A distraction or two

Every other Sunday¹ when I was in high school, I’d have dinner at my grandparent’s house. I’d hang out with my grandmother² in the upstairs kitchen—yes, there was also a downstairs kitchen—while she cooked.

Frequently, it was a roasted chicken with the best roasted potatoes I have ever eaten ever.³

Sometimes, it was pasta and meats and sauce.

Always it was far more food than we could sensibly eat and yet we ate it all anyway, mostly because it was so delicious and partly because of the guilt ladled out by her if we didn’t.

My grandmother is on the left; her mother is on the right. I take after my great-grandmother more and the resemblance only deepens as I age. Also: in this picture, my great-grandmother is likely a decade younger than I am now.

Two things you should know:⁴

1. My grandmother did the absolute best she could, given the constraints on women and on immigrants when she was a girl. She lost her first husband shortly after WWII ended and raised two boys in a rough section of Pittsburgh that only grew rougher as years passed. It made her tough—and inflexible.

2. She also liked to remind us that “vendetta is an Italian word.”

When I was in the kitchen watching her cook,⁵ she’d frequently talk about the extended family, both in the present and in the past. Every now and again, she’d talk about someone who’d wronged her and rage would nearly explode from her, only to be shoved down as quickly as it flared up. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone that incandescently angry, before or since. Her ability to flip it off like a light switch remains astonishing.

But that’s what she had to do. My grandmother was raised to be compliant above all else. Her actual feelings were of no concern. And if she had any strong negative emotions, they were to be suppressed. Circumstances didn’t allow for the luxury of rage.

Clearly those moments stuck with me. I’m no longer a teenager—heck, I’ll soon no longer be a parent to teenagers—and, still, adult me couldn’t understand that level of anger. I grew up in a different time in a different way and have a wider range of acceptable emotions to choose from. My irritations and disappointments can work themselves out before they fester.⁶

This was taken at least 25 years ago as part of an advertising insert for the newspaper I worked for. Why hire models when you have writers who can clean up well enough? The photographer also got roped into posing. You’ll see why in a minute…

Over the last four months, I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot.

I get it now.

There are moments when I hear about El Salvadorian prisons or Signal chats or vaccines causing autism where I snap into the same kind of rage I witnessed, only to stuff it down again because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right that moment.

It’s not a response to how dumb and avoidable⁷ all the last four months have been but a reaction to feeling completely and utterly powerless. I cannot control these circumstances, nor can I predict them.

And that’s the point, right? The idea is to cause so much rage (and its cousin despair) that we are unable to act. Or, if we do act, we direct all of our suppressed and unacknowledged anger at ourselves.

If this were fiction, my grandmother would have leaned into thing #2 and had her revenge on anyone who ever wronged her, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

Real life isn’t like that.

Ultimately, her vendetta energy was inwardly directed. But that is another story. People are complicated.

This is Ed. He was our go-to photographer. We did a story together about a competitive cheerleading squad and most of the girls begged me for his number. It was rough to get them to focus when Ed was in the room.

What’s hard right now for me⁸ is finding the most useful point between Uma and my grandmother. Vengeance isn’t helpful, nor is despair.

I don’t have a tidy little lesson to close with. I wish I did.

Near as I can get is a reminder that if we didn’t have more power than we thought they wouldn’t be working so hard to convince us otherwise. There are moments when I believe that but they are few and far between.

Meanwhile, we muddle through. And we remember that all bleeding stops eventually. And we marvel at the rich pageant of human experience:

• Honestly? I can totally get behind human kibble.⁹

• The podcast Noble is fascinating (but be warned that it contains graphic language about what happens to human bodies when they decay.) It’s about the 2002 discovery of 300 bodies on the grounds of a crematory in rural Georgia.¹⁰ It’s about so much more than just that case and explores everything from racism to capitalism to justice-ism while also asking the living what they owe the dead. There are no easy answers. Journalist Shaun Raviv has done a thorough job of telling this story and how it intersects with broader aspects of life (and death).

• Again: Francis (Fucking) Perkins. I remain amazed that she was able to do so much during a time when women didn’t yet even have the right to vote. She is one of my heroes.

• Speaking of F(F)P: The Cost of a $5 Dress.

• I had the honor of knowing/working with¹¹ Lisa D’Amour.¹² She’s up to some interesting stuff.

• “As a doctor, how could I fail to provide life-saving treatment for those seeking my care?”¹³

• Chuck Wendig really nails What It Feels Like Right Now.

• The Perfect Marathon Pacing Strategy is to Rip It.¹⁴

1. Children of divorce will understand the timing.

2. Always “grandmother;” never “grandma” or other derivatives. The grandchildren who came after me faced less opposition to shortening it. She’d softened up a bit by the time they came along.

3. Honestly? I would do some highly questionable things to have them again. Alas.

4. and a third, which should be obvious: I loved her and was loved in return.

5. She very much didn’t want to teach me how to make what she was making. You’re going to have a job where you will pay someone to do this, she’d tell me. Which is why I learned how to cook Italian food from books and I can get it close to what I remember but never quite there.

6. I have also had A LOT more therapy than she did. But that’s a different story.

7. and most of it could be stopped by half-a-dozen Republicans who wanted to stop it but clearly are too chickenshit to do so

8. and maybe for you

9. One of my college roommate (hi Trish!) proposed the idea of human kibble one day. I really just want food in my bowl, she said. Related: one of the things I most miss about college is a salad bar where I can just fill up with vaguely healthy stuff and not think about getting it in the house, prepping, assembling, and cleaning any of it. Just food in my bowl with minimal work.

10. a story I vaguely remember breaking at the time but had a newborn and not enough brain space to follow

11. I think? We ran in the same circles, at least. Can’t remember if we actually worked together.

12. And then when I moved to Knoxville, I became great friends with one of Lisa’s college friends but it took us a very long time to realize that Lisa was the middle of our Venn diagram.

13. This is an essay by Carolyn Wolf-Gould about providing care to people who are transgender. I’ve watched Carolyn at work and she is a wonder.

14. The last time I ran the Seneca 7, which is a 77-mile race around Seneca Lake (you are in a team of 7, btw, not running all the miles solo), the Race Director started the race by dryly reminding us that it would truly be won or lost in these first ten feet. Reader: I laughed so hard (because I knew he was kidding, which some people didn’t understand and, indeed, took off like bats out of hell only to remember that 77 miles is a long way).