Jennie Orvino’s Blog: Piece of Mind
I’m posting the article I wrote for our South Park Newsletter (Community – Collaboration – Change) as a way of promoting our Santa Rosa neighborhood “Ice Cream and Safety Social” on May 14 at MLK park, 1-4 p.m. Under a grant from the Community Building Initiative, we have been working for several years to strengthen the influence and power of our beautiful, diverse community. The cleanup day I describe below has happened at least four times before, and we have succeeded in curtailing sideshow type events and homeless encampments on our streets (at least for now).
DOING GOOD IN THE ‘HOOD
On Earth Day, April 23, a few dedicated South Park Coalition members and neighbors fortified themselves with coffee and doughnuts and set out with litter buckets and picker-uppers for our neighborhood cleanup. While the turnout was small, the effect was mighty in spirit, fostered by bilingual posters plastering our South Park streets and an email message that said, “If you cannot join us, please consider spending a little time cleaning up in front of your house. Every little bit helps.”
I thought the best use of my time commitment was to weed the roundabout at Pressley and Grand Avenue. For safety’s sake, I wanted to cut the tallest weeds and uncover the reflectors which were overgrown with rock roses. I had worked up quite a sweat when neighbor Camille came by, pushing little Troy in a stroller. “Shall I send over my boys to help?” she asked.
Minutes later, Noah (age 11) tested my packed-full container of weeds and declared he could lift it. He carried it off to dump in the compost bin belonging to nearby neighbors. Noah’s brothers, Odin (age 10) and Orion (age 7), helped by yanking up grasses and sweeping the trimmings around the circle. The four of us pulled and carried weeds until the compost bin could hold no more!
During our labors, many cars and trucks drove carefully around us, some drivers shouting “Thank you” as they went by. On Sunday morning, I put in some more time weeding and when I’d filled another two big containers, the three boys appeared again, offering to help. They carried the yard waste, bag of trash, and my tools back to my house. After I thanked them, Noah, Odin and Orion resumed their play in the street in front of their house. This is a very good reason for the cars driving by to pay attention and SLOW DOWN.
South Park Coalition thanks all our residents for observing the Earth Day Neighborhood Clean Up and showing care for—and pride in—our wonderful community.
Is anyone else wondering why Donald Trump is not in jail yet? The latest law he broke, just in the news, is the Presidential Records Act which requires that all written communications, classified and unclassified, related to official duties be preserved, and subsequently turned over to the National Archives upon a given administration’s end. Fifteen boxes were just fetched from No. 45’s lair at Mar-a-Lago. Evidently, Trump had been ripping and flushing records in defiance of the law throughout his four years in office.
Some of those recently-retrieved documents had been pulled out of waste baskets and taped back together by White House staffers who said their boss was relentless in destroying both what he didn’t like and what he couldn’t be bothered with. They frequently put items, required by law to be saved, in “burn bags” to be destroyed.
Now we find, from the presidential plumber (actually a book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman), that the toilet in the residence was frequently clogged by wads of “clumped up printed wet paper.”
And we thought the stoppages were from the prodigious poops of the KFC gorging inhabitant! Additional details in a Washington Post article from 2/5/22. I can’t wait to see what late night comedians Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers will do with this information.
However, this news isn’t that funny. The string of Trump’s law-breaking includes violations of the Hatch Act, attempts to coerce and threaten Georgia’s Secretary of State of to “find more votes,” the outgoing president’s campaign of lies about the 2020 election, and his fomentation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. All are quite serious.
In December of 2017, I posted a blog titled “Why I support the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump.” That piece was written before he was actually impeached, twice. I did not include the tax and other financial fraud crimes of this grifter prior to his election which are still under ongoing investigation and which I HOPE COME TO FRUITION SOON.
You have to ask if any of us (or hey, if Barack Obama) had committed these crimes, it would have been ignored with a shrug of the shoulders. (“There is no mechanism for enforcing” as some officials said of the Presidential Records Act.) I can’t understand how so many in the country can just carry on as if this all is normal.
I’ll close by recommending John Nichols’ new book Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers in which this investigative reporter insists that not only the 45th president but many of his cabinet members, need to be held accountable for the damage they caused our country during the health catastrophe of the past two years.
If not, then they and their ilk will be free to continue more of the same.
I see from Facebook that the literary giant Robert Bly has passed away. This blog post is longer than usual because it consists of an essay from my book, Poetry, Politics and Passion about my relationship with Bly. It’s the best way I can think of to memorialize him.
“You both have the same hairstyle.” This was my daughter Rachel’s comment when I showed her the photograph of Robert Bly and me in the July 2005 issue of the KRCB Radio program guide. True. Parted on the same side and about the same length, my curly blonde hair and his white wavy locks swept out from each of our faces in almost the same “do.” The picture was taken on the deck of Falkirk House in San Rafael where Marin Poetry Center members were hosting a reception before Bly’s reading at Book Passage.
Arrangements had been made with his agent to interview the renowned poet for KRCB’s literary hour, “Word by Word.” I had been a volunteer at the public radio station almost two years, producing more than 20 shows. I’d conducted phone interviews with such luminaries as Nikki Giovanni, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, and Robert Hass, as well as several local authors. But this was my first in-person field recording opportunity, and a chance to see someone who was more than a celebrity I had brushed up against. Bly had been a correspondent, a literary friend and an anti-war ally. I was jazzed.
I first encountered him in 1969 when, as one of several prominent poets on a nationwide tour to raise money for Vietnam War resistance, he came to read at the Milwaukee 14 benefit. Bly had recently won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body and donated his prize money to the Peace Movement. When I first heard him read, he was 46 years old. He had been publishing poems in translation in his magazine The Fifties, and then The Sixties, making Americans aware of the likes of Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Georg Trakl. From his farmhouse in rural Minnesota, Bly was to go on editing and publishing The Seventies as well as numerous books of his own poems, essays and translations.
In 1975, around the time my growth into feminism led me to Goddess spirituality and study of the divine feminine, Bly founded the Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father. It seemed to me then that Bly was helping the cause of women’s liberation by teaching men how to be authentic. In 1978, he visited Milwaukee again, and, because we had been exchanging letters, the poet invited me to play my doumbek (belly dance drum) with the gang of musicians who accompanied his reading at Century Hall. Ten years after I first saw him, he was still wearing the same performance attire: a cream-colored wool serape with a bold, black border design that made him look like a stately, wild-haired Norse God who had landed in Mexico and taken up residence there.
During the height of Bly’s work in the mytho-poetic men’s movement (his international bestseller Iron John was published in 1990), we lost touch. I admired one of Bly’s other popular books, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart—an anthology of poems edited from his men’s movement work. And yet, I wondered if he had gone over the line into heterosexism. I remember writing to him with excitement that I had fallen in love with a woman, and being offended by his return letter that said my action had put me “on the endless grind of the karmic wheel.” It was an anxious and righteous time of my life, so I may have taken offense where none was meant. But I stopped writing to him, and he stopped writing to me. His growing mainstream accolades put him in a higher category of fame than most poets ever achieve—to the point that even stand-up comedians referenced “Robert Bly and the drum beating men’s gatherings in the woods where everyone shouts ‘ho!’ and hugs each other.”
Still, I treasured our brief common history in working for peace through poetry. When Bly came to Berkeley in 1998 for a screening of the film RUMI: Poet of the Heart, I made sure I was in the audience. Spotting him in an aisle seat before the performance, I knelt beside him to say hello. When I reminded him of our first encounter 30 years before, his face lit in recognition. He surprised me by asking about colleagues from those Milwaukee days by name. “It’s such a delight to see you again,” he said. “I’m glad you’re still writing.” We talked a while longer before he was called to the stage. Shortly afterward, I sent him a copy of my 1996 poetry chapbook. He wrote back promptly:
I’ve enjoyed Heart of the Peony very much. The poems don’t dance around at the edge of town, they head straight for the center. . .and I loved including a recipe for clam spaghetti in a book of poems! I’m going to use it this week. Love, Robert.
In 1999, when I asked permission to quote his one-sentence review of my poetry, he replied in the affirmative, and assured me that “the clam spaghetti was great.”
Our correspondence resumed in the form of exchanging publications—I sent him my 2002 spoken word/music CD, Make Love Not War, and he sent me autographed copies of his small hardcover books as they came out. His inscriptions were personal, intimate. He wrote quoting my own words back: “Thanks for your good poems! I like ‘the black cherries…with gratitude to have blood…’” Another inscription encouraged me: “It’s alright if we keep making the same mistakes/ It’s alright if we grow our wings on the way down.”
*
On that Sunday in May 2005, Bly exhibited the same warmth he had shown at all our previous meetings. Then 78 years old, he was on tour promoting two books: The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations of Poems from Europe, Asia and the Americas, and a collection of his own: My Sentence Was A Thousand Years of Joy. When he arrived at the Falkirk House reception, he walked straight over to where I was enjoying a glass of wine at a table by myself and sat down. As other guests began to press closer for their turn to chat with the poet, I quickly got down to the business of confirming a time for our radio interview. And, I asked someone to snap a picture of us together.
When the Poetry Center entourage arrived at Book Passage, Bly excused himself to “take a little nap” in a back office of the bookstore. He asked me to wake him up a half hour before he was scheduled to read. I tried to browse the shelves, but ended up checking and re-checking my mini-disc recorder, my batteries, my list of questions for 30 long minutes before I knocked.
“Yes, OK…” answered a dry, tired voice. I opened the door to find the septuagenarian rousing himself from the carpeted floor. His face was flushed and he seemed weary. He cleared his throat and situated himself in the leather desk chair as I attached the microphone to his shirt. I wondered then about the success of both our conversation and the two-hour reading to follow.
JO: You use a line from Rilke’s poem for the title of your book of selected translations. Do you want to say anything about why?
RB: He’s urging poets to do daring things. (Bly reads)
Just as the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now raise the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astounding bridges.
Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.
Here he’s saying as a poet gets older you just can’t bubble forth your happy little tunes, you have to go to two different sides of the river and build a bridge between. Then he says—you want to write a poem in such a way that at the very last line the reader feels some kind of a miracle.
JO: I’d like you to read your poem “Call and Answer” that has been widely anthologized lately, although it was written in 2002, even before George W. Bush ordered the attack on Iraq in March 2003.
RB: I used the ghazal form, keeping each stanza to roughly 36 syllables…
JO: Why did you choose this Islamic form? Were you trying to bridge the so-called “clash of civilizations”?
RB: In a way. We’re involved in humiliating the Muslims and I’m involved in praising them. . . .
I was very upset by the fact that no one was writing poems against the Iraq war buildup, and I’m still upset. You know in the Vietnam War days they were coming out of our ears. Everyone was writing poems against the war.
JO: Do you think it’s too soon in the war, that’s why there isn’t much writing about it?
RB: In the sixties, the newspapers were not so panty-waisty. People wrote wild things and the papers printed them right away—think about Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers. The capitalists are trying to control everything and keep everything down. When I asked someone yesterday, “Why do you think there isn’t more against Bush?” he said, “I think it’s fear.” We are being coddled by so many happy television programs, we don’t realize that we are living in a desperate situation.
When our conversation concluded, Bly requested time alone to prepare. I left him and donned my headphones to verify the quality of my digital recording. There it was—his Midwest inflection, the sometimes growl-like voicing of his recitations, the reactive sounds he made to my comments and questions. Satisfied with what I heard, I felt my muscles relax. I joined the standing-room-only crowd in the south wing of the bookstore to wait for the poet’s entrance.
Bly had roused himself from his brief rest to give me a charming and informative interview but when he stepped up to the podium in front of 150 listening fans, his energy redoubled. The ageless bard read his own poems and his translations with verve. The highlight of the evening was the moment he read again his “Call and Answer.” When he finished reciting the poem, he pulled his battered suitcase up on stage, unlocked it, and threw out a few items of clothing before uncovering a stack of books.
“I’m giving these away free,” he said, as he took out perhaps fifty copies of The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. It was a 2004 imprint of Ally Press in St. Paul. “I don’t want to carry them back to Minnesota, so be sure to take one.” I loved his generosity—giving away books in a bookstore! I took home my copy of the slim volume, as did a lucky third of the listeners.
*
Over the years, I’ve been drawn to Robert Bly, as others are drawn, because he is a bright light, as a writer and as a person of conscience. There is much to admire in all the phases he has gone through as a poet who managed to survive outside of academia and benefit from the freedom it provided. He developed a world-wide reputation as a writer/publisher/teacher/translator and has continued to bring the heart and culture of non-western civilizations, as well as the beauty of music, into every reading he does. I am inspired by this. I am nurtured by my personal encounters over time with him, and by those letters on 5 x 8 personalized stationery—return address Minneapolis—signed Love, Robert or Fondly, Robert, in rickety, almost indecipherable, hand.
On May 20, 2011, Bly appeared again in Berkeley at a KPFA Radio/Poetry Flash benefit titled, “Talking into the Ear of a Donkey.” At the age of 85, the poet reads sitting down, yet he maintains his charismatic presence. He chuckles and growls, repeats lines to make sure we understand, surrounds himself with musicians playing tabla and oud whom he directs with his eyes and a wave of his hand.
Bly was not costumed in a wide, red tie under a woven vest of brilliant colors as the event publicity photo showed, but in a casual, gray sport coat over a blue dress shirt with open collar. One of his legs trembled, and he read a poem twice, not immediately for emphasis but because he had forgotten he included it earlier in the program. He seemed to wonder why its funny lines fell flat. I was moved by this one awkward moment in which the famous performance poet seemed like an ordinary white-haired grandfather. Still, the audience remained attentive and delighted. Bly’s hold on the life force, or the life force’s hold on him, is undeniable. He continues to exhibit courage, grace and earthy good humor that belie his years.
“It’s alright if we write the same poem over and over,” he says. It’s OK if we grow wings even as we are falling.
My abortion was neither a trauma nor a fight. At the time, I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there was an excellent women’s health clinic and a Planned Parenthood that offered confirmation of my pregnancy and the means to terminate it. No crowds stood outside these facilities holding “Baby Killer” signs. I did not walk a gauntlet of so-called pro-life demonstrators yelling at me to change my mind about the procedure.
I realize I don’t need to say why I made this choice, in, well, I can’t remember the exact year; it was sometime in the mid-1970s. I was divorced, had a daughter who was of day-care age, the father was not long-term relationship material and he happened to live across the country when I found out I was pregnant.
As recipient of a monthly “Aid to Dependent Children” check, I was entitled to health care, which paid for the physical exam that clinched my suspicions. Home pregnancy tests were not simple or widely available for another decade or more. The abortion was also free.
When I say “no trauma” I don’t mean it was an easy choice. I only mean that it was obvious and necessary, and I just had to walk through the steps, staying calm and trying not to cry or worry about the future. I knew I was lucky to be able to get a common medical procedure as well counseling about my options (and a serious lecture about birth control methods) with respect for my personhood and with support from my women’s group.
I was raised a Catholic, and, as with the clergy’s position on war, homosexuality and other issues, I disagreed about the clergy’s stance on abortion. Bravo for Pope Francis and his position on Covid-19 vaccination, which shows that he understands the difference between personal choice and selfishness vs. public health. I’m free to punch the air until my fist hits another person’s nose, as one of my favorite nuns used to say.
She couldn’t quite stretch this maxim to a choice about medical privacy that causes other people to get a deadly disease, but at least Francis is hip to the moral obligations of the pandemic. I suppose this also comes back to forbidding masturbation as a “sinful waste of seed,” but we won’t go there. I’m not forcing anyone to get an abortion, nor am I in support of any law that would do such a ridiculous thing. Take note, Facebook page readers.
I missed the march in Santa Rosa on Saturday, because I was laboring in my vegetable beds and forgot about the gathering in Courthouse Square. I read about it in my Sunday paper and was glad 500 of my fellow citizens were there. The laws promulgated by Republican legislatures across this country criminalizing doctors and women who make the abortion choice may not happen here, now, but could be a first step to reversing Roe vs. Wade.
The Supreme Court allowed the Texas law to be enforced by any person from anywhere suing for damages, not just the woman, but even those who help her, including an Uber driver who takes her to an appointment. Basically a $10,000 bounty. What’s next? Shooting doctors? Oh, wait…
Read here about a San Antonio physician, Alan Braid, who publicly revealed he broke the Texas law to test the restriction (abortion is illegal as soon as cardiac activity can be detected, no exception for rape or incest). Listen here to congresswomen of color sharing their abortion stories. I am in solidarity with Barbara Lee (yet again!) Cory Bush and Pramila Jayapal.
I can hear and read about issues and events, but the medium that sinks a story into my soul is film. Last evening, I cued up Netflix instead of dinner, having just read, front page B section of my local newspaper, “USA Gymnastics Senate Hearing [elicits] Blistering Testimony: Women blast FBI over handling of sexual abuse investigation.”
I had seen Athlete A when it first came out in 2020, but wanted to experience it again before I made my recommendation. Upon the second viewing, I was even more riveted, especially because so much has happened in this busy year of outing sexual predators.
Local examples? The long-term abuse at an elite private school brought to light by courageous young women years after they were students, and the sexual assault allegation scandal concerning the ex-mayor of Windsor, CA. National examples? New York governor Andrew Cuomo resigning in disgrace (although not in his own eyes). Or the media blitz (and disgusting criticism) of Olympic superstar Simone Biles who revealed mental health issues that were preventing her from competing in her signature events. At the time, did Biles say her suffering had roots in sexual molestation by Dr. Larry Nasser? I don’t remember, but she said it on September 16 at the Senate hearing.
Cogently, calmly, and extremely powerfully, Athlete A (referring to gymnast Maggie Nichols whose narrative is the spine of the plot) tells the story of how hard-working investigative journalists, discerning law enforcement officials, and determined prosecutors together helped a group of young female gymnasts to fight back and prevail against their abusers.
The film is heartbreaking and raises some questions it doesn’t quite answer—were the girls so young and cowed by the cruel, degrading coaching they received that they were powerless to resist all the abuse, sexual and otherwise? The commodification of our athletes (including those NFL players who are still being penalized for “taking a knee”) continues as an issue to be reckoned with.
I’m not attempting a comprehensive film review here. I’m just urging you to see this Netflix Original documentary and let me know how it affected you. Check out the film’s website, which includes resources, materials for discussion, and also a very revealing timeline.
My thanks to Kristen Throop for referring me to The Army of Survivors, an Instagram group “bringing awareness, accountability and transparency to sexual violence against athletes.” Below are quotes I found there.
Over the past few years, it has become painfully clear how a survivor’s healing is affected by the handling of their abuse, and it disgusts me that we are still fighting for the most basic answers and accountability over six years later.
–Aly Raisman, retired artistic gymnast and Olympic gold medalist
“How much is a little girl worth?”
–Rachael Denhollander, former gymnast, attorney, advocate, and author
Many people are writing “Where were you when..?” stories of September 11, 2001 on this twentieth anniversary of “the day that changed everything.” I would say that perhaps August 6, 1945, had been such a day for the citizens of Hiroshima, or that deathly hot day in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina washed away the home and the child of a mother in New Orleans. Disaster and terrorism from the sky can come to any person at any time, and change everything.
That was my first thought this morning. My second was remembering the trembling voice of U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee as she voted No to the rushed “authorization for use of military force” (translated: endless war) and said to her fellow House members, “Let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
In her interview with Amy Goodman this week, Rep. Lee read from the report of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). “We were not equipped to be in Afghanistan…did not understand the Afghan context, including socially, culturally and politically. U.S. officials rarely even had a mediocre understanding of the Afghan environment much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions.” So many lives, so much money…
And now to my third thought: clear memory of being awakened by a ringing phone on that September day twenty years ago; it was a lovely and sunny here in California too. The voice of my daughter Rachel, then age 30, who was living in New York City at that time, gave me the awful news. The first thing I said was, “Now there will be another war.” She said she was about to leave for work.
Miraculously, I was able to get a phone line later in the day. Rachel told me she had walked many blocks home and was now safe in her and Tom’s apartment. I took my own walk then, along Copeland Creek. Here’s a never-published poem I wrote afterward; all political thoughts left behind, I focused only on my dearest.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF TRAGEDY
I’m taking a walk and trying not to think. A slain
grocery cart on its side in the brackish creek, mallards
with their bottoms up looking for breakfast in muddy pools,
an egret perched on the pedestrian bridge, bleached in light.
If I take an aggressive step, it will spread its pure white grace
and take off east. On the upper east side of Manhattan
my daughter lives, “so proud to be a New Yorker.” This day
no boats like ducks on the Hudson. In an ashen shroud she walks
40 blocks from work to her safe home, but I still think of her
as a target, brunette hair iridescent, like feathers.
I let this child go, tossed her into life as one would toss
a homing pigeon, or a dove. Now I look for her
in the returning flocks, skimming city rooftops like derelict flags.
But she is on a separate arc. Solid in the foreground, my hands—
twice as big as my head—are waiting, palms up, just in case.
She posed for my camera all her life: as a toddler playing in
the bubble bath, or learning to tie her shoes, the princess
twirling in her crown and cape, the maiden in her yellow dress
in a field of yellow mustard, throwing flowers in the air,
her smile the fullest bloom. Unseen in the photograph,
our muddy shoes, the patch of damp fabric where she sat.
“I love you to pieces,” I used to say
but I’ll never say it again.
I want her whole, and with me,
in any ordinary circumstance.
© Jennie Orvino September 2001
Copeland Creek, Rohnert Park, CA
New York Visit with Rachel and Tom, May 2001
The most important thing I’ve learned from the intractable pandemic isolation and the rise of the reality-denying, extremist Trump cult, is how to take care of myself. I learn more every day.
After a week of fitful sleep and much appreciated work-for-money, I woke up this morning after a needed nine hours. My Friday the 13th had been busy with research and interviews for an article I am writing. I did not miss my 1 p.m. virtual Stretch and Balance/Pilates class. And yet when I tried to take advantage of clear skies and cool weather for a walk after spending hours at the computer, I dragged my steps and couldn’t get beyond 20 minutes.
I called a friend to say I would probably not go out to dance bachata, albeit with masks and required vaccination proof, because I was just too tired. He was empathetic and reminded me that I had three hours to rest, that I already had my ticket, and I could “pop in, even for a little while” if I felt like it. He said that he, too, was discouraged and distressed by how doctors, nurses and election officials were being violently threatened and harassed for just taking care of our health and doing their civic duty, jobs that they had done for decades willingly and sometimes joyfully. But not now.
His kind words were a balm.
Next, I called my 12-year-old grandson on his new cell phone. I said I missed him, and could he please tell me, “I love you, Gramma.” Much to his amusement, he complied with my request. Shortly thereafter his mom called me.
Her advice was akin to the serenity prayer: Don’t worry about the things you can’t change; change the things you can; know the difference; and have a good supper. I had already opened a gluten-free beer (Omission Pale Ale) and was nibbling truffle salami and mozzarella.
After those three phone calls, I noticed it was pre-sunset hour, the time when the most beautiful light bathes my back garden. Glass in hand, I took a stroll. From the ailing baby peach tree to the prolific Asian pear, I observed and complimented my living fruits and vegetables. I gave newly-seeded arugula a gentle shower. I sat, admittedly only a minute or two, but I could feel a slowing down, a letting go.
Next, I switched my kitchen radio dial from evening news to the Giants vs. Colorado Rockies baseball game and there it stayed tuned while I cooked and ate.
With my journal in hand, and baseball game now on TV where I could glance up occasionally from the page to check the score, I wrote down all the Good Things of my day. I made room to note what was still bugging me but found that list had shortened considerably after I relaxed.
Feeling confident that my team had a sizable lead in the late innings, I brushed my teeth, turned down my bed and climbed in. It was barely dark, but I read only a few paragraphs of David Sedaris writing in The New Yorker before I started to doze off.
What I’ve written here is probably no revelation to any working person or parent who is gearing up for the new routine of school after the past 17 months of scary uncertainty. Still, we all must be reminded to love ourselves, and to “put on our own oxygen mask before we assist others in putting on theirs.” Self-care is a necessity.
Carolyn Lee Arnold’s memoir, Fifty First Dates After Fifty, inspired me personally beyond its literary value. The author was able to transform the story of her midlife recovery from a breakup into a readable and educational book, moving past the eat-pray-love model of experimentation and indulgence. This book both opens your heart and makes you think.
With attention to detail, realistic dialogue, and emotional intelligence, Arnold shows how the values she developed through years of personal growth workshops informed her search for a life partner. She was able to successfully apply the skills she acquired in matters of love, intimacy and sexuality to her dating adventures.
And when I say adventures, I mean they run the gamut—from spiritual ceremonies to sex parties, from gentle face-stroking to intercourse with abandon on the hood of a car (after a “safer sex” conversation, of course). What is so interesting is how she enjoys her dates with the innocence and exuberance of a teenager along with the confidence and life experience of an adult. It seems the people who surround her also illustrate how conscious sexual beings behave.
This is not to say that she doesn’t cry a lot, call on friends of both genders for comfort, and turn her heart into another character she talks to and tries to convince of one thing or another. She gets discouraged or goes a bit overboard just to see if she can swim.
Carolyn Lee Arnold
But, as the professional social science researcher she is, Arnold keeps coming back to The Project—to gather data from every one of the “50 first dates” to understand more clearly what she wants and needs. The men she engaged with were sourced from singles events, online dating sites, ecstatic dance, hikes and meditation groups, workshops and through friends of friends. Singles will get plenty of ideas on that score!
The chapters are short and often end with an analysis. “I was attracted to Randy, and his questions touched me on a deep level…however, I wanted a man with better listening skills, a man who could appreciate the moment and nonsexual ways of touching.” “I wanted the type of balance that Ross and I had created at the party between closeness and independence. We were not threatened by mingling with others, because we knew we were returning to each other. I could imagine …doing that with a future partner… This should be possible. I could feel it.”
As a single woman of certain age, I know what I found fascinating about “Fifty First Dates After Fifty.” I recognized the same hopes for romance and significant connection with men as I’ve seen in myself. I also empathized with her doubts: “What am I going to do when I get to the fiftieth date?” Another appealing aspect of this book is Arnold’s modeling of how to candidly talk about being physical with the men she is getting to know, and with her readers.
That women’s memoirs are purchased by other women is a given, but what might a man think of this book? Too woo-woo and new-agey? Too much emphasis on conversation and being vulnerable? Aside from a curiosity about “sex parties,” I think a man might get some insight into what a woman is thinking and feeling, and that might make his dating life a little bit easier!
What Carolyn Arnold does for sure is make seem ordinary and easy what she calls the “Northern California lifestyle” of spiritual rituals, nude resorts, and deliberate, respectful polyamorous relationships. She also has a lot of fun with her data gathering and embraces a continuum of erotic activities with a lot more nuance than is usually expressed. The woman, like the memoir she has created, is frank, unabashedly sensual, and willing to meet others at the edge of possibility.
www.shewritespress.com www.carolynleearnold.com PUB DATE: November 2, 2021
Since I was a teen, I thought having a summer birthday was the coolest. Looking forward to a midsummer party that included music, dancing and a hint of romance kept me going for the entire month of July. As an adult, the July 29s that marked the decades are the ones I most vividly recall.
At age 40, I was still married, lived in a condo in Rohnert Park, and the party happened poolside. Photo documentation shows I wore black lace, had a hairstyle very short at the neck and curly on top, and served champagne to my crushes of the moment—my Rolfer (hurts so good) and my karate teacher.
At age 50, I was freshly divorced, my parents had just passed away, and I had published a new book of my poems from which I read at the party. This half-century marker was catered by a local celebrity chef with live music provided by the Dave MacNab trio. My brother and sister-in-law were visiting from Chicago, I think it may have been their only visit to me here in California. A friend had allowed me to use her Sebastopol home (large deck, large living room) for the occasion. I repaid her the next day by dumping charcoal that was not quite doused… and burned up her garden shed before an alert neighbor called the fire department.
At age 55, my at-home party was progressing pleasantly to cake cutting when I spilled boiling water from an unstable coffee filter onto the front of my body, causing a second-degree burn on my belly (scar visible to this day). Photos show me lying on the floor, my midsection covered with ice from the party drink chest. I felt fine but friends insisted I go to the emergency room; all the guests departed, too quickly and most without cake. I sadly and reluctantly (nothing hurt) allowed Peter to drive me to Petaluma Valley Hospital where I got salve, a bandage, and pain killers I never took. Medical personnel complimented us on the quick application of ice.
“Sexy Sixty” birthday was a grand affair, with a top-notch party committee and enough money spent to cover a modest wedding. It was held at a local synagogue that was a dance hall when I first moved to Sonoma County, and we made it a dance hall again, with my Argentine tango friends making a positive contribution. My birthday performance, documented by then-primitive video, was a tango valse with friend Maurice as my teacher-partner. One of my oldest friends, Ashbolt Stewart visiting from Portland, gathered musicians to play rock and roll. Many of my gifts were entertainments provided by those in attendance, including a lap dance from Catherine Rose which I enjoyed thoroughly.
Five years ago, I celebrated the beginning of my “Spectacular Seventy” decade as a combo of birthday and first-time home ownership. We were blessed with great weather and my daughter helped host so I was able to relax and visit with the dozens of folks who blessed the property by showing up with love. Best present was a salsa lesson from Rafael and Isa, and subsequent bootie shaking on the cement patio dance floor.
And now approaches the “diamond anniversary” of my birth. No trip to Italy as I had envisioned. No party grandly produced. Despite the many good things on which I focus, namely being alive and healthy as many of my generation are not, there is exhaustion. With years of Trump disaster and disgrace turning into Trumpism running rampant through the body politic, and vaccine resistance that threatens to erase all our sacrifice and gains of the past 16 months, I am feeling tense and sleepless. I want to be upbeat, and I’m finding it more difficult than I had anticipated.
For the fourth year in a row, my dear Bethrenae is taking me to the beach for a long walk to inhale ocean air. I am anticipating a feeling of appreciation and solace, hoping for a sense of inner peace. At this moment, it’s the birthday gift I want most.
Last night I watched The Mauritanian for the second time. In light of the recent death of war criminal, torture advocate and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, this beautifully made film reminds us of what we’d like to forget. Yet Guantanamo prison is still not closed after 20 years.
Director Kevin Macdonald uses flashbacks and parallel layers to show the evolution of the interlocking lives in a story that contains little fabrication. It doesn’t need it.
Stars Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch do justice to the courageous Americans they portray and the amazing actor Tahar Rahim captures the indomitable spirit of this young man who was plucked from his home in the northwest African country of Mauritania and sent to “Gitmo” via prisons in Jordan and at Bagram Air Base in Afganistan.
As Mohamedou Ould Slahi says in a post-film conversation with the director, “As much as Kevin tried to make this movie dramatic, the reality was more dramatic.” He chuckles after making this statement, sitting next to his friend and attorney Nancy Hollander who finally secured her client’s release, more than seven years after the film closes with the notification that he had “won his case.”
Some reviews criticize the story for being more of a legal drama than truly exploring this most compassionate (and innocent) human being who was confined for 14 years without charge. (His lawyer says passing a lie detector twice had no relevance).
Perhaps because I had seen the Democracy Now interviews with all the principals and had read Guantanamo Diary when it was published in 2015—albeit riddled with redactions—that I felt I knew Mohamedou quite well through his writings. In fact, it was his handwritten pages taken out of confinement through official channels that formed the basic testimony of this legal battle.
Check out the interviews with award-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, the tenacious attorneys and award-winning actors Foster, Cumberbatch and Shaylene Woodley. Listen to Mohamedou himself asking President Joe Biden to close the military prison that is such a horrid contrast to the beautiful island on which it is located.
It is only through a rare, three-inch hole in the canvas covering the cyclone fences that the detainee gets a glimpse of crashing waves on a beach that resembles the beloved coast of his birthplace. If you see only one 2021 release, this should be it.
Here is the trailer. (Unfortunately, you have to skip the initial ads)