and the drink and my too-big bag. He followed behind me a bit, two-stepping, me nervous, hustling Sophie along. A gardener came out from behind a hedge, and I asked him to keep an eye on the guy in the bikini top, and at first I thought he didn't understand English, but his voice was muffled behind a face-mask. He nodded his head and waved Sophie and me on, turned around to face the dancing man, was resolute like a sentinel with a pair of clippers.

McMansions in Los Angeles: Curses and Imprecations, Part 2

So, in lieu of having a heart attack, I thought it might be more constructive to document the bullshit going on in our neighborhood. This morning, the 75 year old house directly behind us was razed to the ground in about two hours. Disgusting, right? Now the lovely people who are doing this are uprooting trees that line the three borders. I snapped that picture from the front of the used-to-be-1924-house -- it stood where you see all the dirt; that's the driveway that the guy is sweeping, that red peak is our garage on the other side of the fence. At some point after 12:00, when I was leaving the wonderful Dr. G's office (who provides us with our medical marijuana card! It's been one year and we had to have it renewed!), I received a very tearful call from Oliver. He was beside himself, in agony, really, because they're cutting down all the big trees!

I still had to drive all the way home, and I did so wishing that my southern Italian ancestors would somehow materialize and take care of things. When I reached the street where the devastation was occuring, I made out who were workers and who was a boss. I was tempted to take a photo of the guy in charge, but to tell you the truth, I felt a frisson of not just disgust but fear. He was --- well --- large. In every way. He was smoking a big, very fat cigar and talking on his cell phone when I pulled up in my sexy white Mazda and rolled down my window.

So, are you in charge here? I asked in my lacrosse/disabled kid/homeschool mother voice.

Reader, he didn't even take the cigar out of his mouth, and like someone out of central casting just down the road in Hollywood, he said Yep, and I said, It would have been nice if you'd let us know you were taking out the trees and the fence, and he said nothing and shrugged his big ass shoulders and continued talking on the phone so I rolled up my window, put the pedal to the metal and tore around the corner and into my own driveway where I proceeded to race to my computer with my sons and google stinkbomb.

Just kidding on the last part.

An Open Letter to Councilman Tom LaBonge and Carolyn Ramsey, Chief of Staff

Dear Mr.LaBonge,

I am writing you this letter in an emotional state and understand quite clearly that writing anything in an emotional state is often not the wisest course of action when one is trying to get something done. However, as a mother of a severely disabled young adult and two active teen-aged boys, I get things done regardless of emotion. Today, for perhaps the hundredth thousandth time, I took my daughter for a stroll up to a neighborhood restaurant on La Brea. We live in the Hancock Park Adj. neighborhood, a neighborhood of near-one hundred year old modest California bungalows housing diverse families, the elderly and, in our case, a disabled nineteen year old.

As you can see in the above photo, taken one block from my house, many of the curbs are NOT cut away to provide access for those using wheelchairs. I have lived in this neighborhood for nearly eighteen years, and on this particular street for fourteen. Curb cuts are random in our neighborhood and have been for years, despite repeated calls and inquiries about getting it done. Is there a method to the madness of how these things are done?

It's one thing to struggle with a stroller and a small child up and down these curbs -- I would say that in that case, it's a convenience to have the cuts. However, maneuvering an 80-pound individual in a 75 pound vehicle up and down, in some cases, an 8-inch curb is near impossible. A person with disabilities in a wheelchair would probably find it impossible to do so. The alternative, which I do regularly, is to walk in the street and just take my chances that the cars in both directions will give me room, that someone parked on the side of the road won't open his car door into my daughter or that the person driving fast in his luxury vehicle won't honk his horn and make an obscene gesture while I do my best to stay out of his way. Get out of the road! he cried, today, as I struggled over potholes and dodged those prickly seedpods that litter the streets this time of year.

Hence, my emotion. I thought, today, that the construction just down the street, the herculean Subway to the Sea Project, will probably happen faster, and we've been told that the work there will be completed in ten years. I sure hope that when I'm nearing sixty years old and can hop a train at the end of my street to ride to the beach that I'll be able to get my near-thirty year old daughter there, too.

Please, Mr. LaBonge, get it done. Get the dang curb cuts put in throughout the neighborhood, not just randomly (particularly in the -- ahem -- richer parts of the neighborhood, where I've noted they have been completed for years).

Please, get it done.

Respectfully, your constituent who voted for you,

Elizabeth Aquino
Los Angeles

Summer Night Still Life with Boys

You thought I was going to break my run of 2,714 posts, didn't you? Well, the evening is waning out here in the perfectly perfect summer weather of Los Angeles, The Brothers are playing some godforsaken game outside with the other boys of the 'hood, a game that forces Oliver to wear full lacrosse gear and a wrestler mask. There are pillows on the grass to shield the boy who jumps over the masked boy, and there's a lot of laughing, the kind of boy guffawing that makes me smile but also makes me feel sort of bewildered. The reason why I've neglected to post here is because I spent the day in Long Beach with Oliver at The Irlen Institute. It was all very cool and very interesting, and Oliver qualifies or shows potential promise in having some of his reading difficulties ameliorated with this method. I don't feel like explaining it all here, but I did promise Ms. Irlen that I would write a more lengthy post at some point, so stay tuned.

Reader, what did you do today?

Summer, Day 36

 Boys in the 'hood

Losing community

Bridge Studio: Jason Schmidt
via NY Times

Another good neighbor friend called me today to break the news that he's moving his family to Irvine. Their only child, a boy exactly Oliver's age, is one of several boys in our neighborhood whose families are either moving up and out into much bigger houses and fancier 'hoods or the opposite: simpler lives in smaller areas. This boy and the other boy live across the street and around the corner, and for the ten years we've lived in this house, our neighborhood has resembled Maybery of Andy Griffith more than a couple of residential streets in an enormous city.

I cried in the car in the parking lot of Trader Joe's when he told me. I cried because it means my boys won't have easy access to neighbors' houses -- the banging of doors as they come in and out -- the tribes on the trampolines and the wars in the front yards. Sure, new people will move in, but relationships take years, and most of these homes are small, starter ones -- I'd anticipate young couples with babies and toddlers moving in, not tweens and teen-agers. The trouble with living in this city -- for us -- is that we are not particularly upwardly mobile and most of the people around us are. People don't blink an eye at spending millions of dollars on homes and hundreds of thousands on private schools. They have the means to sequester themselves behind boxwood walls with pools and media rooms, and settle on sending their children to schools that are in distant neighborhoods. I'd venture to say that they don't live in neighborhoods but in beautiful houses on beautiful streets.

If they don't have the means, they have the sense to move out and beyond to where their lives could be simpler, easier on the foot, the planet and the pocket. I wish they wouldn't, but I understand their choices.

I'm wondering about all of this, feeling sad and not a little trapped. Even if I could afford it, I don't want a bigger house or a fancier neighborhood. I love my house and I love my neighborhood. I don't want my children to go to exclusive private schools in far-away neighborhoods and be surrounded by those who only know huge privilege.

 But I don't want to be left behind, either.

(I loved the photo above from this wonderful article.)

Vigilante on an adaptive tricycle

Just another Sunday afternoon in the 'hood.