Capt. Bunker speaks the truth

Posted on February 19, 2013 by sheilawill

You never know where you may learn something. Something important. History. Statistics. Some new food you want to try. U.S. Coast Guard facts.

A Tucson morning walk is the perfect time to gather information by phone. No wasted steps. This morning I was trying to find out if one of my hometown mailboats in Southwest Harbor, Maine, could ferry people from behind our house on Shore Road to the Causeway Club near Somes Sound.

I called Capt. Bunker of the long-time toting-folks-by-boat Beal and Bunker ferry service.

“How many passengers?” he asked.

“Well, I’m not sure yet,” I replied.

“I’ll tell you why I’m asking,” he said. “Our biggest boat used to carry 40 people. But the new Coast Guard regulations made us change that to 36. Seems like people weigh more now.”

Really. Capt. Bunker speaks the truth.

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In Tel Aviv eating Turkish delight

Posted on February 3, 2013 by sheilawill

Really, it’s all about the food. I’ve probably gained 10 pounds on my trip to Israel and Istanbul to prove it. Bags of tiny nougat squares of Turkish delight filled with pistachios, walnuts, pomegranate seeds, you name it. Forget about almonds, my usual healthy nibble. But let’s start at the beginning. Maybe you’ll understand that there’s no turning back in countries where tradition and hospitality begin with “Israeli breakfast” and end with small glasses of strong tea set in tiny flowery saucers.

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Breakfast in Israeli hotels could easily substitute for a wedding buffet: lox that goes down like silk, at least four other kinds of smoked fish, even more kinds of yogurt freshly made, gleaming in white bowls and a whole counter of scrumptious cheeses.

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Not to mention the rugelach ribboned with chocolate and other tender, flaky pastries. But when you’re talking tender, flaky — add buttery — pastries, nothing beats the world’s best baklava.

First fly north from Israel over the Mediterranean to Istanbul. My friend Gail warned me that I couldn’t eat just one piece. The old world charm of Karakoy Gulluoglu made me do it. Three pieces of baklava!

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Here’s the big surprise: Neither Israel nor Istanbul have good coffee. Fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice is plentiful in both places. I drank plenty of it.

Fortunately, both destinations had decent chocolate, which appeared most often in rich Israeli desserts.

Which I ate. My American Jewish Press Association colleagues and I were superbly wined and dined by our generous hosts, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism.

I wanted to connect with people and probably overdid “please” and “thank you” in Hebrew and Turkish. I believe in the benefits of chatting, without the complications of government and politics (more about those topics in future posts and articles).

I must have looked afraid in a colorful spice/tea shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Young Osman — an English teacher and the best salesman I’ve ever met — sold me $40 worth of Turkish spices (like I cook), gorgeous dried flowers for tea that will help cholesterol and coughs, made me laugh and served me pomegranate tea.

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“You know, I’m not your enemy,” he said, after I was drawn into the shop. That stop was one of my favorite of the entire trip.

I’ve been in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport for around eight hours, and still have five to go before boarding my El Al flight to Newark, with another nine hours to get back to Dan and Tucson at 6:35 p.m. Monday night (don’t ask).

So dear readers, toda raba (thank you in Hebrew) and tesekkur ederim (thank you in Turkish)  for following this flaky post.  I’m going to look for chocolate.

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We’re from New Yohk

Posted on January 5, 2013 by sheilawill

Being able to walk on cool sunny Tucson mornings without slipping on ice is a miracle for this New Englander. Back east there’s snow and more snow, a friend was sandwiched between two storms unable to fly west from Massachusetts.

Some folks come to Tucson for the winter (aka snowbirds). Some Orthodox Jews also fly west from eastern U.S. cities. We were on our early morning stroll a few days ago,  returning home from a coffee-walk to our neighborhood Starbuck’s.

There they were trying to cross the busy street at Country Club and 8th. A wobbling, frum (religious) older woman in serviceable shoes, all in black from head to toe except for her short red wig. Her husband, also in black, was decked out in a flat-topped  satin-covered hat, old-fashioned wool topcoat and sported a scraggly white beard.

They’re here, I said to Dan. The foreign east-coast couple had stopped a bicyclist but he soon rode away. Clearly anxious by the time we got to them, the woman asked, “How do you get across this street?”

“Well you have to wait for a lull in the traffic,” Dan said. They didn’t know where they were going so Dan took out his handy-dandy iPhone and found the address of the synagogue they were looking for. The man stood back from our worldly conversation, too steeped in Talmudic learning to deal with the practical, I imagined. Or maybe he didn’t want to get too close to a woman — one with purple streaks in her hair.

His wife was all over it. Since I was familiar with Congregation Young Israel from work, she asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“Yes,” I said, and gave her my usual rap, how I’m not religious but am the associate editor of the local Jewish newspaper. And I’m going to Israel in three weeks on a press trip. “Is this your first time?” she wanted to know.

“Do you live in Tucson?” She was curious, and she didn’t mind that I wasn’t religious. At least I was Jewish. “Yes, we live right there,” I pointed to our house across the street.

“This is our first time here,” she said, leaning in and confiding, “We’re from New Yohk.”

“Really?” I wanted to say but maintained my politeness, maybe realizing that soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange land.

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Welcoming 2013

Posted on January 1, 2013 by sheilawill

photo-64Life keeps turning. But there’s still so much I don’t know. Why does this Christmas cactus bloom at the same time every year?

Where do our memories go when we grow old? Dan’s father says the worst thing about being 88 is that “my memory is shot.”

Yesterday we spent the afternoon with Dan’s  parents. Did some grocery shopping for them at the Safeway where Gabby Giffords and  12 others were gunned down nearly two years ago. Put a damper on the new year but today that experience has whooshed by. Just like 2012. Just like the past 40 or 50 years.

Here’s how 2012 flew by: My hair turns back to gray with purple streaks, Brook and Gian become engaged, Ethan moves forward in the second year of his Ph.D. program at Rice,  Dan loses weight while I seem to take on his lost pounds — same goes for cholesterol, I’m inspired by my 101-year-old friend Brownie, I become pen pals with Noam Chomsky, Brook and Gian arrive for a lovely visit and her gig promoting “Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden” (NYT Book Review Editor’s Choice twice) at the March Tucson Festival of Books,  Julie and I continue our inspiring walktalks 2-3 times a week in El Encanto hood.

The beauty of Mt. Desert Island never ceases to amaze — this year it’s the Rockefeller Gardens. Besides having Brook and Gian at our house for a week and having a yummy engagement dinner at Fiddler’s Green, I visit with 40 friends. No visit with my dear friend Ashley Bryan on Islesford this year but I’m lucky to find the best winter renter, a scientist who relocated from San Diego.

Back to Tucson in August — I’m happy to receive a Poets & Writers magazine grant to conduct writing workshops at Our Place Clubhouse/Cafe 54. It’s all about creating a chapbook to help reduce the stigma of mental illness. We end up in a Tucson Weekly feature story — thanks to Mari Herraras — and on KVOA TV. With more to come…

Dan and I start checking out ethnic restaurants around Tucson with our fine-dining friends Bruce and Judy, from Cafe D’esta to Caruso’s to Kimchi Time (probably our favorite).

Began collecting Social Security! It’s the best! Going to a financial advisor who lives in Tucson but was recommended by Maine friends is also a step forward monetarily.

Over-the-top obsessed with the presidential election. No kidding. I kept pressing the “donate $3” button for a total of nearly $200. Anything to keep clueless Mitt Romney out of the White House. If only we could get the do-nothing Republicans out of the House.

Favorite books read: “Wild” by cheryl Strayed, “When We Were the Kennedys” by Monica Wood, “Elsewhere” by Richard Russo, “The Son” by Lois Lowry, “Orange is the New Black” by Piper Kerman, “Truth & Beauty” by Ann Patchett, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman. I like true stuff.

Posted in Bopping Around Tucson, Family Matters, Mount Desert Island/Maine | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

An Ordinary Day

Posted on December 25, 2012 by sheilawill

photo-62We chose an ordinary plant for our mini-holiday tree. This morning we strolled over  to our local Starbuck’s in the Tucson sunshine. I wanted scones and coffee for a holiday breakfast on an ordinary day. None of the usual suspects were hanging out. It was nice enough to sit outdoors, chatting ourselves about how nice it was.

I like ordinary days. They’re the best. Nothing makes me happier than knowing my kids are together for the holiday, just hanging out in Jersey City. It’s occurred to me that some people don’t have ordinary days.

Take deranged mass shooters. For some reason their lives have gone awry. They’re alone in a bad way, not in a quiet introverted way. For whatever reason they crave more attention than they’ve received in life and they’re pissed off because they didn’t get it.

To the extent that the media believes “if it bleeds it leads,” a mass shooter finally receives the attention he desires — even if he’s dead. Consider the suicide bomber who believes he’s going to heaven or at least a better place than where he lives in real life. That’s a problem for all of us, especially if we believe we’re all in this together.

As Andrew Solomon wrote in this Sunday’s NYT that “people are unknowable.” That may be true, but my theory is simpler than that.  Mass shooters don’t have “ordinary days,” which may include connection to others, feeling worthwhile, hope that the next moment may get better. Seems we human beans need at least one.

photo-63Sunday I drove out to Douglas Spring Trail in the Rincon Mountains. Strolling along, happy to be in nature,  I started humming. A few sparkly young girls, one wearing pink sequined sneakers, ran down the path toward me.

“Happy Holidays,” the girls called out, giggling as they soared by.

I wish everyone an ordinary day, when the sun still shines, when you can walk safely in your neighborhood, when you love and are loved.

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From regret to revolution

Posted on December 8, 2012 by sheilawill

Reducing the stigma of mental illness should be the next civil rights movement. I’ve always been fascinated by “diseases of the brain,” as some of the writers at my Our Place Clubhouse writing workshop call mental illness. From the early 1970s, when I read British psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s “The Politics of Experience,” I wondered who was crazy: Was it the individual who believed she had a bomb in her stomach or the pilot dropping bombs on Vietnam.? It was a conundrum.

We certainly never talked about mental illness in my family growing up, but I’ll bet it was there. My father fell asleep most evenings reading the newspaper in his chair (depression?). My mother was very angry and yelled a lot (very likely had OCD). Were there chemical imbalances, disorders of the brain? Does it matter? Aren’t we all on a mental health spectrum?

My view of what constitutes mental illness has matured since my infatuation with R.D. Laing, who may have had schizophrenia himself. There’s the theory that therapists and shrinks harbor their own brain disorders, spending a lifetime trying to right their own stuff. Could be.

When I was in grad school in the ’70s, earning an M.A.T. degree at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, I concocted an independent study in radical psychology. I taught an introductory psychology class at Northampton Junior College. Taking students  on a “field trip” to the state mental hospital is one of the biggest regrets of my life: Inmates — that’s what they were — were catatonic or totally out of it, drugged to the nth degree, dressed in Johnny shirts, seeming inhuman. We all stared at them in disbelief. Crazy people unlike us. Really sad.

Thank goodness it’s not like that anymore. Many people with serious brain disorders are out in the world, high-functioning, taking much better medications to alleviate their symptoms, living “normal” lives.

There are fantastic community places here in Tucson like Cafe 54/Our Place Clubhouse, which is under the umbrella of Coyote Task Force. I was asked to be on the board around eight years ago, after writing an article about a local psychiatrist. Talking about finances at board meetings didn’t do it for me. I applied for a Poets & Writers magazine grant to work with writers. I wanted to contribute more, to help educate the wider community about people who are more than their mental illness. Watch for our chapbook sometime in 2013.

We’re on our way.

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New England Proud…Arizona not as much

Posted on November 17, 2012 by sheilawill

Gabby Giffords and Ron Barber voting together.

It’s 11 days after the election and Arizona’s Second Congressional District race has finally been called for Ron Barber. It was a close race between Barber and Republican Martha McSally, but that’s not why it took so long to count the ballots. Arizona had something like 750,000 ballots left uncounted on Election Day.

Why, you ask? Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett bloviated about the success of our early voting on NPR the other day. Forty percent of Arizona voters use mail-in ballots. Here’s my take: If it’s “early voting” why isn’t there a deadline for people to send in their ballots a week before Election Day so they can be counted in time, allowing poll workers to concentrate on counting provisional ballots? Why let “early” voters drop off their ballots at polling places on Election Day? Uh…couldn’t they just vote that day instead, allowing the machines to do their thing faster than poll workers bogged down with paper and pencil?

More Arizona voting embarrassment: Racist Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio wins? Sensible Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate Richard Carmona loses — by only five percentage points — to  Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, one of the guys who can’t figure out how a woman’ s reproductive system works?

Ahhhhh…but then there’s New England. All Republican congressional representatives up for election were defeated. Feisty Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren was elected to the U.S. Senate. New Hampshire voted in the first all-woman congressional delegation — plus governor — in history. There’s always Vermont Independent (really a socialist) Sen. Bernie Saunders, whom I pay attention to and trust. And my dear Maine, where Obama beat next-door neighbor Romney by 15 points, and is sending smart, no-nonsense former Independent Gov. Angus King (really a Democrat) to the U.S. Senate.

That’s not to say there aren’t wackos in Maine too.

And there are many right-wingnuts who are still whining about Obama winning reelection. Brassy former First Lady Barbara Bush advises, “Get over it. Move on.” We’ve got to work together. If  House Republicans continue to obstruct progress, President Obama must lead the way.

There are bright spots in Arizona too. Finally, I might add. In addition to Barber’s win, which the Arizona Daily Star still hasn’t announced, Kyrsten Sinema won in CD9, giving the state  a majority of Democrats in the House.

Overall, I’m very happy about the election results. On a personal note, I’m happy that both my grown-up kids are doing their thing at their respective professional conferences this weekend, in Berkeley and Chicago. I’m very grateful this Thanksgiving. I hope you are too. Happy Thanksgiving to all! 

Posted in Family Matters, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Born to Run

Posted on October 29, 2012 by sheilawill

Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords groovin’ to the music

Gabby looked tired. She looked sad although she smiled and subjected herself to hundreds of people taking pictures. She was born to run. U.S. Rep. Ron Barber, who won a special election to take her place in the House, noted that Gabby’s always had a secret passion to be a DJ., which she did at today’s “Get Out the Vote” bash/concert at Tucson’s historic, funky Hotel Congress. “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen was the first song she played.

Gabby’s lucky to be alive with her cognitive abilities intact after a bullet smashed through her brain nearly two years ago. I’m always happy to see her and to walk by her home a few blocks away.

Yet if must be tough for her to hear Ron Barber talking about his current campaign to win a full term in Congress and to listen to Dr. Richard Carmona, who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat that could have been Gabby’s.

People around me were teary-eyed as Carmona, the former surgeon general under W., related how he came to his decision to run for the Senate, when his instinct was to get far away from Washington. “I was inspired by a committed leader who worked tirelessly for Southern Arizona,” he said.  Of course that was Gabby. “She would call me her opening act” whenever he campaigned with her.

Sad sad sad.

A woman stood next to me wore an “Old White Women for Obama” button. Guess that’s me too. I have to say, I’m a little sad watching young women — who look no more than 20 — running around today as a chief of staff or campaign director. A job I wanted fresh out of college, as a political science major/political junkie. I stumped the halls of Congress trying to land such a job but back then I was only asked if I could type. I tried again after working in the 1972 McGovern campaign.

It’s too late for me to be a politico in Washington. But I hope it’s not too late for Gabby.

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George McGovern: “My Conscience is Clear”

Posted on October 21, 2012 by sheilawill

I met Democratic presidential nominee Sen. George McGovern in 1972, when I worked in his campaign in Montana. I didn’t know what to say. “Just keep telling the truth,” I blurted. And he did, that year, and in all the years since.

During the ’72 campaign, Republicans did more than swift-boat McGovern. They sent henchmen to the National Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate complex to find anything that would discredit an honest, smart historian, an American hero during World War II. But like my other role model Howard Zinn, another historian who became an anti-war advocate (not a pacifist) precisely because he had been a bombardier, McGovern spent the rest of his life speaking out against war.

In 2004, McGovern attended the Democratic Convention in Boston where Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was nominated for president. Kerry, who went to war in Vietnam, coming home in 1971 to testify before Congress against the war. At that time,  in what became a famous anti-war line, he pleaded, “How can you ask the last man to die in a war that was a mistake?”

I don’t know if McGovern spoke with Kerry in 2004 about defending his war record. If he did, it didn’t matter. Bush, Cheney and the evil genius Karl Rove manipulated Kerry’s service to make him sound like a French-loving, cosmopolitan weenie.

And Kerry, unfortunately, stood on the Senate floor in 2002 to defend W’s macho invasion of Iraq.

McGovern never swerved from his abhorrence of war. And he kept writing, mostly about history. I heard  him speak about his book on Lincoln in Tucson around five years ago. I didn’t say anything to him then; 2004 was enough. I was on my way to Maine and had received press credentials to cover the Boston Democratic convention.

When I heard that McGovern was sitting in the South Dakota delegation, I ran over and got to sit down with him and chat for a few minutes. I thanked him for his honesty again — 32 years after driving back east from Montana, proud of my little red Toyota’s Massachusetts license plate (the only state McGovern won in 1972, along with the District of Columbia). “Don’t blame me. I’m from Massachusetts,” proclaimed my bumper sticker.

At the 2004 convention, McGovern took my  hand in his, smiled at me, and said, “We didn’t win but my conscience is clear.”

This week I’ll be wearing my “McGovern President ’72” button, in memory of a true hero.

Posted in Fight wimpiness, For Love of History, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Politics is small, life is big

Posted on October 14, 2012 by sheilawill

Driving home from Sunday grocery shopping I was glued to a Radiolab story on NPR. Twenty-one-year-old Alan Lundgard refused to give up on his girlfriend, Emilie Gossiaux, after she was hit by an 18-wheeler truck while riding her bike in Brooklyn. Following weeks of stillness in a hospital bed —  a nurse even pronouncing her dead — Emilie’s shattered parents were ready to move her home to a New Orleans nursing home.

Meanwhile, Alan remembered a method used to communicate with Helen Keller. It worked with Emilie. Read their story on NPR. It’s what happens when a loved one refuses to give up. I sat in our garage to hear the rest of their story. Maybe the cuties I had just bought from Trader Joe’s were melting. I didn’t care. It was a life-affirming moment.

With the young lovers’ story close to my heart, I went inside and had only a few minutes to put away the groceries before Felix Baumgartner’s remarkable descent from 28 miles in the sky, first in a free fall, then via the stability of a parachute. My favorite part was before he jumped, going through his checklist with mission control on the ground, when he gradually stuck his feet out of his capsule window.

What was going through his mind? He wasn’t speaking but responded to mission control commands with a thumbs-up. “If I were him I’d even be praying now,” I said. We were pioneers watching a historical first. Another life-affirming moment.

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