In the last picture in the exhibit—the only one in color—a ring of people surrounds an enormous circle of flowers that have been laid on the street. In the center of this floral installation, Vaclav Havel, in jeans and a suede jacket, with hair longer and hipper than any twentieth-century American politician has ever had, adorns a small tree, wispy and so laden with ornaments that it is almost dwarfed by the Czech flag that has been planted beside it. In rich and vibrant color, there at the edge of the glass stairwell, I saw a man and a fragile tree, encircled by circles of living beings. This is what artists can do, I thought.
Susan Sontag once wrote. “Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas ‘memories,’ and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory… But there is collective instruction.”26 Looking at these photos, that fiercely proud tribute in that garish theatre with its fading rugs, I felt instructed and revived.
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism,” Vaclav Havel would say some years after the revolution. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”27
In 1967, as I merged, untethered, with the crowds at the Czech exhibit on Ile St. Helene, I was hopeful. What I felt that summer and would feel for much of my young adult life, was that I was involved in something that made sense, that I was a single thrumming cell in a larger organism with a shared intelligence and common breath.
Was that belief as illusory as the power I felt pressing my red or green button?
Yes, and No.
Corporate Giving (2010)
On an October morning, I got up earlier than usual to go to a 7:30 a.m. fundraising breakfast for Horizons for Homeless Youth. I parked in a downtown garage, and emerged from my car to the echoing click of sensible but stylish high heeled shoes and a parade of women in tailored suits and pearls filing into the Westin.
I was there as a guest of my CEO, a member of this worthy organization’s Board of Directors. She is smart, passionate, and absolutely driven, approaching philanthropic fundraising as relentlessly and with as much personal investment as she brings to driving us toward our bookings targets and revenue projections. And over the years, she has given me entrée into a sub-culture of high powered business women, a small but growing elite.
As I stood in line to register, I looked at the tags pressed on the silk and wool and cashmere-clad chests of the women around me. The individuals’ names meant nothing to me—it was the company identifiers in equally large font that marked this crowd. State Street Bank, Choat and Hall, Hale and Dorr, Fidelity Investments, Talbots, Crabtree and Evelyn, Digitas—every major financial institution, corporate law firm, advertising or marketing agency, and retailer catering to women was represented there. And the representatives were a tastefully presented bunch. Their make-up was subtle, the manicures pearly and not brash.
Inside the ballroom, PowerPoint presentations on two enormous screens on either side of the dais displayed rotating images of black and brown and white children—on playgrounds, at story time, drinking milk, clutching a jump rope in their mittened hands as they were herded down the sidewalk. They were uniformly adorable with their gap-toothed grins, wide eyes and puffed out chests as they prepared to blow out candles, hurtle down a slide, or climb to the top of a snow bank.
As the lights dimmed, I sat down at our company table and removed the goodie bag full of tchotchkes from various corporate sponsors from my plate. The hall filled with the amplified sound of pre-school aged children singing “The Wheels on the Bus,” and this morning, as they did every year, these small but boisterous voices with their mispronounced R’s and active hands driving the bus as its wheels went “wound and wound,” instantly caused me to well up with tears. Something about their fierce pleasure in singing, their obliviousness in that moment to the fact that they were kids, that they were homeless, that their bold and happy voices were being broadcast to a ballroom of the penitent privileged, broke my heart this year as it did every year.
Liz Walker, a former newscaster and now an ordained minister, bounded onto the stage.
“You’re here because you know that goodness is manifested in your deeds,” she said, allowing just a hint of black preacher cadence into her speech. “You’re here because you know that your caring, your action, your generosity make a substantial difference in the lives of those less fortunate.” She paused for the silent Yeah that this crowd might have felt but wasn’t schooled in uttering. “You’re here because words alone, mere expressions of concern are not enough. You’re here to make a difference, and just by being here, just by buying your seat at the table—a table with a lovely centerpiece generously donated by Crabtree and Evelyn—and I just learned that their name is pronounced ‘Eeevelyn’—you’ve already made a difference. So please, before we turn our attention to this morning’s speakers, give yourselves a hand.”
As warm and genuine as the Reverend Liz seemed to be, my applause was limp and brief. I was embarrassed by this request.
“Tonight over 1,200 families will be staying in publicly funded family shelters,” declared this year’s chairwoman, a graying lawyer from a downtown law firm. “Compared with low-income housed children, homeless children experience more health problems, developmental delays, increased anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and lower educational achievement.” Her delivery was matter of fact, but with a hint of the indignation to come. She must do litigation, I thought.
The facts were appalling; the worthiness of the organization undeniable. But as always, my outrage was undercut by the sight of the enormous corsages worn by the speakers and all of the Board members, as if we were at prom and this year’s theme was Homelessness! Even the organization’s Executive Director—a committed, unpretentious, and hard-working woman whose daughter had gone to school with mine—looked faintly ridiculous with the giant carnations engulfing her pale neck.
I picked at my breakfast. Cross-sections of kiwi and starfruit dotted with blackberries formed a happy face emoticon in one quadrant of the plate.
Reverend Liz stepped back to the microphone. “I’d like to introduce you to one of the hundreds of mothers who have been helped by Horizons for Homeless Youth in the past year. Please give a warm welcome to Lucelia.”
We clapped vigorously as a young Hispanic woman in a tailored navy pin-striped dress walked out of the wings. The applause tapered off and we waited for Lucelia to speak.
She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, I’m very nervous,” she began, then stopped.
“Take your time,” I heard Reverend Liz urge her from the wings.
“Let me try again,” she forced out in a quivering voice, then again fell silent, her fingers audibly clawing at the index cards she held in front of her. Her face, projected to the thousand-person audience on two 5’ x 7’ screens on either side of the stage, was damp, and her eyes were welling up with tears.
“You’re among friends,” someone yelled from the audience.
Lucelia looked down at her notes “I’m glad… I’m very glad…” She stopped again. Reverend Liz began walking out toward her, but stopped when Lucelia turned, held up her palm, nodded to herself, took a deep breath, and began again.
“I’m glad to be here,” she declared. We all clapped encouragingly. Lucelia smiled with relief, her enormous brown eyes beaming out over the crowd. “I’m no good at public speaking, so I never thought I’d be talking to a big room full of people.” Her voice was low and breathless. “But then I never dreamed I’d be homeless either. Three years ago, I was just like you. I had a job in the Medical Records department at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. I lived with my husband who worked at a garage, and we had an apartment where my little boy Raffie had his own room.”
Just like you. I knew that the children of at least two women at this table had bedrooms that were probably the size of Lucelia’s entire apartment. And yet I believed that Lucelia believed her own words. She was, after all, a working woman with a home, just like all of us.
“But then my husband started to drink. A lot. He began to miss work so much that he lost his job, and then he drank even more. It was impossible to pay for our apartment on just my salary, and it wasn’t good for Raffie to see his father like this. So I took Raffie and we moved in with my mother-in-law—just me and Raffie, though my husband, we said he could visit now and then until he got himself together.”
Many of us nodded. This was a good plan, a sound course of action.
“But my mother-in-law’s place, it was even smaller than ours. And then her daughter needed to move in with her baby, and my mother-in-law, she’s a nice lady, but she told us we had to go.”
Lucelia’s story continued—a grim and predictable downward spiral as she moved from home to home, couldn’t pay for daycare, couldn’t get a job because she had no daycare, finally landing in a homeless shelter. She paused and looked up, finally in her groove, and got to the punch line. “Horizons for Homeless Youth changed everything for me. With Raffie at the Play Center I could get to work on time. And he did great, you know? He…” she paused, looking down at her notes, and said with great pride, as if mastering a foreign language, “He flourished there. He’d come home—well not home, because we was still in the shelter so it wasn’t home —and be singing songs and recognizing his letters and stuff that he didn’t do before. Every day watching him was something new. It was like a little treat for me every night.”
“My treat’s a glass of red wine,” someone at my table said. “Hers is better.”
“With Raffie taken care of, after a few months I was able to transfer to another, better paying job at St. E’s, and now I’m training to be an ultrasound technician.”
The crowd clapped in acknowledgment of Lucelia’s career advancement.
“And best of all, me and another mother I met at the shelter—her little girl Lena is in daycare with Raffie—we was able to find an apartment in Dorchester that we could afford, right near the T— so we have a home again. Our own home. Thanks to all of you.”
This was our cue. We stood, not a dry eye in the house, and clapped wildly as the Executive Director walked back on stage holding the hand of a skipping, waving, unawed little boy who briefly flirted with the massive audience, then charged into his mother’s thigh, where he buried his head, then comically wagged his rear-end.
After Lucelia picked up her son and bestowed us with a radiant and relieved smile, after she was awarded a bouquet of flowers and embraced by the line of speakers who preceded her, Reverend Liz returned to the stage to introduce a procession of earnest and eloquent Play Center volunteers. Then she brought the breakfast to a close.
“I know that you’ve got appointments and phone calls and meetings to make. But before we wrap up…” She held up her hand like a crossing guard, “…first I’ve got to ask you to take a look at the gorgeous centerpiece in the middle of your table and remember why we’re here. We are here to help this worthy organization with the gifts of our time and our influence and our lobbying and our dollars. Under that gorgeous centerpiece is a stack of pre-printed envelopes that make it easy for you to sign up to help in any and all of these ways. Table Captains, please blindly draw one of the envelopes from the pile. The lucky winner will get to leave with the Crabtree and Evelyn goodie basket. Now I ask you: Does it get better than that?”
I hoped so.
Still, with a feeling approximating relief, I pulled out my credit card. I knew I’d love to volunteer at a Play Center, but only later, when I was no longer working fifty hours a week. But giving money—I’d gotten good at that, gotten better each year in inverse proportion to my appetite for doing anything more direct or personally taxing. As my income had risen, my political energy had waned, only occasionally flaring from its chronic brown out, surging through manic binges of door-to-door canvassing and check writing. I did it with the ease and privilege and impersonality reserved for those who could say to themselves, It’s only money.
When Reverend Liz incited us to give ourselves a round of applause, I felt sick. The rich breakfast frittata settled heavily in my stomach.
Then, of course, I won the centerpiece.
This perky basket of everything lavender—soaps, bath oils, fabric softeners, exfoliating cleansers—was now mine.
“Does anyone else want this?” I asked lamely, but most of my tablemates were already picking up purses and preparing to bolt. I fled the ballroom, lugging my purse, coat, goodie bag, and lavender basket down three escalators and one elevator to the sanctuary of my car. I wanted to be at work, where every moment was busy and none of them counted.
Back in my office, I looked in the goodie bag. An unbearably appropriate stress ball from Bank of America, a handy USB stick from Price Waterhouse PLC, a business card case from a Human Resources consulting firm, a ballpoint pen from Fidelity that had pleasing heft, and a spa-branded pedometer to show me how far and fast I’d walked away.
Satellites (1945-2015)
In the early 1970s, while working at the Circle Pines summer camp, I saw the Northern Lights. It was around midnight as Ian and I walked back from the staff house to our tents. At first we thought the glow in the sky was sheet lightning. But as we emerged from the pine woods, we saw that the big meadow ringed by cabins was crowned by liquid green light. Stalactites of yellow and green and pink light formed a spikey dome in the sky over us.
We raced to the cabins, woke the campers up, and herded them, still dazed and shivering in the cool night air, into the center of the meadow. Some lay on the damp grass; others simply stood hugging themselves, heads back, mouths opens, staring at the luminous swirls above us. It’s like whipped cream, one kid said. No, like the topping on a lemon meringue pie, said another. Like the fringe of hair around a bald guy’s head.
To me the swooping ripples and twisting sheets of light were like curtains blowing in the cosmic wind. But not curtains—something animate. You could see the particles streaming into and through them, shaping and twirling. And as a fold of light began to fade, I saw its dancing shards, dropping and spiking like lines on an electrocardiogram, like the pulsing heart of the universe.
A decade later, late one night while visiting my parents’ summer house eighty miles north of Montreal, we saw an extremely bright light, low on the horizon, moving quickly through the sky. It looked like a star, but bigger, and flying too low to be a jet. After watching it for a few minutes, we could tell that it wasn’t flying so much as orbiting at a very high speed.
After a hurried search, I found the binoculars and aimed them at the brilliant white object. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before—bowtie shaped and covered in a crosshatched pattern of what appeared to be mirrors. We took turns studying it as it moved across the sky. My mother frantically drew what we were seeing on a napkin so that we wouldn’t forget any of its details.
I called the provincial police. “There is a strange object on the ceiling,” I said in my fractured French, never strong to begin with and rusty after so many years of living in the U.S. “Can you see it?” I asked.
They asked me if I’d been drinking. They asked me if I’d ever seen an airplane.
“Non,” I answered. “Ce n’est pas un avion,” I said in frustration. “C’est quelle sort d’un UFO,” I went on, as embarrassed by my French as by the words I was daring to say in it.
(A few years earlier, I’d been at the house with an American friend and locked my keys in the car. Unable to remember the word for “locked,” I eventually told the police what would literally be translated as, “My keys are in the car and I am not.” They came within ten minutes, clearly grateful I’d equipped them with yet another Stupid Anglo st
ory.)
But the night cop at the other end of the line this time was not amused. He’d make note of it, he told me, and that was all he could do.
We watched the object for another five minutes or so. Eventually it sank below the horizon. We went to bed, telling ourselves and mostly believing that whatever this thing was, it was probably man-made. But though fear eventually dwindled to unease, I was still shaken. My infant was sleeping in the next room; my husband was hundreds of miles away. From the deck of our little Laurentian house, this thing in the sky was a polka-dot, dwarfed by the bounty of stars. But I imagined the perspective from up there, where surveillance was constant and half the earth would make a luminous target.
The object that my mother had sketched on that napkin was a communications satellite. In 1966, when Frank Mannors saw his UFO over Dexter, Michigan, there were about thirty satellites in orbit, but what they did and who for was unknown to all but a few scientists, business people, and spies. As I write this today, there are more than three thousand. If we think of them at all, it’s when the football game on our satellite television turns into a dithery mass of pixels and we shake our fists at the heavens for obstructing our view of the replay.
As with so many innovations, the orbiting communications system was the step-child of military technology. In 1945, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested that satellites in high orbit could beam telephone and television to everyone on the planet. In an article for Wireless World, Clarke proposed that a relay satellite sent 22,300 miles above the earth’s surface would take exactly twenty-four hours to complete one orbit. “It would remain fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere and, unlike other heavenly bodies, would neither rise nor set.”28 Clarke’s expectations were incredibly prescient. He predicted that such satellites would inspire a huge and highly targeted range of television programming and enable people to work from their homes. “One of Clarke’s more frightening thoughts,” Time magazine wrote in 1965, “is that every man on earth will eventually have his own telephone number and will carry a personal apparatus that will permit him to be called, even by people who have no idea where he may be.”29
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