This photo is of is my grandmother, Marjorie Davidson, on the left, and her sister Martha, the elder by two years, circa 1894 or ’95. I love this picture because I love – loved – my grandmother, and because of the look of fierceness on Great Aunt Martha’s face, at least as I see it. I like to imagine that, as the older sister, Martha would have defended her little sis with all her might, but it could be that the photographer was socially inept, didn’t know how to treat little girls, or maybe he kept insisting she sparkle or smile, in which case I know exactly how she felt: men have been telling me to smile for years, and I have perfected a truly frightening grimace in response.
These sisters, Martha and Marjorie, were the best of friends their entire lives, although those lives took significantly different paths, and my grandmother outlived her beloved sister by over twenty years, living to be almost ninety-eight. My sense was that their parents were enlightened, good people, who loved all of their children, and were respected and loved in return. Martha and Marjorie were educated beyond what was much more conventional for the time; after graduating from high school in Monticello, N.Y, they attended Oneonta and Albany Normal Colleges, respectively, and they both went on to teach, Martha for many years in the Oneonta School District, in Otsego County, New York, and Marjorie on the eastern end of Long Island, in the Hampton Bay S. D.
I don’t know how my great aunt met her future husband, Ward Woolheaver, but I know she waited many years to marry him because in true gothic novel fashion, he was married already, with a wife in a mental institution, a wife he would not divorce her in her diminished and vulnerable state. And so, having met and fallen in love they waited, until after many years the first Mrs. W passed away, and Ward was free to wed. By then Martha was in her fifties, and I believe Ward was at least a decade older. From all reports, my grandmother’s, my dad’s, and my mom’s, Ward and Martha had a great life together, buying a home in Franklin, New York, where they loved to socialize with friends and family. It wasn’t a long marriage, however, as both of the pair were very heavy smokers; I clearly remember Martha wreathed in a cloud of smoke, with a long, schmancy cigarette holder, upswept hair, and chunky bracelets. So stylish, I thought, even if I also thought I was going to die when she visited: along with my dad’s pipe, fresh air inside our house during those dinners was in very short supply. Her husband, Ward, died first, I’m not sure what year, but I know that Aunt Martha lived alone for at least a decade – moving to a ground floor apartment in Oneonta – before succumbing to lung cancer in 1968.
I do know that my grandmother met my grandfather when he returned from World War I to finish his high school education. She was his Latin and physics teacher, and by the time he completed his schooling, he was almost twenty-three, and she was almost twenty-six, and they’d fallen in love. She urged him to go on to college, he was so bright, but his dream was to farm, so she left teaching to become a farmer’s wife. According to my dad’s first cousin (and mine once-removed, I think is how it works), my grandmother worked harder on the farm than three hired hands put together, and I believe it. Her husband, my grandfather, was an extremely difficult man she loved a lot, as did I, a man who was volatile and abusive, expecting absolute obedience from his wife and children. He was insecure and ego driven in a way she was not, picking fights whenever and wherever he could, at home, and in public. He didn’t know how to be loved; he feared it. His favorite brother, Fred, had died suddenly at eighteen, going septic from a scratch on his cheek, one minute perfectly vital and alive, then dead less than forty-eight hours later. I don’t think my grandfather, sixteen at the time, ever recovered from the loss. Like Marjorie and Martha, the brothers had been best friends, and I’ve often wondered if he felt that Fred, who he and everyone else had loved, haunted every room in the construct of his own much more difficult temperament.
But I digress.
My grandparents married in 1921, and bought the farm the same year, where they grew cauliflower and kept dairy cows until retiring in the mid-fifties. Their fourth child, my uncle Jay, was born in 1926; he joined an older brother, and two older sisters, Bill, Betty and Martha, at home in New Kingston, the latter named after my grandmother’s sister. Aunt Martha visited to meet baby Jay at the farm in 1926 or possibly even 1927. I’m not sure; the roads were less traveled, and much less travelable back in the day, thus what is a forty-minute ride to Oneonta now was at least ninety minutes back then, if the weather was clear.
Great Aunt Martha wasn’t a huge fan of her brother-in-law, and from what I’ve heard, and the little I remember, the feeling was entirely mutual. Still, she very much loved her baby sister, prioritizing that relationship by keeping in touch through letters and calls, while making visits to the farm whenever she could, and could stomach putting up with her sister’s bully of a husband, always trying to pick a fight. Unlike her sister, Martha had not learned, nor would she ever learn, that when it came to her kid sister’s husband it might be better to keep her tongue behind her teeth. Still defending her sister, Martha picked fights right back at him, and for that, I am deeply grateful. You go girl.
As the story went, visiting the farm in ‘27, and after examining and exclaiming over baby Jay, Great Aunt Martha said to my grandfather, ‘Well, I hope that’s it, Bill.’
‘What do you mean Martha?’
‘I said, I hope that’s it. I hope you’re going to give Marge a rest.’
‘What does that mean, Martha? Give her a rest?’
And where was grandma at this stage? Tending to the baby? Hiding out in the kitchen or living room? From many other confrontations I witnessed between my grandfather and any one of his many sworn enemies (a long list that included my mother), I believe she would be sitting right there witnessing it all, giving nothing away, a female embodiment of the Rock of Gibraltar, albeit a rock with a slight smile on its face. (You go girl.)
‘I mean: I hope this is it. As in no more children.’
Nine months later, maybe ten, my father was born.
All hail Great Aunt Martha! Without you, I would not be here, you darling, pugnacious little girl, you loving sister, you fight picker, you marvel of a woman. You, Martha the First, rejecter of sparkle. All hail!
“The Dalai Lama say that the world will be saved by Western woman. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.
Burning woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all while visioning and weaving the new.” ~ Lucy H. Pearce
*the future is female, as is more of the past than I was aware – by which I mean I have been following several spaces that celebrate women in the arts, science, culture and elsewhere, and I am overwhelmed by just how many women historically occupied those spaces yet were never taught, never celebrated, never brought into the light as artists, as composers, as writers, journalists, chemists, engineers.. the list goes on and on…and, I am burning.
*Every once and a while I go back to Leaves of Grass, re-reading it for the umpteenth time, because it is beautiful, and powerful, and profound. It is a song, and a poem,an anthem, a celebration of life. Here is the first stanza…and if you’ve never read it, or any Whitman, I urge you to do so.
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea- rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . . . a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health . . . . the full-noon trill . . . . the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
*I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction. – Clarence Darrow
The rematch begins again: grudges versus affirmations. This week for the ??th time in my life I have determined that holding anger and resentment toward other people is not good for my health, mental or physical, and that renting so much space out, for free, in my head to shitty humans is not worth it. This is not a revolutionary thought: I’ve known it for ages. Years. Decades. And, once again, I’ve been doing a few letting go exercises and affirmations to fina-fucking-ly let go, or, to be more accurate, at least improve the rent situation, lighten TF up, and start or continue the healing process. This takes the grudges down a notch or two, eliminating a few (knock wood), for the immediate moment, until the next time I initiate another conscious consciousness upgrade/rematch. Conscious as in it takes deliberate thought to alter my consciousness; it takes practice and hard work to get the grim nasties under control and out of my system.
It makes me giggle – shamefacedly!! – to admit that I hold grudges against a couple of people who are, ahem, no longer with us (and may they rest in peace), but in fact it also makes me giggle (truly, my bad) to admit how many grudges I hold. That list is loooooong, people. Why is that? Well, because I was in local politics, which is a teeming sewer, also, I’m a human-fucking-being, and lastly, humans are complicated hot messes, at best. I am also, no doubt about it, a stubborn, headstrong human bean, as well as being a challenge to the more conventional, an independent female with my own money, lots of opinions, and no discernible ‘job’ or ‘career’ or ‘sugar daddy/ husband/ breadwinner’. I have pressed buttons for a long ass time, as in most people have relatively strong reactions to and even stronger assumptions regarding Miss Thing over here, whether or not they’ve ever actually spoken to me. And, being unconventional in a conventional world, there are those who feel free to speak and/or act on their idiotic ‘disapproval’. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best, ‘For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure’. Yeah. In rural America, that maxim is magnified by the short list of options available for those who never left or thought of leaving.
All that said, what I have been doing (again) is, while walking my dog in the mornings or swimming laps in the afternoons, dwelling on the people on my fuck you list, and consciously sending blessings their way. This is my standard blessing, which you are free to use, as I got it from – Eckhart Tolle? Liz Gilbert? Anne Lamott? The internet? – who knows, but it works for me. I even use it for myself, blessing myself, when I need to, when I am anxiety-ridden, not as often as in years past but, on occasion. Here it is: ‘may (so-and-so sonofadick) be happy, may they be heathy, may they ride the waves of their life, and may they find peace no matter what’. Sometimes I add ‘as far away from me as possible’ to the finding peace piece, because that’s a more honest affirmation, and isn’t honesty the best policy? Yes, yes, it is.
I find it calms me and makes my heart feel lighter. I guess? Usually, yeah, it does. Anyway, it definitely helps get me away from the well-trodden ruts of anger and resentment, ruts that lead nowhere, that are circular, that become over time ditches, potential sinkholes from which there might be no escape. And, this week, one of the people on that very active blessings list contacted me for the first time in two plus years to – okay, it was to ask for help – but, given she was one of my oldest friends, hey, give her the info she’s looking for, including my asked for opinion re: same, and keep moving, lightly, lightly. Happy to help, hope you’re well, buh-bye. I set the boundary, originally (she is tied at the hip to my gossipy, unfriendly AF sister-in-law), because enough already with the triangulation, JHFC, puh-leeze. I will, in turn, respect it, that boundary, because I set it (respect for self) for good reason, and having spent the last two plus years without that tied-at-the-hip incestuous nonsense in my life, oh, oh, oh, what a relief!
Pictured above: Clarence Darrow, Counsel for John T. Scopes, who comes up for Trial in Dayton, TN for teaching evolution in alleged violation of the law. (Photo by NY Daily News Archive) He was also attorney for Leopold and Loeb, another of his famous cases, and ‘trials of the century’. Great face, eh?
Because the universe has a devilish sense of humor, this morning I was given an opportunity to put the exercise of blessing a prick in immediate action, to not be a prick in return, to rise above it! Thank you for the opportunity, universe (insert eye-roll here____). I was walking the dog and thinking on my used to be grudge-y list, now the moveTFon list, and doing my blessings for each individual piece of shite human. My furry bundle of joy canine proceeded to poop on the verge of a town road about three miles from my house, one I have been using to change things up, largely because there are only four houses on it, and hardly ever any traffic to excite the chase in my 90-pounds of love, otherwise known as Diego the dog. So, he did the deed, and as one of the joys of rural life being not having to pick up poop on isolated public by-ways, I let it lie. Now, it was dumped in the grass by Diego about twenty feet from a parking spot belonging to a lady I know, slightly. She would not have reason to walk there, nor was the deposit close to her vehicle, her entryway or her bridge (you can only access her property across a lengthy footbridge). When I returned to my car, parked three-quarters of a mile from her house, about fifty minutes later at the end of our route, I found dog poop for the second day in a row on the ground next to where I would potentially step to get in my car. Oh. Yesterday’s ‘that’s another big dog who came through here not long after I parked’ naivete became ‘Oh, shit, Shirley carried the dog shit from up past her parking spot all this way yesterday and today to, to – to make a point?!’
The choice before me was stark: should I call her and give her hell, telling her what a petty cow she was, alternately pasting a note on the windshield of her truck – ‘get a life, bitch’, or, worse, toss poop onto her bridge when she’s not home – or… should I simply type up or write a note apologizing for my dogs indiscretions in the general region of her home (about 100 yards away, across the bridge and stream), including my cell number for future reference, adding that I hope, if she has a problem with my dog pooping on public by-ways ever again, she would call me to discuss it, or even stop by my house. I mean, after all, bitch, we have been acquainted for fifty-plus years. Oops. The funny thing is, yesterday I thought I was being paranoid, nah, nobody would put a big poop right by my car door on purpose!! And today, well, today I know better; today, shit still happens, and it’s up to me to decide how best to handle it. Jury’s still out because – I know I’m not the only one who walks my dog along that stretch – and, human that I am, it makes me laugh, thinking of the effort she has to go to, to do what she’s been doing – drive or walk a quick mile plus back and forth from her house – picking up dog shit out of the grassy verge to prove her point, which is in fact not an unreasonable one: clean up after your dog. We’ll see. Just because she’s petty cow doesn’t mean I have to be. May Shirley be happy, may she be healthy, may she ride the waves of her life, and may she find peace, no matter what.
Is it weird that I’m wondering what could possibly motivate someone to pick up poop – I mean I love my dog and all, but I don’t touch it unless I have to – and move it from one part of the road to another – besides petty spitefulness? Just let the rain take it, or push it over into the taller grass if the sight of it offends you, right? Oh well, back to work on the clash of values, the letting go, the championship bout between who I am and who I seek to be.
I imagine by the time I’m seventy, or eighty, all this stuff, any and all of my grudges, will seem like petty nonsense, right? Fingers crossed.
*Dogs never bite me – just humans. ~ Marilyn Monroe
He needs a haircut, don’t you agree? He’s not easy to catch in a still or semi-still moment for photos, believe me, and cutting his hair is a two-person job.
Diego, it turns out, is a Spanish form of the English name James and has the same meaning, which is “supplanter”. It is also associated with the Spanish word for “Saint”, which is “Santo” – all of which is hilarious for a number of reasons, one of which is that he ain’t no saint, but he sure is a supplanter, having replaced and upended my perviously peaceful life with a heckin’ load of work, chaos, outdoor time, and fun.
This next photo is Diego in his favorite awake spot inside the house, by the French doors where he can supervise the movement of various birds, the woodchuck that lives in the stone wall, and my neighbors. This photo also almost, almost captures the length of his lil leggums, which ain’t lil, a’tall. Sigh. 90 pounds of pure furry love!
In case you live under a rock and were unaware that 81-year-old Martha Stewart is this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Model, now you know, and – you’re welcome. Or, whatever. Personally, I am a fan of Martha’s, a woman not unlike Hillary Clinton with regard to the outsized hatred she’s engendered in her life, although I’m not a watcher or reader of her shows, her books, her magazine, what have you (in fact, does she even have a show or magazine anymore?) so, basically, I’m not a fan fan. I simply admire her for being a smart, successful business woman with a great sense of humor, one who knows how to use the media in support of her businesses. Martha is also admirable for her resilience, for having survived, and thrived, despite pissing off a lot of tweeny lil men, enough to end up in prison for a pretty slim case of insider trading of a type that is so common in certain circles in NYC, and elsewhere, if the authorities wanted to they could spend all day and night every day prosecuting it. But, they don’t, and for good reason.
As for Sports Illustrated. Who cares? Oh right, a lot of people do. I guess? A lot of men do. First of all, the magazine should be called Men’s Sports Illustrated, because the number of women and girls whose photos and stories inhabit the pages – even a half century after Title IX was passed – are miniscule. Miniscule. Tiny. Itty-bitty. Small. Few and far between. So, let’s be honest and call it like it is: Men’s Sports Illustrated. That a nearly nude 18 – 28-year-old female graces the cover annually, usually, creating that year’s best-selling issue – pardon me, 18 – 28-year old primarily white female – is y’know, not a big deal unless I guess you’re either the female in question ($$ka-ching! $$) or a person who enjoys looking at nearly naked females, and given the ubiquity of naked women and girls on the internet (so I’ve heard), maybe it’s time to move on? Maybe?
For a millennium, men have held the majority of the buying and selling power in the world, but people like Martha Stewart have been changing that for some time now, and – a recommended read – Rebecca Traister’s All the SingleLadies outlines how that rising demographic of successful, experienced, often well-educated, working, middle and upper-class women are changing the overall paradigm, and not a minute too soon. I started The First Time Project because I was sick to death of reading and seeing stories of male sexual initiation. FFS, not another one! And, in the culture at large, women and girls are waking up to the power of having our own: our own money, stock portfolios, businesses, homes, investments, representation, ideas, choices, desires – and our own stories told, respected, believed, and acted upon. Do we still have a long way to go? Fuck yeah, we do.
Does Martha Stewart’s appearance on the cover of SI’s breathlessly anticipated swimsuit issue change anything? Maybe, maybe not. But it is a conversation starter, and conversations are good, ain’t dey? Yes, yes dey are. For example, answer this: why the fuck is there a swimsuit issue, at all? And if so, why not a mostly naked man at least every other year, arising from the surf in Hawaii or whatever TF they shoot these things. I could go for that. Would advertisers flee? Would reader-subscribers? We won’t know until it’s tried, now will we? Mix it TF up. And of course we can discuss the male gaze, the taken for granted, assumed male point of view, and gaaaaaaaze. Who is holding the camera, who is editing these magazines with their dearth of female athletes portrayed, who is determining what and who is newsworthy in a world that is – however incrementally – changing; this is a subject for conversation, for discussion, for consciousness raising – the late 1960s equivalent of ‘woke’.
I’ve also seen the response on social media to the cover, which response and conversation has tended to revolve around Martha’s ‘work’, as in Botox, face lifts, filler – as well as the amount of retouching required, retouching the editors do even to the 18-28-year-olds, btw, because no woman, not one, is perfect until she’s been heavily retouched. Interesting word that: re-touched, touched again. Hey, the most beautiful person I have ever known was my grandma, a woman I was named after and adored, a woman who adored me, although in a hands-off way because she and my grandfather believed in treating their grandchildren equally, as in equally hands-off. Sigh. Still, she was pretty special and – she had a face that most closely resembled a horse, or a mule – not, by any means, standard issue pretty. But oh, she was gorgeous, highly intelligent, with a lovely sense of humor. She was also incredibly patient and kind. I never, ever heard a word against anyone, ever, come out of her mouth. I intend to grow old as gracefully and naturally as my grandma, who was a role model extraordinaire – except perhaps for aping the whole not a bad word spoken part, which is probably, mostly not possible, but I’m trying! I might, I just might have a dollop of my to-the-grave grudge-holding paternal grandfather in me. I might. And, once again, other pals of mine are going another route, as they are free to choose for themselves how to age, and hooray for that. One good friend had some kind of Botox-like injection to her upper lip, and was unable to drink through a straw for a week, which made us both laugh, as she so loves her big slurpy iced coffee drinks.
We all have to find our own way, and make our own choices, in a world that is often very cruel, very unforgiving and harsh, toward women as they age. As we raise our personal consciousnesses, as we let go of the ideas we had of ourselves as we once were, as we let go of cultural expectations, of fear, and of our precious egos (William Saroyan on the subject of aging, and death: everybody has to do it, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case), we make our way toward a wrinkled no matter what end. No one gets out of here alive, and no one really wants to get out young, regardless of the beautiful corpse concept. And truthfully, we are the same at age six as we are at age sixty, or ninety; our character, our temperament, our spirit, remains the same.
Robert DeNiro just had another child with his current partner at 79. Seventy-nine. Whatever. What’s sauce for the goose…
And if we must continue these outdated, ridiculous traditions, ones like an annual partly naked person on a sports magazine’s cover, let’s at least change it up, of which this latest gambit is step one. If we must, and – must we? Since Covid, since the weird last several years, can we not upend and alter a number of ancient, creaking, stale and moldy traditions – like inequality and unequal outcomes in healthcare and housing, like crippling student debt, like overpaying CEOs, while underpaying workers, teachers and nurses, like not having universal healthcare in the U.S., like not having paid family leave mandated federally, like paying too much for prescription drugs, like a broken congress, like the filibuster, like having only nine justices on the Supreme Court when we no longer have nine courts of appeals, but thirteen – and don’t you think thirteen is a nice uneven number? Ah! A woman can dream. The tradition of wedding bouquets and father of the bride dances can be toileted as well, in my opinion, as for white lace or satin dresses – puhleeeze – but I won’t get my hopes up, at least not for another decade or so.
Hey, I say go for it, Miss Kostyra (Martha’s maiden name), do whatever floats your boat. She certainly can take the heat she is getting; she has handled it well for decades. Practically my favorite thing about Martha Stewart is that she is, actually, friends with Snoop Dogg, which is perfect. And she did start her career as a model, back in the day. Jersey Girls Rule.
Here’s a link (below) to a survey of how many/often women – sans the swimsuit issue – have been featured on SI’s covers, it’s from 2013 but I figure nothing mich has changed since then, but again – a woman can hope.
