Postcards from the Shore

Postcard #1.“Hi. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Yes, this week has been our annual pilgrimage to the land of Maine, so consider these your postcards from the shore. By the time you’re reading this, we’ll have returned home, in part worn out by the long drive, but also refreshed by the waves, the tang of salt on the breeze, and the unforced rhythms of grace found in this place.

Postcard #2. “You won’t believe what I saw on the beach.” Truly, the human body has been fearfully and wonderfully made, but should there be a time to pass the bikini to the next generation? I for one am eternally grateful for the invention of the Tankini with shorts. As for the subtle messages of gender training, boys must not be taught to suck in their stomach when strutting down the beach. No fat shaming here, just making an observation.

Postcard #3. “The lovely Madelyn Simone is (a) having a blast, (b) making new friends, (c), playing hard, or (d) sleeping deeply.” And the answer is, (e), all of the above. For many years, our journey to Maine has been a family vacation, at times reminiscent of the classic film, “National Lampoon’s Family Vacation.” But this year, due to circumstances beyond our control, none of our kids were able to join us. Might we bring Madelyn with us? Her parents’ yes was hesitant, but they finally acquiesced to our plea and allowed her to come with us.

A seven-year-old child takes great delight in just about everything. Finding tiny crabs, clams, and bits of shells. Creating a sand refuge for her discoveries. Navigating the rocky shore with caution and bravery. Jumping over the waves for what seems like hours on end. Ordering clam chowder every day. Giggling at the various uses of Flarp (noise putty). Chatting with French-Canadian children. Threatening to splash Nana. Great joy for sure.

Postcard #4. “What was that mother thinking?” Like many old resort towns, Old Orchard Beach still has its seaside amusement rides, and it looks like at least the two-car Galaxy Coaster has been in operation since opening day, reminiscent of the Wild Mouse at Crystal Beach. Earlier in the summer, we spent a day at Cedar Point, and I’d been impressed with their safety standards. I’d never seen kiddie rides where the attendant had to release the seat belt with a special key, and while their height restrictions seemed limiting to Madelyn’s adventurous spirit, it was clear that Cedar Point took a very conservative approach to child safety (while scaring the bejeebers out of its adult riders).

Here in Maine, Madelyn could ride on a few more rides without an adult, for which I was grateful. However, we witnessed one mother giving the Superstar ride operator a difficult time because her small child (less than thirty-six inches in height) couldn’t go on the ride, the one where the stars at the end of the ride’s arms are raised in the air and rotate in the opposite direction from the central column. The Declaration of Independence may promise the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but thankfully there are limits to that pursuit!

Postcard #5. “Meeting lots of new people.” Even in a resort town in Maine, the multi-cultural nature of our country is in full view. Women in burkas on the beach. Canadians and Americans vacationing side-by-side. A French-speaking little girl, eager to practice her pre-school English skills with the friendly Madelyn Simone. Foreign students cleaning motel rooms, operating amusement park rides, and selling poutine, Pier fries, lobster rolls and cotton candy. One of our maids is Slovenian, a bio-tech student who cleans in the morning, catches a few hours at the beach in the afternoon, and scoops out ice cream late into the night. Disney gets it right: “it’s a small world after all.”

Postcard #6. “On our way home.” Ramana Maharshi understands: “If you approach the ocean with a cup, you can only take away a cupful; if you approach it with a bucket you can take away a bucketful.” We’re returning to Ohio with a full bucket of seashells, sand and memories.

Privileged

Privilege, according to dictionary.com, is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. Phoenix Calida describes it like this: “Privilege simply means that under the exact same set of circumstances you’re in, life would be harder without your privilege.”

I am a woman of privilege. I am white. I am well-educated. I have adequate income to purchase what I need, take the family out to eat from time to time, and go on vacation. My husband and I own our home (technically, about 85% of our home, sharing the rest of that privilege with the bank). About the only strike against me in terms of the world’s sense of power and privilege is that I am female, not male.

In my seventh decade (how can that possibly be?) I am grateful for the privilege I have. As Roxane Gay, author of “Bad Feminist: Essays,” suggests, “You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don’t have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about.” Or, as Nicole Graffeo explains, “White privilege isn’t saying we’re all rich kids with rich perfect parents spending our summers without a care in the world. On an individual scale, it is not cancelling out our everyday struggles. It doesn’t say that white people do not have problems or bad lives.”

While I could devote an entire column to the topic of privilege as it has come to be culturally understood in recent years, that’s all I’m going to say about it today. Because I want to write about a different kind of privilege, the one with a capital “P,” the kind of right and advantage that’s only available to a particular group of people: the bona fide grandmothers!

I am grateful for the privilege of family, and while I enjoy the adults and older kids in my family, I am especially blessed to have the lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful Elizabeth Holiday in my life. We (Larry, myself, and the girls’ Aunt Becky and Unkie Dan) took the two darlings, ages seven and two, on a mini-vacation to my hometown, and because of the high beds in the hotel room, we began the night with E.H. sleeping between Madelyn and me (or is it myself?). About 3 a.m., I awoke to the touch of Elizabeth kissing and patting my cheeks, while Madelyn was positioned diagonally across the bed, legs draped across mine. After my initial irritation at being awake in a hotel room in the middle of the night, my heart overruled my mind almost immediately, shifting to a profound sense of gratitude at how privileged I am to be a grandmother. Even as Elizabeth said the dreaded word, “ba-ba,” even as I stumbled in the dark to get her a drink of water, even as I hoped I wouldn’t trip or she wouldn’t spill water in the bed, even as it took her a while to go back to sleep, the word kept coming: I am so privileged.

As we strolled along Canalside in downtown Buffalo, privileged. As the buzzing bees and the raucous seagulls crashed our impromptu lunch on the shore of the Niagara River; privileged. As nine of us crowded into a hotel room for Chinese take-out at 10 p.m.; privileged. As little hands reached for mine while walking, jumping into the pool, or drifting off to sleep; privileged.

I acknowledge the privilege. I know many grandparents who are hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from their precious grandbabies. I know of the pain of estrangement and the pain of loss. I know the ebb and flow of Ecclesiastes 3, with its promised seasons and time for everything. I am soaking up every touch, every kiss, every splash, and yes, even every middle-of-the night, “Nana, ba-ba.” For as Brené Brown understands so well, “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.” I am one grateful Nana today.

Only if we remember . . .

One of the highlights of summers in our community is the Ashland Chautauqua event, held primarily at the Guy C. Myers Memorial Band Shell, featuring a series of performances and workshops with characters from various segments of our nation’s history. This year, under the banner of Voices of Freedom, scholar-actors portrayed Rosa Parks, Bessie Coleman, Mother Jones, Maria von Trapp, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., twentieth century figures whose courage spoke forth from the battleground for civil rights (Parks and King), the world of union organizing (Jones), the challenging skies of early aviation (Coleman), and life as a refugee from Nazi oppression (von Trapp).

Like most Chautauqua series, some of the characters are more familiar than others, but by the end of each evening, the audience has either met a new hero or discovered a new facet of the personality of an iconic figure. The latter was the case for me with Marvin Jefferson’s portrayal of the man born as Michael King, known to us as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

King was a complicated figure, best known for his civil rights leadership, but also standing firmly against the war in Viet Nam. As King expressed to the Saturday night audience, “I don’t know about you, but I ain’t gonna study war no more.” No doubt about it, the prophetic voice of Martin King married his courage to his convictions.

As I listened to the portrayal of Dr. King, and then later as Jefferson responded to questions from the audience both in character and from a scholar’s perspective, I did some quick math computations. King, born in 1929, died in 1968 at the age of thirty-nine. His assassination, less than four years after President Kennedy’s death, was followed a year later by the slaying of Robert Kennedy Jr. I remember Mr. Hurley’s knock on the door of Miss Kramer’s third grade class on November 22, 1963, and the subsequent reporting on the deaths of King and RFK. But I remember these events from the perspectives of an eight-year-old child, and then a young teenager of thirteen and fourteen. I was there. I bore witness to the history developing before my eyes. Yet I wept the tears of grief over these larger-than-life figures with little understanding of the complexity of their characters or the way the loss of their voices through early death would mold our country in the years ahead.

King claimed the movement was sustained by singing; he was also remembered through song in Richard Holler’s words about Abraham (Lincoln), Martin, and John (and brother Robert): “He freed lotta people, but it seems the good they die young, I just looked around and he’s gone.” My adolescent heart and mind wondered: would this public rampage of death ever stop? Even as I dredge up these thoughts from the perspective of almost fifty years, I am gripped by the courage that was modeled by so many in those turbulent times.  

What I realized as I listened to Jefferson bring MLK Jr. to life is that within another generation, within the next few decades, the memories and the voices of those of us who bore witness will be silenced. Soon, those who fought the battles of World War II, who bore witness to the atrocities of the concentration camps, those who vowed, “never again,” will all be gone. Soon, those who marched at Selma, those who dreamed of a country where the civil rights of an individual weren’t dependent on skin color, will be gone. Who will remember?

Yet we must remember, we must repeat the stories, we must continue to hear the voices of freedom. Because of von Trapp, we gather the courage to climb the mountains before us. Because of Mary (Mother) Jones, we are challenged to “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Because of Bessie Coleman, “we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream” (William J. Powell). Because of Rosa Parks and Dr. King, we can claim the dream that the content of character overcomes the color of skin. But only if we remember . . .