Meditations on Milestones

Three stories:

One: a project that took so long, everything changed

I was very excited Sunday when I suddenly hit a major milestone with my Katharine Hepburn epic. I finished sorting through all my notes. Woohoo!

Okay, this may not seem like a big deal, but I took my first note while sitting on the floor of my living room in my Yonkers apartment 25 years ago.

It was a basement apartment steps away from a beautiful aqueduct trail running up the Hudson River near Odell and Warburton. I used to walk my dog there twice a day. The apartment was always freezing (and flooding) and everyone else was on rent strike…except me because nobody bothered to tell the new tenants about it.

I would gladly have joined the strike just to be able to phone my grandfather in Oregon to tell him I was finally on strike for something, at least something other than that time he talked me into going on strike in their Port Orford living room the day I was disgruntled about having to eat fish again for dinner. He even helped me make a picket sign and sent me pacing around the room with it.

Of course, he would have asked about the picket lines and I would have said, “There’s no line, Grandpa. I’m just not paying my rent! Kickin’ ass for the working class!”

Anyway, aside from reading the occasional new Katharine Hepburn biography, it wasn’t until this year that I made a concerted effort to compile all the notes from all the books, magazines and journals. And it kind of feels like 25 years, (on and off, but mostly off), digging into a basement and now I can start pouring the foundation and raising the walls.

But here’s the thing, a lot has changed for women in 25 years. And I am finding that assumptions I made about Katharine Hepburn back then, assumptions I was pretty sure most other women shared as well, they aren’t so certain anymore.

For example, Katharine Hepburn herself, both her parents and her Aunt Edith together worked for and symbolized sexual, economic and reproductive freedom for women. You don’t have to search very far on social media to find men (and women) fighting against those very ideals Hepburn stood for and defended. Conservatives are attacking reproductive freedom on many fronts, not just abortion. Contraception, control over one’s virginity or sexuality, and the entirety of women’s roles in the workplace are now contested spaces. I saw a tweet yesterday attacking a woman’s decision not to procreate at all, even through abstinence.

So I can no longer tell the  story I was going to tell in the same way I was going to tell it, with the assumptions I was going to make about how women are allowed to be. The direct quotes I had been cataloging from Hepburn and her allies, quotes which still sound empowered and fearless aren’t going to land the same way for everyone. Even the assumption that an empowered woman is a positive thing is now up for debate again. I can’t even assume Katharine Hepburn can be understood as a great American hero in today’s political climate.

Two: hypertext heroics 

I also finished a new browser piece, a more complicated piece using those iframes we once  implemented back in the late 1990s with all those boxes and ugly scroll bars everywhere.

And usually, when I try to return to these older HTML design elements, I introduce a whole host of problems for myself and have to find work-arounds and make compromises. For example, in this piece I had wanted to use the new search technology Text Fragments. You’ve seen this in action if you’ve ever searched for something and were directed to a webpage with the exact search text highlighted. My grand vision was to show highlighted text from one frame link to another frame’s text. But Text Fragments won’t work at all with iframes so I had to scrap that architectural pipe dream.

I was telling a relative in Kansas City recently about writing browser poems and how I was going about them. And she said, “So you’re trying to make them hard to read?” And I said, “Yes.”

Because it’s hard to read on browsers. It’s frustrating on many levels. That’s what makes a book so pleasant…to this day. And pages and poems don’t get lost in a book. They don’t suddenly stop working. On the other hand, books are relatively passive. Links make you do something. Even something as microscopic as clicking a mouse button. Browsers and books, they each have their capabilities and failures.

Three, the notebook

A few weeks ago I started to use a handmade notebook I’ve been saving for a special purpose. I purchased it about 10 years ago but whenever I need a new notebook, I always  go for the dollar-store ones first.

I finally decided on a use for this best notebook collecting favorite poem titles from poems I find on Twitter. And since I am reminded of the day I purchased the notebook each time I use it, I’ve been thinking about the people I met that day and looking up their names on Wikipedia. This weekend I discovered two of them have died. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, this is an amusing story about meeting somewhat-famous people and how it doesn’t always go so well.

When we first moved to New Mexico in 2010 we lived in Santa Fe. I was working for ICANN in Los Angeles but working from home in Santa Fe. So I wasn’t meeting any new friends. This is partly because Santa Fe has become a wealthy and cliquish city. But also, I just wasn’t getting out. I met my friend Maryanne on a bus tour to see Greer Garson’s historic John Gaw Meem house on the Pecos River. For years, she was the only friend I had in Santa Fe.

I was even attempting to glom on to Monsieur Big Bang’s friends from Highlands University and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Well, I only did this once but I befriended one of his anthropology professors, a woman from Israel living in New Mexico to study Navajo culture. She was a cancer survivor and involved in a Santa Fe charity whereby seriously rich people were raising money to help poor, rural New Mexico cancer patients afford the stupidly expensive Santa Fe motels when they came in town for treatments.

So I would invite the Professor to dinner and she would invite me to these charity art shows and events in Santa Fe, One day the two of us traveled to the small New-Mexican town of Galisteo for the town’s home studio art tour. Because it’s always fun to go house to house and see everybody’s studio set up, especially in rural towns with especially high concentrations of artists.

Galisteo is interesting in itself.  All I ever knew about it was that Burl Ives lived there. If you drive through the town, it appears to be just another shady ancient and rundown New Mexican village. But shockingly those dilapidated-looking adobes are actually multi-million-dollar retirement homes. I remember the Professor telling me the CEO of Victoria’s Secret lived in one of them! How did those people even find out about Galisteo? And is it fair for a bunch of rich people to buy up a quaint little New Mexican village?

Anyway, so we went from swanky shack to swanky shack looking at everyone’s art spreads and we finished up at a house on a hill,  my Professor’s friend from the cancer charity, a French woman named Evelyn Franceschi.  She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had an attic full of delightfully charming French-looking  things she had made by hand: books, dolls, pictures. She even made her own French chocolates. (I bought some.) She was also quirky and charming and I bought the aforementioned notebook from her and loved it so much I hated to use it for ten years.

While we were there, another friend rode up on a motorcycle. We all stood in the dark, adobe living room chatting. Evelyne found out from the Professor that Monsieur Big Bang was working on an anthropology degree and Evelyne told me we should come back sometime to see petroglyphs on a mesa bordering their property (we never did). When the Professor told Evelyne I was a writer, she told me her husband was a writer, too, and had just written a book of local Galisteo history. I was very interested in reading about Galisteo that she told me I should ask her husband about it when he came back. As if on cue, her husband arrived minutes later. I went up to him and said, “Evelyne tells me you’re a writer. What sort of things do you write?”

I was expecting him to show me his stack of book copies on Galisteo history. But with a stone face he said, “I write plays.”

And I said, “Oh.”

I remember the sound of disappointment in my voice and I could even feel my face crumple up a bit at this unfortunate news. I mean plays are nice but how often do you meet a Galisteo historian?

And so that was the conversation killer. He looked at me with the face of someone who is annoyed that you do not know who he is, but not annoyed enough for him to tell you. We each went our separate ways and I never did learn the history of Galisteo.

The Professor and I took our leave and as we were walking to her car, her motorcycle friend comes up behind us. As she’s putting on her helmet she says to me, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

And I hate it when people say that because they know very well you don’t know who that was. But anyway I said, “No. Who?”

“He wrote The Elephant Man.”

“Oh…wow,” I said. “That is impressive.”

She told us he moved to Galisteo in order to not be found. His name was Bernard Pomerance and he died in 2017 of cancer. Evelynn died in 2015, about two years after we all met in her house in Galisteo. All things considered, I’m very happy to have this souvenir of my social awkwardness, this lovely notebook handmade by the charming Evelyn Franceschi, wife of the playwright who wrote The Elephant Man and possibly other bits of Galisteo history.