Christina Taylor Greene, September 11, 2001 – January 8, 2011, Tuscon, AZ. (Photo: KVOA.com)
Except sympathy to all who grieve.
[addendum: All right, also, this statement from Christina's mother in Sunday's NY Times: “I think there’s been a lot of hatred going on and it needs to stop,†she said.]
Several readers — thank you theredbaron, Jill, and COat50 — wrote me yesterday to inform me that Mitrice Richardson had been found. As in, her body had been found, life long since lost from it. (LA Times account here.)
It was another reader who informed me of her case, nearly a year ago. She thought I might be interested in trying to publicize her disappearance, partly because at the time it was getting insufficient attention from the press. That she was a Black woman mattered to me; she was likely experiencing a psychological break of sorts, untreated; also, that she was a lesbian mattered (or so, at least, I gathered from some of the news reports and readers).  All beings deserve all our love and care; some, though, get less of it from the world as it is right now, and any of us with heart-mind-gut has a special responsibility to do what they can, when they can. (Here was that first post.)
These days, I haven’t been able to do much. But I kept this notice in my blog’s sidebar since that first post, hoping someone would maybe see something or remember something or pass something on. The proverbial Hail Mary pass, the fielder’s glove tossed in the air as the ball flies past:
A quick sketch of the complexity of people.
The boychild and I were at a stationary supply store this morning, getting the nicest congratulations on completing Kindergarten/ congratulations on starting preschool gifties I know to give these kids: spiffy little hardback notebooks and fresh felt-tipped pens with which to fill them. Per usual, the boychild is in a dress. Today, it’s an especially pretty one, since it’s the last day of school for the big sister and he wanted to be fancy for the school’s Friday morning community meeting. It’s got an empire style cut, with forest green velvet on top and white organdy below, layered over a built-in slip dealie. Twirls nicely. Over it he’s wearing a plaid shirt-jacket, under it, striped cotton tights. All per his request.
Other relevant matters: in the past month or so, perhaps because he’s bigger, perhaps just because, our son has drawn more and more attention from kids around him,ranging from stares to snickers to derision. These kids are all either a little or somewhat older than him, since kids his age continue to either not notice or not care much. We’re at the point that I pretty much have my feelers out the whole time we’re in public, and anticipate some management/intervention/dialog of some sort with other kids.
E.U.P. • February 27, 1995 — March 24, 2005.
[I posted the photograph above and the poem below for the past two years on this date. Â Most of the explanatory text below, last year too.
Muted backstory about my nephew here (I provided an anchor link to the relevant part, but it seems to not be working).
I continue to find it near impossible to write here in public about my nephew, the flesh and blood boy, much less about his illness and death. Though I will mark this day this way. Slightly more possible has been my attempt to describe the mark his joie de vivre, coupled with his illness and death, has left on my parenthood. Â About which, some here, and here.
At some level this whole blog is a paean to him insofar as it is an extended sign of my attempt to live my life and my parenthood with eyes and heart as wide open as possible, and to grab as many people by the lapels as I can, and urge them to do the same. Â For this enduring parting gift, my gratitude to him continues to be oceanic.]
“When Death Comes”
by Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems
Pops, indicating the height of the trees when his dad planted them 70 years ago.
In my recent, breezy, Twitter-length series of As to some Qs about lesbian fatherhood, I wrote: “My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life.” Â True story. Â One of his most oft-repeated definitions of family is this line from the sympathetic speaker Mary in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”:
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, Â They have to take you in.
One of the clearest and warmest youthful memories I have of my dad, besides standing next to him singing as he played Broadway show tunes on the piano, or playing frisbee with him in the back yard, or walking the streets of San Francisco en route to an “old timey movie,” Â is how he tucked my sister and me in at night. Â I can’t vouch for what he might have said with my sister in her room, but I suspect it was fairly similar to what he said to me. Â We would wax philosophic — mostly at first, he would, and I gradually joined in as the years wore on — pondering life’s big imponderables. Â Then as he’d turn out the light and linger in the doorway, he’d say, “It’s a good world.”
He said it enough times that I pretty much came to believe him.
Kid’s baseball card photo/talisman, Berkeley, CA.
Had to wait ’til Monday, since over the weekend the spirits flagged too much. Kept looking at pictures of pictures of my nephew, who would have turned 15 on Saturday. Couldn’t post a picture of anything other than him, but then couldn’t really post about him, either. So, a blank weekend. Â Today, just a wee slice.
Every morning I pick up a bracelet I got in his memory right after he died, to keep him and what he teaches me in full view. Â Just before I put on the bracelet, I kiss the tip of my index finger and touch it to his face in this peanut league baseball photo, taken several years before he died, and try to connect/summon/say a little something to him. We all do what we can.
The boy and I are driving back from a morning’s peregrinations — hardware store (my idea, natch), bakery (we both agreed, natch), library (his suggestion) — and we were listening to one of his favorite songs on the Free to Be You and Me album: “When We Grow Up.”
It’s sung by Diana Ross, and here are the lyrics:
When we grow up will I be pretty
Will you be big and strong
Will I wear dresses that show off my knees
Will you wear trousers twice as longWell, I don’t care if I’m pretty at all
And I don’t care if you never get tall
I like what I look like and you’re nice small
We don’t have to change at allHey, when we grow up, will I be a lady
Will you be an engineer
If I have to wear things like perfume and gloves
I can still pull the whistle while you steer{repeat refrain}
When I grow up, I’m gonna be happy
And do what I like to do
Like makin’ noise, and makin’ faces
And makin’ friends like youAnd when we grow up, do you think we’ll see
That I’m still like you, and you’re still like me
I might be pretty, you might grow tall
But we don’t have to change at allI don’t want to change, see, ’cause
I still want to be your friend
For ever and ever and ever
As we near home, my sweet boy starts to sing along with it — he of the coiled-spring body energy and the jabbing sword thrusts and the fierce, fast tears and the insistence, this morning, on bringing his sister’s fairy wings and wand with him — and a swirl of contradictory thoughts elbow one another in my head. What a beautiful vision of the future. What a load of malarkey. Everything’s changing these days; anything’s possible. Think about that tomboy girl you saw on the playground the other day: she was surely loved by her parents, who did her hair like that. My son will be pummeled — like that kid in the middle school a few scant blocks to the north of us; wait, no, like that kid at our daughter’s very own elementary school — the minute he wears his fairy skirt outside the house. “We don’t have to change at all”– how sweet. How impossible.
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From the vault: a Copenhagen pictorial (1)
This image is of a Wonka-esque factory along Copenhagen’s harbor, taken by me using my sister’s cellphone camera. Â I was brandishing it out the window of a moving taxi en route to the Opera House and the beloved’s and my first date night with childcare (ever? certainly in a foreign country).
My then-family of three was visiting my sister and her just-then-family of three, who were living there four Thanksgivings ago. A surreal, crepuscular time during a crepuscular season. Dusk at 3:30, 4pm; long shadows all day; a bluish glow over most things for much of the time. Or so it felt. We were all underwater, to one degree or another, some of us so deep it’s a miracle the pressure didn’t crush the skull.
Last week was an historic week  for this blog: I believe I may have posted less than I have in years. Rivaling holidays when I was supposedly away from internet access, or post-surgery when I was supposedly away from my better senses. The coming weeks may not be any better, at least in the prose post department. As consolation, for those of you still wandering by to peek and see whether I’ve been able to lift something sharable up out of the fray of late,  I’ll offer up some images from that Copenhagen visit, in honor of the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference held there.  We got two weeks of conference: other than my visual travelogue of Copenhagen, my goal is to sprinkle some kinda actual prose posts in before we all roll up the sidewalks and hunker down for one holiday or another.
Disclosure: none of the Copenhagen pictures to come over the next two weeks includes high-profile world leaders, or anything more climate-change-themed than the factory above. Still, there’s a picture of a one-year-old lil’ monkey in the batch, shocking proof that the more things stay the same, the more things change.