Observations

         Yesterday was Mark Milano’s actual memorial at The Center, where so many activist milestones take place.     Entering the room, the first person I saw was Andy, who reached to hug me with a glass of red wine in his hand, spilling it on my sweatshirt sleeve and the floor.               Next I encountered a cluster of FUQ lesbians ,all of them mothers now, one with no longer baby daughters about to head to college.     The moment felt awkward, like running into colleagues you once saw daily but haven’t seen in a long time.     There have been times I wondered where these women were as we did action after action, trying to hold on to the things we won a long time ago.         Not Jennifer, but the others, who melted away and left just the two of us. Jenn has seen me in various states, showing up DC with my walker or barely able to ge...

              Activism can be a source of real frustration for me because I come hard up against the limits of what my body can do these days.     Yesterday was May Day, and a coalition of activists decided to take a stand against the billionaires who are greedily monopolizing resources, buying our democracy, and destroying the planet for profit. Sunrise, an organization of mostly young activists, put out the call but in an effort to prevent the info leaks to the police that have plagued several recent actions, in order to get any details other than the date we had to show up at a meeting the evening before. I ducked out of work early not knowing what to expect and made my way down to Judson, where people were gathering in the former gym.  It’s a big, unfurnished space and when I got there, young organizers were kneeling on the floor drawing on big pieces of paper and stacks of pizza boxes covered a table.  I grabbed one o...

  I got to the infusion center yesterday and found it completely deserted – nobody behind the desk and nobody in the waiting area either, like the rapture had hit just one floor of this outpatient building.     Eventually one of the receptionists showed up and issued me the standard bracelet.     I have a couple of favorite nurses, mainly because of their IV starting skills – after so many years of medical crap, some of my veins are just done.  Yesterday it was Kayla, an energetic woman whose slight build and pixie cut remind me of Kess, a character from Star Trek Voyager.  I’m not the only one who had this kind of reaction to her – a few cubicles down an older man getting chemo told her how much she resembled a character from a 1960s movie. Kayla had a trainee with her, a nurse who told me she had previously worked at Presbyterian so told her about Project Stay, the youth clinic we work with at Presbyterian.  Nurses have a lot of t...

       I woke up with a song Kate S used to sing in my head.  I was humming it when I went in to feed Gretchen, the new cat who is still acclimating in her own room.  We don’t know how long she was alone after her owner died, but by the time the super found her she was noticeably underweight. She is understandably food  obsessed and normally goes straight to her bowl and then comes to be patted.           When she heard me humming though, she veered away from her bowl and came right to me, purring. Some cats are drawn to music – several used to come sit on the piano when my mother played.  I can’t tell if she thinks my humming is purring or if she likes the song, so I sing it to her - “How can anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less than beautiful, how can anyone ever tell you that you’re less than whole? How can anyone fail to notice that your loving is a mirac...

        I was at Hampshire, in my second year, when my mother found my birth father’s obituary in the NY Times after looking for it for years.     I don’t know what made her think he would die fairly young – he was 66 – but she read the obituaries year after year with a quiet determination.     It wasn’t easy to buy a copy of the Times – the campus store didn’t have it, and you wouldn’t necessarily find it by taking the bus to Amherst either – so I went to the library and fished it out of a bin of recently arrived newspapers.     The library was silent, not in the hushed way of people trying to be quiet as they did research, but in an empty, echoing kind of way.     I could still bend back then, so I settled onto the carpet to read it.     It covered his time in the Navy in WWII, his years writing for Life and as a professor at Columbia.     But mostly they covered his books and the controversies they c...

        Trying to juggle a ton of medical appointments and a lot of clients in crisis, I haven’t had time to let the announcement of Hampshire College’s closing really sink in until now.     It’s a huge loss, not just for me personally – which is especially painful because I met Kate S there – but also for all the queer kids and the oddballs who need a safe place to land.     Hampshire was the only college that was willing to look past my strange high school transcript, where the grades were all over 90 or failing in what looked like a completely random pattern.  My grades were a barometer of each teacher’s feelings about the importance of physically being in their class.  Some teachers were OK with the fact that I was busy going to protests and speaking at hearings and doing press interviews, as long as I could pass the tests.  Other teachers could not imagine anything being more important than being in the...