Holding my head up again as an American!

Sunday, November 2, 2008: I am trying to hold down the rising sense of anticipation and pride within me, the sense that something very very good is on the horizon, is about to happen. GOOD NEWS finally, for me, for my friends and family (especially for my young nephews and nieces), for my country and for my world! As I write this, the 2008 presidential election is still two days away, and as many commentators like to remind us, “anything can still happen.” And yet, for the first time in all these weeks and months, I can feel change in the air, I am starting to feel confident that the miracle will in fact take place—that the horrible Bush years will soon be behind us, and that as an American living in Europe, I will at last be able to stop blushing and apologizing for my country, stop having to shake my head and repeat for the umpteenth time, “I don’t know, I don’t understand it either, how ‘they’ could have elected Bush!” Distancing myself from “them”, from “over there”, from my own country, disowning it, implying that “they” and “me” are very different entities.
But of course, despite my adopted French nationality, I remain profoundly American, and never is this more evident than during a US presidential election. My French friends are of course interested, well-informed, and concerned about what happens in the U.S. But none of them are as involved as I am during a presidential campaign, and they do not suffer as I do over the great defeats (2000, 2004 in particular), nor will they be able to experience the tremendous joy I fully expect to feel early Wednesday morning Paris time, say, about 2am (8 pm New York time). I will be up, I will be at my computer, I will be unable to sleep that night or wait until morning to learn the results. For, as a citizen of the US, most powerful country in the world, I cannot avoid, as no concerned American can avoid, feeling a sense of responsibility—and often shame—for my country’s actions. This is what distinguishes me from my fellow French. (Yet, now, being a French citizen also, I feel a double responsibility—for the actions of two countries around the world!)
And if, as I now am coming to believe, Barack Obama is named the next president of the United States, my French friends will be thrilled and happy but they will not feel the primary emotion I expect to feel—pride! I will finally be able to hold my head up again as an American. I will be representing from that moment on, a country that has chosen to look outward rather than inward, and that has for the majority of its citizens at least put the notorious racism that has dogged our country for so long behind it, has judged a man not by the tint of his skin but by his intellect, his gifts, his qualities to be a good leader,. When I was eighteen years old, the summer of 1963, I arrived in Washington D.C. just before the great March on Washington. I had gotten a job in a Florida congressman’s office. When I announced I was planning to march, I caused fear and consternation in that office—the others were all planning to stay home with their doors locked! I had no one to march with but that didn’t deter me. I found in a newspaper the name of a church where marchers were meeting, and early the morning of August 28, I was at that church. It turned out to be a black church, but instead of being ignored, I was heartily welcomed, and I will never forget one old man coming up to me and taking off the huge button that read “I WAS A CIVIL RIGHTS MARCHER, AUGUST 28, 1963” right off his own chest and handing it to me! I wore it all that day, and I have it yet. Nor of course can I ever forget standing with my fellow Americans black and white under a tree along the Reflecting Pool and listening to Martin Luther King’s voice ringing out so powerfully with the speech to become so famous “I have a dream.” I went home after that incredible day and wrote my first journalistic piece, recounting my experience that day (story which was published in the Oregon newspapers and in the Congressional Digest).
When I was nineteen years old, I fell in love with a fellow student at Georgetown whose skin tint was also different from my own. It was 1964. We worked hand in hand for the 1964 Bill of Rights. We desegregated a “whites only” beach just half an hour from our nation’s capitol. We faced down a neo-Nazi who saw us sitting on a park bench and stood with arms folded and expression full of hate right in front of us, unmoving. When our pictures were in a Washington newspaper together (speaking at a demonstration for the civil rights bill), I received hate mail sent through the newspaper.
Later, I worked in the small Mississippi town of Grenada, just a few miles away from where three white civil rights workers had been murdered. the summer before. My cousin and I joined a boycott of the downtown white stores, and were spit upon as we marched around the square.
Those years were also the years of the assassinations. President Kennedy. His brother Robert Kennedy. And when Dr. King was shot down too, it really did seem to be the end of the dream Then came the Nixon years, and I left the country, never to return there to live again.
There have been ups and downs since then in my country’s history, it hasn’t all been bad, but there also hasn’t been a whole lot to feel much pride about since then.
Until now.
I wasn’t even an Obama supporter at the beginning of this campaign. I supported the lovely and competent Hillary Clinton all the way through the primaries, and had the great privilege of voting for her in my Oregon primary election. I think she would have made a fine president, and her election as a woman would also have been highly symbolic, and perhaps I will live to one day see a woman in the White House. But I do believe that Barack Obama’s election will have an even greater symbolic import than would Hillary Clinton’s at this particular moment in our world’s history. America’s reputation is in tatters. Our country, once a symbol of liberty and democracy however imperfect, is today hated by many of the world’s people (among whom there is a great range and variety of skin tints!). But if the election goes as it should Tuesday, while the world will not instantly change, the peoples of the world will instantly have a different vision of America. I believe there will be an immediate rise of good-will toward my country from all around the world and that Barack Obama will know how to profit from this good will, make America worthy of it once again, and so increase it rather than, as Bush has done, squander and dilapidate it. This is my hope.
I can hardly wait for Wednesday. I wish I had a button I could pin on my chest saying, “I AM AN AMERICAN, AND FINALLY PROUD TO BE ONE, November 4, 2008.”

Garden Surprises

I think what I love most about a garden are its surprises. Of course I love planting flowers and seeing them emerge, I love my roses every one of them, I love seeing the perennials return year after year. But the most delightful part of a garden for me is to see nature going its own way, doing its own thing, showing me year after year that I’m just its handmaiden, that I’m only the caretaker, not the owner of my garden. Nature is the ultimate decider of how things are to be.
Here are some of the surprises I’ve had in my garden since I became its caretaker, now ten years ago.
The first year in Jonchères I planted sage up at the upper border of my back garden. It has flourished and just now is fragrant with purple blooms, and what I love about it is that it just grows there by itself, I never have to water it, and it comes back fuller and more beautiful every year.
But to my astonishment I found in poking around in my front garden this spring, lo and behold, sage! Now it’s up, a blooming purple patch there too, where there had been a kind of bare patch that had been a little needy. Nature, blowing sage up and over my cottage, from back to front, filling in a garden hole!
A couple years ago, in redoing the communal pathway going through our property, a truck severed the large yucca plant that had been growing in my rock garden. The yucca looked completely dead and I was quite upset and was all ready to ask the village to get me a new one (since it was a decision of the village council to redo that path). But then one day, I happened to glance a little more closely at the long rib that had been left. And what did I see—not just one but SEVEN new Yucca plants pushing out from it. It turned out to be extremely good for that yucca to have been cut “to the bone” so to speak, and I have even had to dig out a couple of the new plants and plant them elsewhere!
That same first year, one of my neighbors, Jeannette, gave me a little seedling of some plant which I planted in my back garden. It grew and bloomed with delicate blue flowers that would close up at night, open up in the daytime. I was quite fond of it But then, after a couple years, I didn’t see it anymore. Then one spring, about four years ago, we came down to the cottage to find the whole rock garden hillside full of that blue flower, called “lin” in French, flax in English. I was thrilled, and said to myself, now I’ll have tons of this flower every spring.
Nature must have heard me being too self-satisfied over “my” blue lin because the next year, there wasn’t a one in my garden—but down the path in my neighbor’s garden, there was tons of it! It had all migrated down to her!
This spring, I’m happy to say I had several bunches of “lin” again, some of them growing IN the pathway, others in among my lavender plants, and I took great pleasure in those lovely pale blue flowers, but never again will I presume upon Nature necessarily providing them to me every year—it will be as Nature chooses!!
My garden came with a huge garden of lavender, all I have had to do in it is pull out some of the old woody ones and plant new ones. But what I love is moseying around in my garden and finding other little clumps of lavender there where I never planted any: along the north side of the house for example, or in among the irises, or down in the lower garden!
This year, there were, scattered all over the garden and also on the hillside above my garden, patches of pink flowers, definitely wild, but which I had never seen before and certainly not in such profusion. Will they be back again next year? Maybe, maybe not.
. Every year I get lots of surprise wild orchids in my garden. I’m told that wild orchids grow where the air is very pure which pleases me. They pop up anywhere, under my back stairway, in the shadowy slope below the house that descends to the little main road of our village, up at the very top of the back stone steps leading up to the top of the garden. I’ve come to recognize their large glossy leaves and when we do our annual late spring grass and weed mowing, I go around the garden first with my pruning shears cutting carefully around the orchids so F will see them and they won’t get mown down. This year there is a whole group of them on the east side of the garden, just under the forsythia—some with delicate white blooms all up and down the stalk, others with just a purple tipped flower at the very top….a whole exotic garden growing of its own will—and Nature’s, naturellement!
Along the back path, I noticed this year two very tall green plants growing just a couple feet away from each other. I knew I’d never planted them and I wondered what they would produce. The other day I went outside, and they both had bloomed: a large taper on each one with up and down rows of yellow flowers—looking like immense yellow candles. I have no idea what they are….and realized I need a book on wild flowers in France to help me identify some of the garden surprises!
Other wild flowers that have come on their own to my garden are Queen Anne’s lace, wildflower which I love not only because of its beautiful lacey white blooms but because it always makes me think of my grandmother Dill who first pointed it out to me, and wild red poppies like the ones you see in the famous Monet painting—I’m absolutely delighted I’m finally getting red poppies in my garden, I’ve been wanting them for ages and even tried throwing seeds around once without results—but here they are now, who knows how or why?! Another regular to my garden also is Blue Chardon, with its prickly leaves and prickly blue flowers and from which one can make a bouquet to last all winter. A huge one seems to be coming up just next to our bamboo this year.
But the very biggest surprise in my garden came last year, and it’s an even BIGGER surprise this year! Last year, right next to my Queen Elizabeth rose, I suddenly saw lots of green runners, and in looking at them closely, recognized them from Grandma and Mother’s gardens—sweet peas! Where did they come from? I never planted them. But they grew thick and heavy and I finally had to put a couple trellises against the stone wall to train them up and away from my roses, and they bloomed all summer, fragrant deep rose colored flowers. This year, I’ve got about quadruple the number of sweet peas and they have spread all over the yard, back and front. I found some at the foot of a cypress tree and trained them up so that they are blooming all around it. Others are in the iris gardens. Others up in the rock garden. And in my front garden where they first began I had to put up a third trellis! I know I will have to probably cut some of them out at the end of the summer if next summer I don’t want a garden full of sweet peas and nothing else—but what a wonderful flower it is nonetheless, and not the least because it just flew on its own into my garden, and clearly is thriving here!
At the beginning of my life as a gardener, I was distraught if I planted something and it didn’t do well or didn’t take, died or just disappeared. I used to make “flower maps” of everything I had planted, try to keep track of it all, but as some things vanished and new things appeared, my “maps” became quickly out of date. Now I’m much more philosophical as a gardener. I know for every plant I lose, Nature will spring one of its surprises on me, something new and wonderful will appear. I don’t let my garden get to the jungle state—but at the same time I leave it a certain amount of freedom to just “do its own thing”. And so, hand in hand, Nature and I take care of this little plot of land loaned to me for a few blissful years.

Love & Literature

As I look back through my writings—my novels but also my journals—a few main themes emerge. The past and time passing (Nabokov “je suis chez moi dans les souvenirs.”), certain beloved places (Rushville, Yachats, now Jonchères), my attachment to family, and family history, the inspiration and thrill of travel. But above and beyond those themes, running like a thread through all my writing, is the subject of love—love, passion! My journals contain a little of everything of course, but in them every one of my love stories since the tender age of nineteen has been recorded in such detail that I can relive them all simply in going back and reading those scribbled notebooks (now however, mostly typed onto the computer). These love stories then got transformed by the bias of fiction into some of my novels and short stories. One of my novels is entitled The Perfect Lovers, and was an attempt to capture the fleeting experience of falling in love. Another is called Unsent Love Letters from the Heart of my Garden, sixty letters to an unnamed lover. Another of my books (not very successful, it was one of the first I wrote), Through the Sandglass, was based on my first rather traumatic love story with the young Sam Jordan, story of a young white woman and a young black man trying to have a relationship during the tumultuous civil rights years of the early sixties. Another of my books—a novella—is a backward look at a romance in Burma many years ago. Then there is the book called Embrace of Stone and Flesh, in which my dear French husband figures as a Russian poet, and in which two love stories intertwine. I also have a book of poems called Winter Love Poems and a book of short stories called The Poet and other Love Stories. Indeed, while I have also written on other subjects in my novels, essays, children’s stories, accounts of my travels around the world, and an “autobiography through photographs”, it’s clear that the subject that has most enthralled and entranced and mystified me over the years—and so which I have continually tried to unravel and understand—is the mystery of passion and love between two human beings.
So then I thought I would like to make a little list of favorite books whose primary subject is love, books which have perhaps formed or influenced me in my own writing, or from which I may have gotten certain insights into the subject from other writers also impelled to put down either their own story or a fictionalized story or who have written poems or essays about this emotion of love which is the basis of all human relationships.
So here is my list. Perhaps, if this blog begins to be read by others, there will be additions to my list. But here is mine. In another post, I may include a few reviews of some of these books.

Favorite Books on Love and Passion:
Novels, plays (17th- 19th century)
*Romeo and Juliet & Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare

*La Princesse de Cleves by Mme de la Fayette

*Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility, Northranger Abbey, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

*Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

*Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

*Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

*The Lady with the Lapdog by Anton Chekhov

*Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

*Wings of a Dove by Henry James

*Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand

*Le Roman de Tristan et Iseult (as retold by Joseph Bedier)

Novels, Plays (Contemporary)
*L’Amant & Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras

*Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

*Ada or Ardor by Nabokov

*Evening by Susan Minot

*Theater by Somerset Maughn

*Gone with the Wind by Marguerite Mitchell

*Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

*The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart

*Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

*Remembrance of Time Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) by Marcel Proust

*Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen

*The Snow Goose byPaul Gallico

*Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

*The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

*An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

Non-fiction (letters, essays, poems, anthologies etc.)
*De l’Amour by Stendhal

*A Venetian Affair by Andrea di Robel

*The Natural History of Love by Morton Hunt (a non-fiction work on the subject of love)

*Lettres d’ Heloise et Abelard

Sonnets by Louise Labé

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Josh in Death Valley

I wanted to include a picture of Josh in Death Valley after writing about him in the last post. He and Laura hiked into a canyon last November that he had remembered from years before and where he thought he would like to have his ashes scattered. Josh had always wanted to do a series of articles on the lowest points in the world, the places below sea level. He and my husband photographer François talked about doing the project together, Josh would write the text, F would take the photographs. It seems most appropriate that Josh would become a part of one of those "lowest places" (a great number of which he did indeed visit) once he left the world in the shape and form in which we've known him.
Just a couple days ago, François mentioned the project again, saying perhaps he will still try to do it--a kind of photographic memorial to his most beloved friend.

Lives going wrong

By the time one reaches one’s sixties, one has a backward vision of one’s own life, and of the lives of those others with whom one has been close. One can see the roads taken and not taken, the turnings in those roads, the opportunities taken and those that were missed, the wrong decisions (and the right ones), one can see the patterns. And by one’s sixties, one can fairly well predict the end of the road, mostly more of the same as what has gone before. Rarely does one’s life change significantly after a certain age, except for the changes illness wreaks, and then of course, ultimately, the change into non-being when death comes.
For some of my friends and family, the end of the road has come already, the life is finished, complete, it is as it stands and will be forever such, nothing can come to change it.
For others—myself included—we’re still on the journey. But of those of us still on the journey, there are two categories. Those whose lives have turned out fairly well, and those whose lives have gone wrong. Fortunately, I see more of the former than the latter, yet among my entourage, there are some lives that have simply turned bad, and it’s hard to see any redeeming factor in how they are going nor comprehend the disaster, it’s hard to understand why those lives in particular have become lost lives, wasted lives, unhappy lives, tragic lives.
Just yesterday I was on the phone with two friends, both of whom have shipwrecked lives. The ship of one of them, a man in his early seventies, crashed against the sharp rocks of life some fifteen years ago. He had been up until then one of the most cultivated, literate human beings of my acquaintance, a high post in the cultural ministry, and practicing his own art on the sideline. No marriage, no children, but a wide range of friends, famous and not-so-famous. And then, suddenly we heard that there had been a change in his job status, that he had gone into a depression. And from there, it has been downhill all the way—suicide attempts, shock treatment, inability to live alone, and, a spiraling sense of self-loathing and guilt. All pleasure in life vanished, and gradually the inner deterioration has led to an exterior deterioration. This man’s life is hell, yet he cannot seem to either emerge from that hell or end his life—and now he must submit the further indignity of grave health problems.
The second friend was a happy ebullient man when I knew him 20 years ago. Life was all ahead of him, and he leapt forward joyfully to meet it, full of enthusiasm and energy. But now he is caught into a maelstrom of misery: a marriage that is disintegrating, a business going badly, health problems, and without a single second of respite, no time at all for himself, no time to contemplate the world and his place in it, to suck the nectar from the flower. His life has become joyless and he himself is the quintessence of the harried middle-aged man, running from metro to job to home to metro to job to home. How could this have happened in such a short time—that a man’s life just turned around so completely and headed down the road to disaster? Is it destiny, fate, genetic determination, just plain bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is it the result of one’s character (“character is destiny”). I don’t have the answer, I don’t know what can account for these shipwrecks? And I can think of others, a man who is seriously obese, with plenty of money but who barely leaves his home anymore, spending his life on the computer, a woman who lived much of her life in a tiny closet-like apartment, there too no husband, no children, and who died alone of cancer at too young an age. A childhood friend who in her late fifties just went mad, became a Miss Haversham, inventing a bridegroom, a wedding, for her shocked friends and family (who when they arrived for the wedding found her in her shabby dressing gown with rotting bridal food in the fridge). This friend and I used to write stories and poems together when we were twelve up in my tree house—we lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools, graduated with honors, went on to travel, to have a life. But somewhere, in hers, the mechanism just stopped functioning. Her friends do not know if she is wandering the streets or dead—one day, she just disappeared. And then, there is my mother-in-law, who took so little pleasure from life when she was in it, when she could, and who for the past 16 years has been dead to the world although her heart continues to beat, buried alive in a retirement home. Another life gone horribly horribly wrong.
But most of us in my little world, thank heaven, have lives that have gone mostly right. Of course there are rocky patches, of course there are sorrows, mingled with the joys, disappointments mingled with the successes, but on the whole, I would say the majority of my friends and family members have lives that have gone mostly right. Lives that are filled with people who love us and whom we love, with work that satisfies, with enough money to keep poverty at the door, with varied experiences, with children, grandchildren, travel, with sunlit days on terraces. And it is not a premature death nor an illness which necessarily makes a life go wrong—I think of our friend Josh, who has just died of cancer at the age of 62. Far too young. And the past ten years, he was battling that illness. Yet his life never “went wrong” despite his illness—he continued to live life as he always had, and this up until the last week of his life. He retained his love of life and of travel, his humor, his attachment to his friends and family—he did everything exactly right. Last December, he took his last trip, with his wife Laura, to Death Valley, a place he’d always loved, to find a place for his ashes. They took pictures on this last trip of theirs, and the photos of this loving couple in that strange magnificent setting, show them smiling, full of energy, full of life although death was stalking them, intent on the beauty of the world and absolutely conscious of their place in it. Josh, a life well lived.
Time beats its relentless drum. I hear its booming. I know that we have just one thing to do as the drum beats: love life! Embrace it, hold it close, enter fully into it, do not let bitterness or disillusionment or disappointment or sorrow or fear cast its shadow over the years we have left. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem. Seize the day!

First thoughts on beginning a blog

I wonder indeed what Guri Larsdatter would think could she know her great granddaughter is about to set up a blog (a what?!) named after her and which will be able to be read and seen by people all over the world by a simple click of a mouse (a what?!). Guri Larsdatter was born in Norway on April 4, 1865, and in 1882 at the age of seventeen, she left her country, her parents, her younger sisters and brothers to set sail for America, a long and difficult journey during which a young man she perhaps hoped to marry died at sea. She went on to Chicago, met a dapper Englishman, married, had seven children, among them, my grandmother, Florence, and never returned to Norway. If I've named this blog after her, it's because her example has been an inspiring one for all of her female descendants, myself included, and because I heard so much about her from my grandmother and my mother that I decided years ago to take her name Guri as my writing name. I like this connection with the past and with my ancestors, precious people who, however unknowingly, assured my brief existence upon this earth. That's enough for first thoughts, as--sorry, dear Great Grandmother--but I'm not at all sure of what I'm doing here yet. Posted May 25, 2008