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Bessie

I have been thinking about the invisible among us.   Bessie was the maid at the boarding house, owned by Mrs. Harris, where I spent vacations from boarding school in England.   At that time, I never considered her or thought much about what her life might be like, but a few months ago I was reading Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a novel about a char woman who saves her money to go to the House of Dior to buy a beautiful gown.   I thought of Bessie. Bessie would have never dreamt of such an adventure. She was old and walked in a stiff-ankled stomp.   She was skinny with grizzled hair that escaped her cap, part of the uniform she wore, a black dress under a white apron—an unkempt imitation of the maids in the estates of England at the turn of the 20 th century. She lived in the underbelly of the house and served as cook and housekeeper. I never bothered to find out exactly where Bessie “lived”, where she slept or passed her off time, if she had any, but she may have had a room in the base
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Witch Hunts

The first time I landed in the United States, I flew in to Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in New York. As I waited for my luggage it was hard to miss a huge billboard exhorting us to KEEP GOD IN AMERICA.   Was God about to hop the next flight out? Over the years I have come to realize how ubiquitous this kind of easy religiosity is in the United States.   It is easy to proclaim KEEP GOD IN AMERICA, but what does that entail? I say easy because it seems to require little more than spouting simplistic aphorisms and feeling self-righteous.   It parrots mindless adages about morality and good and evil without actually considering the actions that would make them meaningful.   It is on a par with platitudes like “America, love it or leave it.” “America right or wrong.”   How do people think they are contributing to the well-being of their country or themselves with simplistic jingoism, be it religious or nationalistic? Watching some films from the 1950s, I would guess that this kind of piet
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Those Pesky Women

  The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans regardless of sex, has been shuffling through the halls of power, waiting to become part of the U.S. Constitution for 99 years. According to the Women’s League of Voters, Alice Paul, a suffragist, wrote the Amendment in 1923. It was passed by Congress almost 50 years ago in 1972 and was finally ratified in January 2020. The full text of the Amendment is: Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.  Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Simple enough. But it has yet to be added to the Constitution because the National Archivist, was instructed by the Trump administration to block its certification.   I heard about this obstruction on the radio as I was driving to babysit my grand-daughter.   When Congress first passed the Amendment I was a
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In the Time of HIV/AIDS

  I had no particular reason to go to San Francisco in 1975, but a friend had moved there and was feeling very much at home, so I decided to join her.   I had dropped out of the PhD program at the University of Washington, having decided that teaching college English was a cutthroat business and not what I wanted to do. Spending some winter months in Montreal convinced me that it was not for me.   I was at loose ends, and San Francisco was as good a home as any. My work experience up until then was editing engineering journals and law books, so I started sending out resumes to any company that was remotely connected to those fields.   I landed a job as a “technical editor” at large engineering firm, which meant I was responsible for writing proposals in response to requests from prospective clients.   The technical editing department was quite large, about a dozen of us, managed by a staid man, who I later learned was gay, and he had hired several gay men and a bunch of women and a f
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Refuge

  I have often wondered what it takes to really feel that a place is yours and that you belong to it.   A large percentage of the world’s population ends up in a different place than the place they were born, some 244 million people, according to the Pew Research Center. Some are voluntary migrants, but a substantial number are refugees who have left their countries to flee violence, persecution or war. In the United States we like to say that we all originally came from someplace else, meaning our ancestors did, not necessarily we ourselves.    Americans whose ancestors came here generations ago do not see themselves as refugees or immigrants.   They boast about the fact that their families have been here for generations, as though that is a personal achievement.   There are societies they can belong to if their ancestors came on the Mayflower or fought in the Revolutionary War and so on.   In Colorado where I live, people could get vanity car license plates that proclaimed them t
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Street Scenes

In the mid-1950s, before I left Iran for school in England, my family lived in an apartment next door to a movie theater. In the summers, we slept on the balconies on the third floor of the building; it was too hot to sleep indoors.  Tehran could predictably reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, and with no air conditioning, sleep inside was nearly unattainable.  The theater next door had an outdoor roof terrace where the owners aired films in the summer, and since they had to wait till it was dark, the shows ran quite late. The last show in the summer would end at about midnight, and the crowd from the theater would disperse quickly.  The street would grow quiet with only an occasional car driving by and the street vendors and street dwellers would lay out their bedding on the sidewalk and go to sleep.  During the day, Shah Reza Avenue was a main thoroughfare with considerable road and foot traffic. Before the show, the delicatessen and bakery teemed with people buying
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Airplane to New York

She sits by the window on the thirteenth floor of the apartment on 96 th Street and Central Park West gazing out.   She turns to me and says, “I have been watching people go up and down these stairs for months.   What is this hole for?” I walk to the window to see what she is seeing.   It is the access to the subway station. There is a hole in the ground and people climb the stairs down into it and others climb up. “There are trains that run underground that go all over the city, and people go downstairs to take them.   And when they want to get off here, they climb the stairs out of the station.” She nods.   “In Baghdad there were no trains underground.” My great-grandmother and I have arrived in New York within a year of each other, and we are both finding our way.   I can go out and explore, but my great-grandmother, of unknown age but old, stays at home, too frail to go out unless necessary. Her world has narrowed to the windows overlooking Central Park and 96
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