Finding Peace

As a student in Catholic school I was taught the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.

Recently I found a reference to this prayer in a book I was reading, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, in which its author, Eknath Easwaren, states that “when you use the prayer of St. Francis in meditation every day, you are driving the words deep into your consciousness. Eventually they will become an integral part of your personality, which means they will find constant expression in what you do, what you say and what you think.”

For me, I have found that saying the entire prayer to myself throughout the day, when I am waiting in line, stopped in traffic, feeling anxious or insecure gives me a sense of peace I would not otherwise have.

Here is the prayer. I hope it helps you too.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

 And the Answer is...

      Can a man be both sane and monstrous? Can reason and cruelty coexist? 

      

     According to author Lyra Cindelshade these were questions that  would haunt one man for the rest of his life. That man, Douglas Kelley, was the thirty -four year old American psychiatrist sent to Nuremberg in 1945 to evaluate the twenty-two surviving Nazi leaders of the Third Reich.

     Yes, I went to see the movie Nuremberg over the weekend, the movie in which an almost unrecognizable Russell Crowe played the part of Herman Goring, Hitler’s chosen successor. This movie had many disturbing moments, not least of which was a film shown in court of what was found in the concentration camps after they were liberated: an endless succession of starved and skeletal bodies.

     I had seen these images before. Not as a film but as pictures I found in my youth in a copy of Life magazine I discovered in the basement of my home. 

     I dare anyone not to find this movie and the questions it asked disturbing - the most central of which are these: Can it happen again? Can it happen here?

     And the answer in the movie, the answer that was so subtle it almost went unnoticed, is this: Only if we allow it.  

     

Fade to Black!

 I had a desultory day yesterday unable to stick to anything I started. I’m on vacation - actually a staycation since I hadn’t expected to have so much time off before returning to work later this month. (Oh, that’s right! I never told you that after leaving a company I loved, I returned to it a year later.)

Anyway, with so much time on my hands, I decided to binge watch HBO’s Sopranos. And I hated it! I know. I know every one else I talked to loved it. But except for all the Italian slang that brought me back to my childhood, I hated it. I hated all its criminality, brutality and senseless violence.

I hated it even as I managed to watch the first five seasons, but when they killed off -. Oh, I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but when they killed her, that was it for me. I couldn’t take another minute of it - except that I did watch the last ten minutes of the final episode because I’d heard that the ending, a simple fade to black, left many viewers confused. But for me that fade to black spoke volumes.

For Fred

 It has been a little more than six years since I published a blog post I called Oscar and Felix, a post in which I wrote about a friend of mine that read as follows:

A friend of mine tapped the window of my school bus one morning early last week...and said, 

“My son came to visit last night.”

“That was nice” I said.

“No it wasn’t,"  he said. "He had a cold and I got angry.' Don’t you know that at our age your mother and I are susceptible to colds?’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he wanted some soup.” 

I laughed.

“So I made him some soup and told him not to touch anything.”

By this time I felt as though I were playing Oscar to his Felix, and I wanted to move back a step or two, but I was sitting inside my bus and he was standing just outside it. 

“Fred,” I said, “does it ever surprise you when you hear about someone’s death? Someone who’s younger than you?” At 76, Fred is a year younger than me.

“I think about it all the time,” he said.

I do too.

Because Fred died last month, I would like to honor him here. 

Fred was a retired Army sergeant and a Vietnam Vet. He and I used to talk about Vietnam a lot. But mostly we talked about what came after - for each of us. 

Upon his return from Vietnam, Fred began to drink heavily until his family, seeing what was happening, intervened. He then began group therapy at a local VA hospital, which became his salvation.  

Fred was my first friend when I went to work at a new

location. What I want to say to him is: I miss you, and thank you. We will meet again - in death and again in friendship.

 

"If I Can Help Somebody..."

It was Friday night, the beginning of a long weekend culminating with Martin Luther King Jr Day, so I decided to watch a movie.

I chose a documentary called I am MLK Jr, which celebrates Dr. King's career as a civil rights activist, starting with the day he happened to be in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to enter the bus, pay the fare, exit the bus, re-enter the bus's back door, and take a seat at the rear - the only section open to Blacks. 

The documentary shows news reels of the day Bull Connor viciously turned fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators, many of them students. It highlights the day Dr. King stood in front of more than 200,000 people in Washington to tell them about his dream.

By 1968, Dr. King, who had been receiving death threats to himself and his family every day for years was so exhausted and so depressed he decided not to speak to the sanitation workers in Memphis who were fighting for their rights. His friends, however, convinced him to at least appear.

On the plane to Memphis, King, who had been beaten many times, stabbed, and threatened, told a reporter that in the past he had been so afraid that he had yielded to the real possibility and inevitability of death. 

When he spoke that day, telling his listeners it is the right of every American to fight for their rights, he was, according to Travis Smiley, one of the documentary's narrators, looking around, his eyes darting from one person to another because he knew "his days were numbered," King told the crowd he "did not know what would happen now... But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountain top. I've seen the promised land...I may not get there with you (but) I don't mind (because) mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

And with that last word, and without finishing his speech, he turned and collapsed into the arms of his friend, Dr. Abernathy. 

By the next evening however, he was "jovial and clowning and free...He was in a playful mood."  He was  standing on the balcony outside his hotel room when someone reminded him he was expected at dinner soon. Dr, King called down to Jesse Jackson, saying, "It's time to go to dinner, man. Get dressed," When Jackson responded, "The prerequisite for eating is not a tie but an appetite," Dr. King laughed - and a bullet struck his body.

As I listened to these words of Travis Smiley: "We have no control over when we die, where we die, or how we die. All we have control over is what we die for," I listened too, to the words of a song playing in the background, the one about helping somebody, and realized that, although I am not Black and have never had to suffer the way any Black man, woman or child has had to suffer in this country, I have suffered and if I can use my suffering "to help somebody, then my living will not be in vain."     

If You See a Good Fight...

  

A friend told me recently about a movie too few people have seen, a movie about a man too few people have ever heard of. The film, The Story of Vernon Johns, is about a minister who was a civil rights advocate before Martin Luther King Jr. rose to the pulpit, before the hideous death of Emmett Till, and before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Dr. Johns, who was proficient in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German was a man who fought against both white Jim Crow laws in the south and black indifference to change, a man who deeply believed that "if you see a good fight, get in it."  

In 1947 Johns told the well-to-do parishioners of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that "the nastiest and deadliest sin in the world is the hatred between the races. This innane and foolish hatred threatens to devour civilization like a moth caught in a hell fire."

In a sermon given after the death of a young black boy who was shot in the back for allegedly resisting arrest, Johns told the congregation that murderers act with impunity knowing the black witnesses would not come forward. "By not coming forward," he asserted, "you have become accessories to murder."

After Johns, who advertised the topic of his sermons on a bulletin board outside the church, decided to give a sermon declaring that "It's Safe to Murder Negroes;" after he is threatened with a lynching, after a cross is burned in front of his church, Johns decides to give the sermon anyway.

If you are wondering what happened to this fearlessly courageous man, I think that, like me, you will have to watch the movie, which stars James Earl Jones, and is currently streaming on Appletv. Or if you have Amazon prime, it will direct you to Freevee where you can watch it with commercials. Either way, it is a movie well worth your time!

 

 

Rise and Shine

 

For the past year or two, I have had trouble reading. Not trouble reading, actually. Just trouble finding a book I wanted to finish. For the past year or two, I’ve picked up, started, and then discarded more books than I can count.

That is until I rediscovered the kind of books I truly enjoy – books by women, about women. Right now, I’m delighting in a book by Anna Quindlen called Rise and Shine.

It’s a story about a woman named Bridget who lives in Manhattan and works in the Bronx. (Why is Manhattan called Manhattan and the Bronx called the Bronx?)

It is also a story about a young, black girl (called Princess Margaret) who lives in the Bronx and goes to an exclusive, private high school in Manhattan. When asked if she found it difficult “to ricochet between a school in which most of the students consider it a tragedy if a cashmere sweater had a moth hole and a neighborhood” in which the housing project smells – well, unpleasant, Princess Margaret answers, “It’s pretty easy…You’re just two different people. One there and the other here. And you have the whole ride on the train to turn from one into the other.”

And, although the story is about the dissimilarities between the very rich and the very poor, our protagonist likes to revel in the similarities. Like how from the top floor window of the projects, the Bronx looks every bit as magical at night as Manhattan does atop Fifth Avenue.

Now let me give you some examples of why I love books written about and by women via an excerpt or two from the book. While describing the poor odors in the projects, Bridget says: “Fortunately, the community room smells most of the time like frying chicken and cake because of the elderly woman who lives next door and who salves her loneliness by cooking as though her children are still home, or at least likely to visit. I love the smells of grease and sugar; if I were to create a signature perfume, I would call it Donut Shop and would smell just like the community room…”

I love it! And I’d be willing to bet that men would love it too.

Another example involves Bridget’s older sister Meghan, who is the popular anchor on a morning television show. The first time Bridget heard her sister announce the name of the show, Rise and Shine, she said it reminded her of the way Meghan woke her up every morning when she was little. Those words, she said, “sounded so promising, as if this would be the day: the day to ride a bike without training wheels, to make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding, to persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.” Or to be. Simply to be! 

 

 

1001 Books

I saw this book club, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, on social media and decided to join, even though I thought that at my age, I’d better start reading a lot faster!

But when I saw this month’s selection, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, I changed my mind - then changed it again, mostly because its members meet in person and not on Zoom.

 I read In Cold Blood back in the late Sixties, not long after it was published. I read it and never forgot it. 

It’s a story about two men who walked through the unlocked door of a farmhouse in western Kansas in the middle of the night on November 15, 1959, and brutally murdered an entire family, Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their two teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy.

“Two worlds exist in this country," Capote said in the 2005 movie Capote. “The quiet conservative life, and the life of those two men. The underbelly. The criminally violent.” (Or as I would put it, the sane and the obscene.) “And those worlds converged that bloody night.”

To write the book, Capote and his friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, interviewed hundreds of people and took more than 8,000 pages of notes. The result was the first “nonfiction novel,” and an instant success.

However, although Capote finished the book in three years, he had to wait another three, (until the killers were hung) to release it.

While interviewing Perry Smith, one of the two killers, Capote discovered that both he and the killer had mothers who neglected and mistreated them.

“It’s like Perry and I grew up in the same house,” Capote told Lee, “and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.” 

Or did he? 

Writing that book “changed my life,” he said. “It altered my view about almost everything.” 

It also interfered with his relationship with his partner, made him jealous of Lee whose book won the Pulitzer Prize, increased his intake of both alcohol and drugs, kept him from completing another book, and contributed to his death.

"If I have to leave here without understanding you,” Capote told the imprisoned Smith, who he both "fell in love with” and used to further his career, “the world will see you as a monster.” 

But, in trying to deny the monster in Smith, Capote, I believe, unleashed the monster inside himself.

“

The Movie Tar

 Even though the movie had started, it was dark in the theater when I entered. So dark I had to put my arms in front of me to get my bearings, which is how I felt throughout the movie because this movie, Tar, felt more like a puzzle than a film.

 In the first scene, which runs for almost twenty minutes, Lydia Tar, played by Cate Blanchette, is being interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. Throughout the interview, we see Tar, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, as accomplished, brilliant and, for want of a better word, haughty. In the second scene, with a fellow orchestra conductor (a male this time), she moves beyond haughty to condescending. And in the third scene Tar is teaching a seminar at Julliard where she berates a young student after he tells her he’s “just not that into Bach.” This time she comes off as bitchy.

It is at this point that the movie begins to feel like a puzzle. There are too many questions. For instance: a woman named Christa is mentioned. But who is she and why is she at risk?  And why, as I watch Tar progress through the movie, do I feel as though I am watching a skein of yarn unravel?

The answers come slowly. At first, as guesses. And then with an undeniable certainty as the story reaches its incredibly dramatic climax.

And I am left gaping.  

Till, the Movie

 

“Hate is a virus in the blood…”                                     

Roy Wilkins

 

I heard the words quoted above while watching the movie Till, a story about a Black boy from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and lynched while visiting his cousins in Mississippi in 1955 because he whistled at a white woman

This powerful movie begins by showing us the excitement and vulnerability of a 14-year-old boy as he gets ready for his trip. Three days later, Emmett was dead. 

After his body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River, authorities in that area tried to have him buried anonymously. It was Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who insisted her son’s mangled body be returned to Chicago and the casket remain open during the public viewing.

During the movie, Medgar Evers, who accompanied Emmett’s mother to the trial that followed one month later, said the federal government was trying to pass a law that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

“It wasn’t passed until this year,” I whispered to my daughter, who was sitting beside me in the theater.

Why had it taken so long?  I wondered. As I sat there watching the movie, I thought about the noose I’d seen on the Capitol steps during last year’s January 6 riots and wondered if lawmakers had to experience hate for themselves before they acted.     

“Hate is a virus in the blood.” Wilkins words reverberated in my head throughout the rest of the movie.

“Does this story need to be told again?” someone has asked. The answer is “yes.”

Emmett Till was only 35 days older than I was in 1955, and I have known about his murder almost since the day it happened. His brutal death is a story that must be told again and again and passed down until racial violence and injustice in this country are finally eradicated.

 

 

Termoli, San Giacomo, Venice and Padua!

 From Rome to Termoli with its view of the Adriatic,

we drove “just over the hill” to San Giacomo degli Schiavoni, the town with the long name and only three streets. The town with a population (today) of less than 1500, where my father lived between the ages of three and eighteen. We went to find the house he built in the Sixties.

Afterward, we drove to Venice. 

I didn't like Venice. I didn't like the canal. It was just a body of water, and I'd seen better bodies of water in Paris six years earlier, and in Switzerland as we drove passed the mountain lakes near Luzerne. 

But then we went to the old part of the city, to that part of the city that had no water and no tourists either. To that part of Venice (called Mestre) where I ate smoked salmon and (would you believe) Philadelphia cream cheese on a croissant, and where I bought a blue dress I fell (quite literally, but didn't get hurt!) in love with.

Then we went to Padua because I wanted to pray in the church dedicated to my patron, Saint Anthony. 

And finally, we started the long drive back to Darmstadt!

   

Arrivederci Roma!

 We have spent our five days in Rome and have just arrived at a seaside city close to the town my father grew up in. It is heavenly here, much nicer than it was in Rome.

Oh, Rome has all the sights, all of what Irving Stone once called “the agony and the ecstasy.” It has the Vatican:

The Trevi Fountain: 

a view from the top of the Spanish Steps:

 And, of course, the Colosseum:

But Rome was hot,  hot, hot - which is why all my photos were taken at night- and this little city, called Termoli, has little more than a beautiful view of the Adriatic, and a delicious sea breeze!     

Florence!

My pictures say it all! 

Basilica di Santa Croce
(Basilica of the Holy Cross)

 

Michelangelo's Tomb
(inside the Basilica)

The River Arno at night

a typical street

The River Arno again

the view from our front door

a wider street

Dante!

On the Beach

I’m on a beach. In Delaware. A mini-vacation before the longer one I’ll begin next week. I’m sitting under an umbrella, most of the time with my eyes closed, listening to the voices of strangers while a breeze skips across my skin, moving from one shoulder to the other.

There are people all around me - an older woman with short gray hair sitting alone with a book; an Asian family of three - mother, father and a teenage son who never leaves their side;  a young black man with long thin locks that frame his face majestically; and a man behind me talking incessantly on a cell phone, his voice rising and falling with the cadence of the waves, a voice I’m surprised I miss after he packs up and leaves.

Children screaming. Women laughing. All of it muffled by the mantra of the waves that lull me into bliss, until finally, I pick myself up to head home, to finish packing for a trip across this ocean to Germany and beyond.

ELVIS, a Movie Review

 

. I've seen Elvis impersonators before -thin men and fat men, men in white jumpsuits or black leather jackets, and I’ve disliked them all. But Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film version of the king is nothing short of electrifying.

The two-hour and thirty-nine-minute movie, which covers every facet of Elvis’ life and career from his birth in Tupelo, Mississippi to his death in Memphis, is narrated by Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks), Elvis’ manager who tries to convince us that he “is not the villain in his story,” when, in fact, he is.  

But before Colonel Parker, there was Elvis standing on a stage in one of his earliest performances. When the girls begin to scream, Elvis turns to his guitarist, Scotty Moore, and asks “Why are they yelling?” “The wiggle,” Moore answers, and, at that moment, ELVIS was born. And in a scene that is nothing less than genius, we see how and where that wiggle originated.

During most of the movie (to which I took my thirteen-year-old granddaughter Chloe, who loved it. Indeed, when I turned to whisper something to her, she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen), I found it difficult to remember that it was Austin Butler on the screen and not Elvis himself.

Unlike the Beatles, Elvis never made political statements. But when Robert Kennedy was assassinated during rehearsals for the 1968 Comeback Special and, with the memory of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., two months earlier, still fresh in his mind, Elvis sang “If I Can Dream” with a passion and purpose that only Butler could match.  

Throughout the movie, Parker tries to lay the blame for Elvis’ death on anything and anyone except Parker himself   -  Elvis’ heart, his drug use, and even the love Elvis felt coming from his audience,  one that could not sustain him when he wasn’t on stage.

But, if this movie begins with the circus-clown-like antics of Parker, it ends with the real Elvis on stage singing “Unchained Melody” in concert in June of 1977, just weeks before his death. While listening and watching Elvis sing this song, I realized that Elvis’ greatest love was his love for music.  

 Dear Elvis, my memoir of love and loss, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE      

Still Driving After All These Years

 

Back in the late '90's I was living in the mother-in-law suite of my youngest daughter's house. While I lived downstairs, Jessi lived upstairs with her husband and four kids. I had been living there ever since I called her one day and told her how much I hated the job I had, working at a bank.

“Quit,” she said, “and come live with us Instead of working, you can do all the cooking.”

Back then, Jessi was driving a school bus, and for a while, that arrangement was working. Or, at least, I thought it was working until the day she came home and told me the school district was looking for another driver. I told her she was crazy. I told her there was no way I was going to start driving a school bus.

“What? Why? It’s easy,” she said.

“But those buses. They’re so – long.”

“You really don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “You just have to drive the front of the bus. The back always follows the front.”

I laughed at that and told her again she was crazy. But, after thinking about it, I decided to try. And right away I loved it. I loved the hours- the early mornings and late afternoons and having the rest of the day to myself. I loved listening to the sound of children’s voices and sitting up high with the big boys. I also loved the benefits. 

But after twelve years - by which time I was 72, I decided to retire. I put in the paperwork, then changed my mind. Luckily, I was able to find another job in another district. I’ll only work for a year or two, I thought back then.

I just finished my ninth year there. This time I fell in love with my co-workers. But sometime in the middle of those nine years, I moved with my daughter and son-in law to a house twenty-five miles away, and lately that distance has been getting to me. Not to mention the increase in the price of gas.

Now, I’ve found a job driving for a district whose bus garage is only nine minutes from my home and I’m going to work for a year.

Maybe two.

But, no more.

I think.

Postscript December, 2024: 

I worked there for only one year, and then I returned to where I fallen in love with my co-workers. To where I was happy. And yes, I am still driving after all those years!

Automatic Weapon

 Like almost everyone

I was shocked

after hearing

about the shootings

in Buffalo

and Uvalde.

It made me think  

about a place

I visited not long ago –

a church in Birmingham

where four little girls

were murdered

by men with

guns,

and bombs –

by men with

guns

and bombs -

and 

hate!

 

 

Such a Fun Age

 

It's a cold Saturday morning outside my home, just twenty-five miles north of Philadelphia, and I am about to sit in a chair in my room with a good book open in front of me.

The book, Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid, is a novel I began yesterday. It’s a story that starts with a late-night phone call made by a young mother to her babysitter, asking the woman to take her two-year-old child to a grocery store “to get her out of the house for a while” because “we had an incident with a broken window.” and doesn’t want the child to see the police" who are on their way.

Once at the grocery store, the sitter, a young black woman named Emira, is confronted by a security guard who accuses her of kidnapping the precocious child, a child who asks questions like “Where is that squirrel’s mama?” and "Why don't we know that lady?" and who, according to Emira, is “always at the edge of a tiny existential crisis.”  

In the second chapter, we learn that what the child’s mother didn’t tell Emira is that the window was broken because of something her husband, a news anchor in the city of Philadelphia (of all places), said on the air. It’s a remark that is “slightly racist.”  Is there such a thing as slightly racist,” I wonder as I get ready to settle in to a long afternoon of reading and, hopefully, some intermittent napping. 

Dear Elvis, Kirkus Review

The following is a review of my memoir, Dear Elvis:

McCloe presents a heartwarming memoir with fictionalized elements about dealing with the death of the man she loves by writing letters addressed to Elvis Presley. The author tells the story of how she, a middle-aged divorced woman, fell in love with Don, a widower. They met at work, where they both drove school buses for a living, and became close friends, lovers, and then just close friends again before Don’s death, due to heart failure. At the start of this work, Don has already died and McCloe is coping with her pain by writing missives in a diary, begging the spirit of Elvis in the afterlife to pass along messages to Don. This correspondence chronicles her feelings as she manages such emotions as denial, anger, heartbreak, hope, and finally, peace. She also begins a friendship with a priest named Father Chris (a fictional, composite character), who encourages her to find a way to move on. As the author reveals more about Don’s life and their connection, Father Chris affirms her suffering while also urging her to memorialize Don in her own way, and live her life in a manner that would make Don proud. Her letters then directly address Elvis, asking him about his life and telling how his music career positively affected her as she attempts to find catharsis. Over the course of this book, McCloe’s prose is relatable, likable, and highly sincere; she’ll make readers think about how one can easily take one’s relationships—and, indeed, one’s life—for granted. The changing format of the letters keeps the narrative engaging and propels the story forward in an offbeat way. This book will likely appeal most to those who are coming to terms with personal grief, as it accurately conveys the conflicting emotions that come with the grief journey, while also honing in on how one always has the ability to find joy again. A grounding and deeply human take on love and loss.                                                                                                                                                     Kirkus Reviews                             

                              

   Dear Elvis is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE      

                                              

Two Days Before Christmas

I'm feeling lazy today although I'm almost ready for Christmas. I put up the tree last week and mailed all the cards - the guys at work were sweet. One came into a crowded break room as usual, took his seat beside me, and whispered,“Thank  you for the card,” A young driver, who always treats me as though I were a princess, shyly called me from the room to thank me; and a third, who is always sweet, simply said “thank you.”

Anyway, all I have left to do is wrap the presents, of which there are few, because this year, we are doing a pollyanna in a family that seems to be growing exponentially, and because I am trying to save money so I can finally retire.

And so I am just sitting here staring at my tree, wishing the presents were wrapped, and thinking about a family that grew by just one more than two thousand years ago.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!