Betsy Robinson

On walkers and canes they shuffled, in wheelchairs pushed by their children and grandchildren they rode, flanking a multitude of Boomers who'd made a lifestyle of youth and piloted the protesters on motorized scooters. "People get ready . . ." sang the young people who had used their smart phones to organize the buses and convoys. From all over the country they flooded the streets of DC, finally so tightly packed against the reinforced spear-topped White House fences that the old people crashed through.

But neither broken hips nor the Orange Man brigades could quell the swell of outraged pensioners at a missed payment of their hard-earned Social Security.

They hobbled, they limped, they slow-motion surged from the Ellipse onto the White House lawn and into the Kennedy Rose Garden which no longer had flowers since the woman the Orange Man doesn't sleep with replaced them with concrete. They filled the East Lawn, the West Lawn, and the South Lawn, where several elderly women were heard to exclaim, "I found a rotten Easter egg."

"I don't suppose we could eat them," replied another, miffed at the cost of her breakfast since the inauguration.

David Hogg, the new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Parkland School gun control activist, rolled his meemaw to the quickly erected podium and lowered the microphone to her chin.

"I have one thing to say," she bellowed over the electronic squeal.

"All right, all right there, young lady," came a gruff but hopeful voice over an invisible sound system.

"Bernie Sanders!" laughed David Hogg's meemaw. "Take it away, Bernie!"

And as David carefully rolled his grandmother down the portable ramp that had been hastily but expertly invented for quick assembly by a gaggle of MIT students who understood the future and wanted to do their part, Bernie took the stage.

"Welcome! Welcome to everyone! We are the richest country in the world. You have all worked hard for your retirement income! And finally, finally, it seems we have an issue that brings us all together.

"Just for a moment here, let's hear from you. Tell us where you came from, and if you don't mind, your political affiliation.

"You there, yes you in the lovely blue muumuu with the nice pageboy hairdo—reminds me of my mom in Brooklyn, always did her hair nice. Yes, tell us, where are you from and anything else you care to share."

"My name's Estelle. I'm from Michigan, and I voted for Trump—"

As the boos erupted, Bernie raised his hands like Moses. "Everybody, everybody is welcome here. Excuse me, excuse me one moment, Estelle, I think we need to establish our commonality." And instantly a respectful calm was restored.

"It is a big country," continued Bernie, "and people come with all different issues. But here and now—this is a place to come together for our common good, so there will be no booing." And as a mumble of apology undulated through the crowd, "All right, Estelle, go on. Tell us what brought you."

"I was a librarian for 50 years—"

"Wonderful, wonderful," mumbled Bernie. "Never mess with librarians. Go on, Estelle."

"I'm ashamed of my vote. You'd think I'd have realized—"

All around her, old people cooed and comforted with several on either side of her caressing her arms.

"Thank you, thank you," whimpered Estelle, her limpid blue eyes filling with tears behind her thick lenses. "I never made a lot of money, but I never spent a lot either. I was smart, so I thought with my Social Security I'd be all right. But now— Now—" Unable to go on, she collapsed in tears.

"All right, all right, we understand, Estelle. We're so glad you're here. Who's next?"

A tall bald Black man way in the back raised his hand, and Bernie shouted for him to speak.

"I'm from Tennessee and I only voted for Trump because of RFK, Jr., but now I realize that a guy with an oil and gas family trust fund don't know nothing about living on Social Security. I heard he mixed it up with anti-social obscurity due to malnutrition and food deserts."

"Yes! Yes!" bellowed the crowd.

"Next," said Bernie, pointing. "You there in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank. Can we get some help here? Somebody hand her a microphone."

"Thank you, thank you," gasped the woman. "I appreciate— I've got COPD—"

"Take your time, take your time, dear," comforted Bernie. "We're here for the long haul. Give her some space, people."

The woman coughed, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a voice that belied her medical appliances: "My name is Maria. I'm a Mexican American, a citizen of this country for 60 years, and I'm living in a nursing home in Southern California—"

"Bless you," mumbled Bernie.

"Bless you, bless you," echoed the crowd.

"I thought the wildfires would do me in, but thank God they didn't touch us."

"Thank God," said Bernie.

"Thank God, thank God," echoed the crowd.

"I'm so glad you made it," said Bernie soberly. "What brings you here today, Maria?"

"Well, this may sound silly—"

"Nothing is silly," said Bernie. "Take your time. Tell us."

"Well, I was brought up to believe the Golden Rule. All my life I tried to do the right thing. I paid my taxes, helped my neighbors, and volunteered at my children's school. Two of them served in the military and died in Iraq."

"I'm so sorry," said Bernie. "Thank you for their service."

"Thank you, thank you," echoed the crowd.

"And the other one, well he died of AIDS in 1982."

"Aw, gee," said Bernie, wiping his brow and shaking his head with sorrow, and a wave of sympathy rolled through the assembly.

"I was about as mad as a mother can be at Reagan for never even mentioning the crisis. But at least he didn't try to make it worse.

"But this—" she gestured toward the White House, "This is much worse. I'm a Christian, and like I said, I believe in the Golden Rule, but also there's the 'eye for an eye,' which the Orange Man said is his favorite Bible passage. So I think it's time we did unto this regime as they have done unto us."

A murmur of confused delight began to reverberate across the White House lawn, spreading quickly back to Pennsylvania Avenue, then to 17th and 15th Streets on the west and east and as far as H Street and Constitution Avenue on the north and south as Maria's voice resounded through the sound system.

"What are you saying, Maria?" queried Bernie, a slight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"Shut them down!" boomed Maria in a voice that came from a place beyond her oxygen-deprived lungs. "No tax payments, no food deliveries, I call on all White House service personnel to walk out now! No cleaning people, no butlers, no maids. Walk out! Walk out!"

And miraculously, an explosion of uniformed workers—cooks in aprons, chauffeurs in hats, doormen, even many office workers in business clothes—hearing Maria's cry, exploded out of the White House.

"No traffic, no commerce, no communication! Many of us are already sitting, so we don't even have to move."

"You mean …?" said Bernie, now with a full-face grin.

"Yes!" declared Maria. "A sit-in. Nobody move for as long as it takes. My grandson, Jesus, brought me here, and he and his friends from colleges around the country brought tents and supplies—"

And as if ascending out of an ocean, battalions of young men and women rose with backpacks and duffle bags bursting with food, medications, books and magazines, and even solar-powered appliances for cooking, entertainment, and medical sterilization.

And as the 70 million pensioners and their supporters heaved themselves to the ground, at a window somewhere in the White House private residence, a big bloated blob of a man with tiny hands and a decompensating brain, peeked out the window and muttered, "Wow, what a crowd size. They love me. They really really love me."

Full disclosure: I believe I am semi-intimately related to Mr. Dave Barry even though we've never met or enjoyed carnal knowledge. At only 9% into an advance e-copy of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years without Growing Up (pub. date, May 13, 2025), I was so delighted, entertained, and aroused that I prematurely ejaculated on Facebook:

Dave grew up in the 1950s in Armonk … just a hop, skip and a jump from where I was growing up in Briarcliff Manor.

 

His parents were married the same date as mine were. They were both smart and funny like mine. His father became an alcoholic but recovered. Mine didn't. And on and on and on.

 

I don't know whether to be jealous or in awe that I'm seeing a kind of parallel life in an alternate reality if only my family had been sane, nonviolent, and Presbyterian.

But it turns out that's where our parallel existences diverged.

Although Barry claimed to have been aimless after leaving college, flitting from bookkeeping to a local paper to misery at the Associated Press to teaching writing to business people, from my point of view as a writer who's slogged through publishing mud for more than 40 years, he was a goddam bird dog—zeroing in on Gene Weingarten (another writer who makes me guffaw) at the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic … which is where this book became my personal hilarious writer's tutorial.

Lessons from Dave Barry: To do a successful humor column, it is critical to care nothing about the truth of your subject, what your subject is, or basically anything. Sometimes the stupider the questions, the more entertaining the column. Hence, my imagined interview with Dave Barry about his new memoir:

BETSY: Why class clown? For goodness sake, you were only in school for 12 of your 77 years (well maybe 16 if you count college, but by then you seemed to have outgrown clowning for clowning's sake). So isn't it kind of disingenuous to qualify your life by 1/6.416666666 of its duration? Speaking of which, what do you think of clowns? In my experience, they are often sad and depressed and they make lousy dates.

DAVE: Aw gee, I never dated a clown, Betsy. I'm sorry you had such traumatic experiences. We only picked that title because everybody in the focus group voted for the cover with six-year-old me in a party hat. I do look pretty cute, despite the buzz cut my father insisted on giving me, but he was probably drunk when he did it, or in the middle of writing a sermon—did you like the parts about my dad?

BETSY: Very much, Dave. Your dad seems like a swell guy, the way he helped so many people and took you, with his camp group, to the march in Washington, DC, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. (BTW, nice historical significance, giving the memoir the obligatory gravitas required for a Pulitzer. Smart move.*) Speaking of which, you said you didn't realize at the time that you were witnessing history. What were you doing standing there in the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial?

DAVE: To be honest, Betsy, my mom had insisted I wear laced shoes, and one of the staffers in my Camp Sharparoon inner city kids group thought it'd be a great joke to tie them together. So I spent a lot of the speech trying not to faint from the heat or fall down because we were packed so tight I couldn't bend over to untie them. But I've heard the speech on video many times—thank goodness for YouTube—and, like I said, it's mind-expanding.

BETSY: Speaking of almost dying, (I know we weren't but you seem okay with leaps of nonlogic), one of my favorite of your millions of quoted parts in the book (Great recycling! More leisure time to practice your broom and lawnmower marching skills and think about what to eat for dinner!) was your interview with Bob Graham, the then governor of Florida. And speaking of almost drowning in a harmonica accident (readers, you'll have to buy and maybe read the book to understand that—You're welcome, Dave!), have you ever played harmonica? I know you spent and spend a lot of time in a band—currently with a lot of famous writers—but how do you feel about blowing into a small box?

DAVE: Wow, what a creative question. Well, honestly, Betsy, I long ago stopped blowing into anything because it makes me hyperventilate, and particularly if I were to do so while standing next to a pool. I really valued Bob Graham's warning and establishment of the Harmonica Safety Day (Read the book!). Who knows how many lives besides mine have been spared. Full disclosure: I still do have impulses to blow into small containers, particularly if they make funny noises.

BETSY: What's a mutilated verb? I've heard of mutilated body parts and your description of your colonoscopy made me laugh so hard I may have fractured one of mine. But until your book, I never heard of "mutilated verbs."

DAVE: Wow, you're a real word person, aren't you? Try this:

It is my conclusion that the explosion in your head at the mention of this mutilation is due to the failure of the relief valve in your ears and may in the future result in sentences that are just too long for their own good.

See what I did? Lots of verb ideas have been mutilated into nouns: "conclusion," "explosion," "failure" and maybe some other ones that you added to this totally unauthorized revision of my book. Thus you pressed some really dull verbs into service. An unmutilated way to write it is:

"I conclude that your head exploded because your ears are blocked."

BETSY: Okay … So how about farts? You talk a lot about body emissions. Any final toots?

DAVE: Speaking of "toots," how come they don't rhyme with "foots" which brings me to footnotes. Did you like them?

BETSY: About footnotes**

_____________

*I'm not being cheeky. Dave has a whole section where he makes fun of newspaper writers' obsession with winning Pulitzers, so this sentence is a bit of an homage. BTW, Dave did win a Pulitzer—I'm not making that up—so I'm sure he won't take offense if he ends up reading this after all his book tour interviews, signing autographs, and setting fire to many pairs of perfectly good underpants (Read the book!).

**There are lots of footnotes in this book and, in the digital edition, the way they pop up when you tap the footnote number makes the jokes on top of jokes even funnier. Way to go, Dave!

_____________

DAVE: Thanks, Betsy.

BETSY: My pleasure, Dave. And thanks for the free book in exchange for an honest review … which I guess this really isn't. Whoops. Well, thanks anyway, and I'll think of you whenever I have nothing else to think about.

A Facebook post reported:

The New York Times published a list of about 200 terms that the Trump administration reportedly prohibits or avoids. The list includes words such as activists, anti-racism, belonging, breastfeeding, climate crisis, community diversity, disability, discrimination, equality, feminism, gender, immigrants, LGBT, mental health, minorities, oppression, orientation, pregnant, racial justice, racism, sex, transgender, and victims.

 

The NYT stressed that the published list is likely incomplete, as more internal memos exist than those obtained by the newspaper.

(For a complete list that is free to read, see Diane Ravitch's blog.)

A couple of commenters thought that no matter what MAGA censors, they can't change reality, and therefore this word ban was "bonkers, stupid, and ineffective."

My response:

The ban is neither bonkers nor stupid. It is a very effective way to control what we, the people, believe. The censorship is calculated carefully to accomplish a whitewashing of communication and therefore people's mindsets. This is what dictatorships do. This is what the Nazis did. This is an endeavor that is tried and proven effective.

In the 1940s, my mother was one of the first female copywriters in a NYC advertising firm, and she used to say if you can get people to believe advertising, you can control what they think.

Not taking this stuff seriously and not understanding its effectiveness is how Democrats have been repeatedly defeated. We have a kind of arrogance that is self-sabotaging: we like to believe we think independently and therefore cannot be controlled by the language around us. But this simply is not true.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) became wildly popular during the rise of Trump, helping warring families bridge political gaps by teaching them how to reframe their thoughts and find common values. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, as anti-Semitic speech exploded, Lakoff wrote on Facebook:

"All thought is carried out by neural circuitry—it does not float in air. Language neurally activates thought. Language can thus change brains, both for the better and the worse. Hate speech changes the brains of those hated for the worse. It creates toxic stress, fear and distrust—all physical, all in one's neural circuitry active every day.

 

"This internal harm can be even more severe than an attack with a fist. It imposes on the freedom to think and therefore to act free of fear, threats, and distrust.

 

"It imposes on one's ability to think and act like a fully free citizen for a long time.

 

"Hate speech can also change the brains of those with mild prejudice, moving it towards hate and threatening action. When hate is physically in your brain, then you think hate and feel hate, you are moved to act to carry out what you physically, in your neural system, think and feel.

 

"That is why hate speech in not 'mere' speech."

And so it follows, if you ban, for lack of a better term, "inclusive speech"—speech that invites thoughts of equity, acceptance, and empathy—you will gradually transform the culture to be accepting of a dictatorship.

This stuff is serious. Wake Up!

Here is my Goodreads review of Jane Urquhart's magnificent novel In Winter I Get Up at Night. Urquhart, a multi-award-winning celebrated Canadian writer, appears to be so obscure in the USA that the massive New York Public Library doesn't have this book. (Hence, the displayed e-book, courtesy of Bookshop.org. Same price as the amazonian's e-book.)

I don't say much in the review because I don't want to spoil any of the discovery of it. But there is a lot I'd like to say.

This is a book about seduction as it relates to racism. I would never say that in a review because it is completely at odds with what most people will feel for the longest time and maybe even at the end, they will not articulate it. But this is my post, so I'm saying it.

"For seduction is a soft thing," Urquhart writes near the end of the story. "It fills your rooms with golden light, sings your praises, makes you feel elected. Sainted."

In my opinion, seduction, not hate, is at the root of racism. People who practice allegiance to charismatic racists feel bathed in their "golden light." People who pick up modern slurs, denigrating others, are pumped up by superiority and righteousness so impermeable that, even when it is pointed out, they are immune to the notion that they are doing anything hurtful or wrong. People who feel a "manifest destiny" aka "entitlement" to privileges that are denied others have been drugged with a false sense of supremacy. They have been seduced and don't even know they are flying on ego as flimsy as a cloud.

But, writes Urquhart in the next paragraph:

"Abandonment, however, is not to be endured, because it provides proof that—no matter how he made you feel when he was now and then in town—you are ordinary after all."

Seduction based on the ego's need for superiority is always followed by abandonment.

Forty-four minutes past midnight on February 7, 1951, I came into the world at the now-nonexistent Woman's Hospital, 39 blocks north of where I live in Manhattan.

When I was very young, my mother told me I was a mistake, quickly followed by the explanation that they'd have had me eventually, just not when I made my appearance. Even then I knew that "at another time" would not have been me. But oddly, I was not hurt by this. It was information that is even more important to me now than it was then.

Abortion, which I firmly support, was not an option and even though my sudden presence caused problems ("Good Trouble?"), I'm glad I made it through. And I'm absolutely positive that by the end of her life, my mother, who became my best friend for her last 10 years, felt the same.

Today I am 74. Way older than my father when he exited; six years older than my mother when she lifted off; and way way older than I thought I'd ever be.* And I'm grateful to be here, doing this life, trying my best to finish what I started so many lifetimes ago.

I may fail. As I said, my timing has never been great. But I'll go down acting and meditating … for the well-being and transformation of me, my ancestors, and for all who populate this precious world we all share.

__________________

* Because it is my birthday, I'm giving you a present if you are a person (like I was and sometimes still am) who is afraid of your own thoughts because of the edict that "Thoughts create reality."

If my thoughts created reality, I would be dead.

Thoughts create your experience of reality, but it is thoughts married to actions + fate/luck/karma that create what happens in this land of karma and matter.**

If you merely think and never act, you will have a passive existence. You can be born into wealth and experience life as drudgery. You can meditate your behind off, but not affect the karmic chaos in which we are all, by default, participants.

If you think you are hopeless and unworthy of life, and you eat/drink/drug/etc. yourself to death, you have acted on your thoughts and it is your actions that have proven the validity of your thoughts. This is called "confirmation bias."

If you have lousy thoughts like I had growing up and still do, but you DO NOT ACT on them—e.g., you don't kill yourself but instead live as healthily as you can; you do not seek revenge due to spiraling hurt and rage after somebody does you wrong, but instead you just feel and process those feelings; and if, no matter how ineffective you believe you are, when you see a destructive raging fire, you attempt to extinguish it—you essentially starve into transformation the beliefs behind the thoughts.

What's key is discernment which requires knowing WHAT you think and then choosing to act or not act on it. In fact, the whole business of condemning and being ashamed of our own thoughts lies wholly in the ego.

Lift up! Expand! Send your roots deep down to the core of Mother Earth. BE here. Discernment is only possible from a whole and therefore higher Self. And when the Self identifies an ego problem, then the ego gets embarrassed, and transformation happens. And as you transform, you have the potential for great joy and, eventually, amusement at your own lousy thoughts. So quit being afraid of your thoughts!

_______________

**Many of us have heard stories about enlightened beings manifesting stuff—food for the hungry, etc. By definition, enlightened beings live at One with everything (as opposed to split and in their ego), which means their steady vibration is quite different from that of most people. Their vibration is One with the Creator/the act of Creation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Hence, their actions are those of the Creator. Hence, manifestation.

Unless you are an enlightened being, to worry about manifesting stuff by merely thinking about it, or to believe you can magically heal the world by doing nothing is, to put it bluntly, the magical thinking of a young ego.

Whatever your tradition is, think of a Great Being whose counsel you believe in. All Great Beings encouraged action.

A central practice of meditation is repetition of a mantra—in my case, the Sanskrit phrase "Om Namah Shivaya" which means "I bow to my higher Self."

A central practice of Trump and his supporters is repetition of lies.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in a live Facebook talk, strongly suggested that those of us who are interested in truth relentlessly repeat that the pardoning of the Jan. 6th criminals (notice, I call them "criminals" rather than the sanitized "insurrectionists") is wrong. She referenced the success of the election result deniers through constant public repetition of the lie that it was not a fair result (notice how I do not repeat their lie, but use the words "fair result"). She said we can learn from them by using the same tactic to relentlessly refute any justification for pardoning criminals who broke into the Capitol, beat, bloodied, and tased police officers, called for the murder of the Vice President and Speaker of the House, and smeared their shit (notice "shit") all over the Capitol rotunda.

She encouraged us to write to lawmakers, write editorials, and do it repeatedly.*

The words we choose to repeat matter!

Why?

Because constant repetition, whether in meditation or in spreading beliefs, causes erosion. In meditation, if I can repeat my mantra for 35 minutes every morning, no matter how many times I go off the rails into mind chatter, there is a gradual erosion of that chatter.

The practice itself—of meditation or phrase repetition—causes erosion of whatever exists already. Practice is repetition.

Therefore, I repeat: WORDS MATTER.

WHAT WE REPEAT MATTERS.

We have to start noticing what we are publicly repeating. If we desire truth, we must choose to phrase things using truth.

___________

* The day after Heather Cox Richardson's talk, because I have no Republican representatives to plague, I sent the following to our newly minted, unanimously confirmed, Secretary of State. Feel free to copy. The address is: https://register.state.gov/contactus/contactusform

Or even better, write an original message to a Republican who represents you.

Dear Secretary Rubio:

Congratulations on your appointment as Secretary of State. I've read your remarks about this and you sound rational. Therefore, I would like to plead to your better angels to:

1. Remember how you got here and mitigate the brutal plans to eliminate immigrants. Yes, they should come here legally, but the point is we are a country of laws and your boss's promises to ignore everything from the Constitutional right of citizenship for people born here to draconian deportations are inhumane and go against everything this country was founded on.

2. Your boss's pardon of January 6th insurrectionists is untenable. Speak up! How can you possibly represent this country diplomatically when criminals are freed and encouraged by the government?

I wish you the best in your new job. Please act as a bulwark against the oligarchy that is threatening to end democracy in our beautiful nation.

Sincerely,

Betsy Robinson

1. Today, Jan. 7th, is the relaunch of a second edition of my funny novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, revised and republished when it went out of print.

The Humorous Story of a One-Woman Train Wreck—Winner of Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize

Meet Zelda McFigg. She is 4-feet 11-inches tall, 237 pounds, and convinced that she could be somebody, if only someone would recognize her inner beauty and star quality. Cousin to Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) and Homer Simpson, Zelda runs away from home at age 14, and at age 49 ¼ writes this furiously funny memoir to "set the record straight" about her lifetime of indiscretions. (Video: https://youtu.be/baVdveWdtao)

paperback

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQS8DXJ8

and

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/12166654?ean=9798989689248

e-book at Bookshop (readable on phones, iPad, computer--they have an app)

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/e1019eca30ba6166

kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Will-Testament-Zelda-McFigg-ebook/dp/B0DQHR13B8/

kobo

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-1

Nook

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-will-testament-of-zelda-mcfigg-betsy-robinson/1117038781?ean=9798989689255

2. I am thrilled to have my essay "Whole-Body Reading" in the winter issue #018 of Oh Reader magazine. It's about my visceral experience reading and why it's visceral—why some books work on a body level and some don't. It's a piece I've wanted to write for a long time, including an explanation of what I qualify as a story that "had to be written"—the books that send my body into movement and noise.

You can get the winter issue, #018 at Barnes & Noble stores magazine sections. And hopefully it will be available soon on www.OhReader.com.

Happy New Year!

Maira Kalman is brilliant!

This book reads like stand-up comedy for philosophical masses. The stories are snippets: commentary sometimes, sometimes personal stories. And they're delivered with a stand-up's or a performance artist's timing and pithiness, paired with paintings that demand to be looked at alone in a second paging through.

The still lifes are both paintings and moments within stories that manage, in so few words, to make you feel the insanity-causing dichotomies of love and remorse, love and rage, generosity and greediness, and every other opposite that we all contain. All this crazy turmoil of emotions is life. Or as Kalman writes: "the seething savagery / of our mundane lives." (81, slash  connotes line breaks, as in poetry)

Maira Kalman is part gleeful sprite and part ancient wise woman. A true original who's found her niche—despite my comments about stand-up comedy and performance artists, this work is exactly what it should be: a book of writing and art. Long may Maira Kalman live, write, and paint.

SALE: NOVEMBER 25 – DECEMBER 2ND

This Cyber Week, my books are on sale.

CATS ON A POLE

A novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills.

Reg. $16; Discount ($9+shipping) link:

IngramSpark

THE SPECTATORS

Part love letter to NYC's Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators' cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.

Reg. $16; Discount ($9+shipping) link:

IngramSpark

Perhaps my biggest ego quality is arrogance. I know it and it is hard to incinerate. I approached this morning's meditation feeling some despair. I asked for help—from a Siddha guru in spirit and the one who is presently alive.

It felt good to ask for help from what for me is a "higher power." (Side note: I just finished a thrilling thriller called Assassinations Anonymous by Rob Hart about a killer who is attending a 12-step program to stop killing. It is an ingenious way of dramatizing what it takes to change, and in 12-step programs, that requires requesting help from a higher power which can be anything you feel is bigger than you are. For me, that is my gurus.)

I felt their presence, but it wasn't helping much. Still my arrogance was spinning. Then Gordon Parks, the late photojournalist who I wrote about last February, came in in the form of a great light that pierced my heart so deeply I cried.

I felt small and contracted after that. When I tried to straighten, I felt nausea in my stomach. I guess I have to fully experience my arrogance as a process of letting it go.

Arrogance is a very different thing from determination. Gordon Parks lived his life with enormous determination but zero arrogance.

What a wonderful journal of thoughts and observations by Amy Tan, who also is a fabulous illustrator. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is beautifully written and published (thick paper, suitable for color plates) and $35, which is cheap for a book with this kind of art. (I read a library copy.)

Finally I get this birder thing. Amy Tan chronicles not only the "bird community" in her lush backyard, but her own mind chatter—and she is self-revealing in that way that I'm guessing most people will relate to: all of our judgments and worries, etc. The entries range from informative to funny to sad and even heart-breaking (it is a rough world in the wild, even in the well-tended world of backyard birdfeeders) to inventive (a wonderful "live commentary" of "The Windowsill Wars" for bird food). And I so admire her care for all living creatures—from the birds to the live mealworms she feeds them. She roots for life but has the ability or tolerance to watch death.

I live in NYC, right off Central Park, and for most of my decades here I had dogs (my last girl died a couple of years ago), so I was well acquainted with the human "bird community" in Central Park's woodland area, The Ramble. [If this sounds familiar, it is because the well-publicized horrific racist incident with one of the long-time birders, Christian Cooper, was in the north end of the area.] Historically, the birders are not fond of the dog people who chronically break the leash laws in the Ramble. And the dog people, who are there year round no matter the weather, are not that fond of the birders who tend to travel in massive aggressive herds, moving like a seasonal invasive species oblivious to anything or anyone on the ground who is not a bird. There are obnoxious birder guides who show off by blasting their bird calls through the serenity to impress the people who've paid to go on their tours. In short, there is obnoxious behavior on both sides of this birder/dog people history. But after reading Amy Tan's book, I finally get it: the birds are just like us—complicated, scrappy, territorial, with bullies and submissives, predators and prey. Maybe I'll even take my binoculars there myself now that I'm solo. (N.B. The solo birders are no problem—some became my friends over the years. Christian Cooper was not a herd-group birder, and the woman who falsely accused him was a newbie dog person—Ramble etiquette is, when caught off leash, to say "Sorry" and leash up—no big deal.)

At the beginning of the book, Amy Tan writes about how she was taught to "become the bird" by her drawing instructor, and she does—struggling to understand how they recognize individuals and why they do what they do and if they can change their habits . . . which brings me to:

Some thoughts on energetic and telepathic communication that Amy Tan never mentions:

In my years of watching birders in the Ramble so obsessed with peering through binoculars and camera lenses, I often had a fantasy. Or an idea for a cartoon: what if somehow what they saw were birds staring back at them through tiny binoculars?

The thought amused me and still does, and, often while reading this book, I found myself envisioning this.

Amy Tan is mostly focused on common human senses of sight and sound in her musing about why birds react the way they do—even wondering why they are fine when she's looking at them naked-eyed through her glass doors, but the instant she picks up her binoculars, they take off. She posits that it is because she looks scary.

This brings me to a New York City anecdote:

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I recently had a deep conversation with a friend I've known since the first grade. He is one of the nicest humans I've ever known. To me, he radiates goodness. But he would dispute that because he isn't made with the same energetic antennae that make me ME. He'd just read my novel Cats on a Pole and he was deeply shaken by not only the turns of plot but by the protagonist's sensibilities: she smells things he doesn't smell and feels energetic sensations he doesn't think exist, so in his mind, she was possibly mentally ill.

Because he's such a good friend, I willingly went into the weeds of this with him. I explained about hyperosmia (a smell sensitivity; I just recently learned the name for it from a NY Times article that describes it as a gift—which it is—rather than the "disorder" categorized by medical sites) and I told him I feel energetic sensations everywhere. I told him how this is commonplace and in fact valued in indigenous cultures where people who are particularly gifted are named as shamans or medicine people. (Unlike in our Western culture, this is not something one declares about themselves.) I told him this stuff is ancient and there is tons of literature about it.

All he really wanted was assurance that neither I nor my protagonist is insane. He seemed satisfied at the end of our book-length series of emails.

And I learned from him that what I've written may scare some people and I hope I understand better why and how to respond in a helpful way.

Today, September 1st, is a day I glory in being hyperosmic. I smell fall: a heavenly mix of both growth and decay in Central Park, one block away. My apartment is filled with godly perfume, and I wish my friend could experience this.

I wish we all would be curious, rather than judgmental, about one another's differences. Altogether, we are the most incredible garden we could never imagine.

Yesterday a friend told me that people feel pressured to "take a side" in war. Maybe in life too. The side I pick is FREEDOM and EQUALITY.

I pick that in this country. I pick that in the world. It's not that complicated.

If freedom and equality are my side, then everybody's pain matters. I can wish for wars to end and everybody to have equal rights. I can acknowledge the pain of people who have been attacked, killed, butchered, raped, burned, and abducted while enjoying a music festival, and I can acknowledge the pain of innocents who are being slaughtered by an army directed by a tyrant who cares only about maintaining power. I can call for the release of innocents on both sides from horrific actions.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can acknowledge the history of my own country and also live here, knowing that I have a right to my home, even though others were butchered in a genocide that gave me the land on which my home stands. I can choose personal actions to see that everybody's pain is acknowledged and everybody matters and that past wrongs are not perpetuated or repeated.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can hold painful contradictions and refuse to give in to catch phrases that condemn everybody of one race or ethnicity.

It's not that hard.

Yippeeee! On sale today: Cats on a Pole, a novel (with humor and an edge) about curmudgeon Harmony Rogers and healing teacher Joshua Gardner, and their duel of psychic wills. It's available wherever you like to buy books and e-books. But here is a link to buy it at a discount directly from Ingram, the distributor. (Cheaper for you, more royalty for me, no Amazonians chewing up the majority of the price, and only one shipment—smallest possible carbon footprint): $10+shipping for paperback for sale to addresses in U.S.A. only:

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD7AtCWE6EmYWL6RGzaLBcFDddACvPC4RxwU9SPSj5O

To see more--videos, etc.--go to the Cats page on this website.