Elbow Grease

“Use Ajax the foaming cleanser,  foams the dirt right down the drain.

You’ll stop paying the elbow tax,  when you start cleaning with Ajax!”

As a kid I loved that silly jingle!   And in fact my mother always told us to use that proverbial elbow grease in whatever we did,  and not just mundane cleaning chores.

My mom Jessie was always ready to tackle new challenges and to give her all to whatever she did,  and she invariably did it all very well.  (See My Game Mother,  Still Life,  Jessie’s 79th,   Art Imitates Life,  Jessie’s Earrings, and  The Dinner Party)

I  miss those silly advertising jingles,  and I really miss Jessie and her elbow grease.

RetroFlash / 100  Words

– Dana Susan Lehrman

I marvel at the significance of having an elected official there to register his dissent against a sitting President from his own party.
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I like to think of history in astronomical terms of spiraling orbits. In the same way the sun hurtles through space and our planets spiral along behind it, forever trying to catch up, history doesn’t move in cycles, it moves in spirals.

I’d like to offer the possibility that — with our most recent inauguration — we have completed a 40-year spiraling orbit that began with the inauguration of Ronald “the Gipper” Reagan and has ended with the inauguration of Joseph Biden as 46^th President of the United States.

When the people elected Ronald Reagan, we Californians were incredulous. We had seen how this B-movie actor betrayed his colleagues in the Screen Actors Guild by naming names in front of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. We had seen how this Hollywood hack had conducted himself as Governor of California, particularly on issues of budget, social services, and protest during the Vietnam and civil rights era.

Our incredulity escalated to anticipatory dread during his inaugural speech when Ronnie Reagan spoke to the post-Vietnam economic malaise. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” And so the cycle began.

Conservative politicians resurrected an old Congressional carnival hustle — cut the money to government programs and then point to the results of starving governmental programs and say, “see? Government doesn’t work.” Nice.

Forty years passed. Who knew government was such a curse, so  bloated, so troublesome to the people that it needed to be starved and butchered? Reagan fiscal zealots cut budgets and bureaucratic “fat” from social services with a carving knife. Homeless people popped up on the streets overnight. Wars came and went. AIDS came and didn’t go. Scandals — Iran Contra, Enron. Welfare queens disappeared under the watch of a corporate Democrat.

Halfway through the Reagan era, a pile of Republicans tumbled into Congress like a stir-crazy pack of football players piling off a bus. The Tea Party dogma of no retreat, no surrender turned Congressional discourse into an obsolete artifact. A bubble appeared with the moving inauguration of Obama but racist America never got over four years — and then four years more! — of a black man in the Presidency

The nightmare of the next administration began with an inaugural description of American carnage that no one recognized, replete with “…mothers and children trapped in poverty,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” “the crime and the gangs and the drugs” and a state of infrastructure in “disrepair and decay.” “The orange agent’s grim bummer of an inaugural speech was written by a white supremacist child of a holocaust survivor who ate dried paste off his arm in junior high school.

In four short years, the presiding orange agent split the already bone-thin governmental structures and processes into kindling and set them on fire. But out of the ashes, a new President rose on his knowledge and experience, learned what left of center might look like, was elected regardless of phony doubts and promised to close end the 40-year Reagan era of anorexic government and trickle-down economics that never dripped, never trickled.

Now, we have a President and administration that wants to use government to address the problems that government was designed to address in the first place. In his inaugural address, the newly minted 46^th President said, “[w]e can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus. We can reward work and rebuild the middle class and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.”

All of that will require government to do the heavy lifting. The social contract, the agreement that the people will support the government and the government will serve the people, will return. And with all the good will, focused intent, and luck in the world, we just maybe might come full spiral and into launching a new New Deal for America. Amen.

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Book Slut,  or Why I’m in Six Book Clubs

Most of my women friends are in a book club and some are even in two book clubs.  I’m in six.  I know that sounds a bit crazy,  but it really wasn’t my fault.  Here’s what happened.

As a kid I loved to read,  in high school I was a staff editor for the literary magazine,  I was an English major in college,  and went on to grad school in library science.  (See Library Lesson)

And so by the time  I became a librarian,  I was what my friend Paula calls a book slut.

In the 1970s my New York neighbor Jerilyn invited me to join her book club,  my first.   We picked books by consensus and took turns hosting the meeting and leading the discussion.

We were all young mothers then and scheduled our monthly book club meetings for 8:30 at night to give us time to feed our families and put the kids to bed.   (Altho we thought we were liberated women,  in hindsight I guess we weren’t liberated enough to assign those tasks to our spouses!)

But eventually we got smarter,  and met for dinner at a restaurant before heading to our host’s apartment for drinks,  dessert,  and book talk.   As the years passed women dropped in and out,  and sadly we lost some to illness and death,  but I’m happy to say that after 40 (gulp) years our club is still going strong,  and since Covid meets on Zoom.

In the 1990s I joined a second  book club,  one for teachers and librarians that met after classes in a neighboring high school in the district where I worked.   Renee,  a public librarian,  led it as part of an outreach program to the city schools.   We met for many years and then when several of us retired,  we decided to stay together and Renee offered to continue as our leader.   She and I became close friends,  and that club also still meets,  now on Zoom,   but sadly without Renee.   We lost her to cancer much too soon.  (See Comfort Food for Renee)

And then in 2007 my friend Judy called to say Doris Lessing,  a favorite author,  had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature,  only the 11th woman to win in the Prize’s 106 year history.   We decided to throw a celebratory tea party for our bookish friends,  and thus our  “literary tea for women authors”  and my third book club was born.

A few years later when Danny and I began spending weekends and summers in a Connecticut community,  I met many well-read,  congenial women.   Soon,  you guessed it,  we formed a book club,  my fourth.

My fifth book club is made up of four cousins who are scattered from coast to coast.   We don’t see each often and so we Zoom monthly to stay in touch and talk about books.  (See Retreat,  Still Life)

And this year,  amid the racial unrest in the country and our Covid struggles,  my friend Yaslyn invited me to join a social justice book club made up of a diverse group of women,  and so my sixth.

Over the years the books I’ve read and discussed,  and the wonderful women I’ve met and close friendships forged have been so enriching and rewarding,  I can’t imagine giving up a single one of my book clubs.

And so after a lifetime of book clubbing here are some titles I can recommend:

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf,  Time Will Darken It  by William Maxwell,  The Lover by Marguerite Duras,  A House for Mr Biswas by V S  Naipaul,  Stoner by John Williams,   Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor,   Charming Billy by Alice McDermott,  Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle,   A Time of Love and Darkness  by Amos Oz,   Beloved by Toni Morrison,   A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius  by Dave Eggers,  West With the Night by Beryl Markham,   Lonesome Dove  by Larry McMurtry,   Kric Krac  by Edwidge Dandicat,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  by Maya Angelou,  The English Patient  by Michael Ondaatje,  The Book of Daniel  by E L Doctorow,  Life After Life by Kate Atkinson,  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner,  Old Filth by Jane Gardam,  The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa,  Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston,  Darkness Visible by William Styron,  Buddha  in the Attic by Julia Otsuka,  Shipping News by Annie Proulx,    Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson,  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier,  Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion,   Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks,  84 Charing Cross Road  by Helene Hanff,  Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally,    Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov,  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver,   Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,  The Devil in the White City by Eric Larsen,  Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin,  We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates,   Dubin’s Lives by Bernard Malamud,  My Brilliant Friend  by Elena Ferrante,  Ties by Domenico Starnone,   Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz,   Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid,  Room by Emma Donoghue,   Mr Bridge and Mrs Bridge by Evan Connell,  The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien,  Happiness as Such by Natalia Ginzburg,  Passage to India by E M Forster,  Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham,  The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer,  The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker,   Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively,   and Peace Talks by Tim Finch.

I’ve loved all these books,  but if you’re headed for a desert island and you can take only one,  make it James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses,  and don’t let the hype scare you,  Joyce is not as hard to read as you think.  (See My Love Affair with James Joyce)

Rest assured you can trust me on this,  after all how many six-book-club sluts do you know?

 

– Dana Susan Lehrman