June 2011 – Patricia Wild

June 29, 2011: Talkin’

Whitey Bulger’s surprising, out–of-the-blue capture last week’s got me thinking: I need to deepen Welling Up. Why? Because one of the two main characters of my novel, which I thought I’d finished last summer, is a former member of the Winter Hill Gang.

While All Souls tells Whitey’s sad/maddening/horrific tale best, it’s a House of Representatives’ report, written in 2004 that’s inspiring me to go deeper. Specifically, it’s the title: “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers As Informants.”

Everything secret degenerates. Feels like an open invitation to probe, seek, TALK!

June 20, 2011: Talkin’ Trash

Just got back from a wonderful family visit to Brooklyn where I spent sweet time with my grandson and grand-daughter and their terrific parents. And experienced my first Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.

Coney Island, classic Last Stop on a Subway Line—with attendant amusement park and miles of beach to attract weekend ridership—vigorously holds on to its tawdry past. Not with its crumbling buildings, freak show/side show attractions, cheap thrills, overpriced souvenirs, faded, iconic billboards , incessant noise. And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about the bare-breastiness of the Mermaid Parade. All these are, arguably, charming!

I’m talkin’ trash. On the face of it, aside from Nathan’s Famous, Coney Island’s business owners seem to have made a conscious decision: We will not provide trash cans. (Kinda skimped on adequate rest rooms, too.)

God knows, if you’re walking around holding an empty Styrofoam cup for blocks and blocks, you begin to really wonder: Should I have ordered that pistachio-chocolate swirl softserv in the first place? (Answer: maybe I should have ordered a cone!) God knows, if you’re seated in the outdoor seating area right next to a Nathan’s Famous trashcan so can observe how often a sweaty employee empties the thing, one’s awareness of the sheer magnitude of disposable crap intensifies.

[BTW: Spectacle Island, one of Boston Harbor’s islands, has a no trash can policy: Visitors have to remove whatever crap they’d brought or bought from the island. AND THERE ARE SIGNS EXPLAINING THIS!]

But, hey. While I’m always overwhelmed by the Big Apple’s muchness, I am also always impressed by its Let’s Make This City Work energy. If NYC kids are currently reading comics starring The Green Lantern, comics which tout (hector?) responsible electricity usage—and they are—surely another Super Hero spouting Disposable! Recyclable! Bring Your Own Utensils! is already in the works.

June 9, 2011: Can We Talk?

Went to my 45th Wheelock College reunion last weekend—an abbreviated, spend a few hours on Saturday version.

Beside the fact that I live just miles from my alma mater (so going on a Duck Tour is not going to be the highlight of my reunion), my reasons for this abbreviated version are complicated and not worth going into here.

What, courtesy of the Internet, I would like to share is this:

Spending time listening to other women talk about their lives is fascinating. (Until it becomes so overwhelming that I gratefully hop on the T and go home!)

This year, I had two opportunities to listen: my class’s traditional, post-luncheon get-together, when the twenty or so of us go around the circle and share. And I also attended a workshop on “Transitions,” open to anyone attending her respective reunion, so the chance to listen to younger and older women was especially rich.

Because I want to respect privacy and confidentiality, I’m going to be a little elliptical: One woman talked about an incredibly difficult situation in her family and then said, in effect: “I, of course, would not have wished for this nightmare. But this horror has allowed me to be fully alive; a fully present participant in what is really the human condition.”

See why I went?

June 2, 2011:Talking about climate change

Just back from a wonderful, five-day trip to Louisville, KY and still in that never-neverland mood when the sensibilities of that quirky city feel pretty real. I can still smell boxwood.

For this trip, my husband and I had opted to stay at an elegant B & B, the Dupont Mansion, in the heart of Old Louisville and one block from “Millionaire’s Row.” So the scene for this B & B’s making-polite-conversation-with-total-strangers-while-having-a-sumptuous-breakfast-ritual was an elegant, high-ceiling, crystal glassware-filled dining room.

Nine times out of ten, under such circumstances, after collectively oohing and aahing over such palatial surroundings, what would most strangers—sleepy strangers—talk about? Of course: the weather.

Except that it seems as if weather, like religion and politics, is not a safe, banal conversation-starter any more.

This became crystal-clear (get it?) one morning when my husband and I sat across the dining room table from three people from—yup—Missouri. After we’d heard the story about being shunted into a supermarket walk-in cooler for almost an hour with forty other shoppers to wait out a tornado, the five of us began looking into our laps.

Bill McKibben’s Washington Post article playing in my head, I was hyper-aware of how fraught, how layered that lap-studying moment was. Because one simply doesn’t say aloud, “Jeez! This weird weather we’re having scares the bejeesus out of me!” to a total stranger.

First of all, there’s the possibility you’re talking to a climate change denier—and who wants to get into that over fruit cups and french toast?

But I sensed something else in that heads-bowed moment: A still-working-on-it etiquette: One simply doesn’t talk about the scariness of tornadoes and droughts and deluges and violent weather because it IS so terrifying. It’s a kindness not to speak The Truth?

Well, yes and no. Like discussing religion and politics, it’s a kindness to strangers to tread gently. But now that I’m home, I’m pondering what I could have said in that lap-studying moment.

Or asked.