I still have the tattered Golden Book of Nursery Tales (1948) and Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes (1953) presented to me at birth. At a time in my life when preserving the past evidently mattered less to me, I removed the covers and added my own crayon and pen illustrations to those of Tibor Gergely, whose images are for me the definitive Mama Bear and Papa Bear, City Mouse and Country Mouse, Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf. Continue reading
I was ten years old when I made a pinhole projector from a shoebox for my first solar eclipse on July 20, 1963. It reached a mere 30% totality over Globe, Arizona, but I was a curious child, and seeing that moon shadow as it bit even a small piece out of the sun’s globe was exciting enough for me to remember more than five decades later. Sadly, I must have become too jaded to watch the handful of solar eclipses in the 54-year interval. Or maybe it was cloudy; I was living in North Carolina for most of them, after all. But when I learned well over a year ago about the August 21 total eclipse practically in my own back yard, I got the fever. I determined that I would get reservations for South Carolina far in advance and be able to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event in comfort and firsthand. Continue reading
August 19, 2017
Speaking my mind today may be impolitic. However, because what I fear most is the silence following the premature death of the First Amendment, speak I must.
I am reminded of Paul’s recital of his unblemished pedigree: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3: 5-6). I cannot claim so perfect a lineage. Mine is cobbled together, a denial of my birthright, a patchwork of personal choices in the quest to believe and do the right things. Continue reading
I must be clear that this all happened a week ago, July 30, eighth Sunday after Pentecost on the liturgical calendar–or kalendar, if we’re being precious–Year A, Track 2. Everything would have different had it not been this specific Sunday in this long green season of Ordinary Time.
Just before I left for church, I closed an email as follows: “Where do you worship now? I’m on my way to St. Michael’s as soon as I close. It’s hard to feel part of a community when no one knows my name.” For more than a year, that whimper of despair has become a common theme in my various forms of communication. I have been attending the same parish since February of 2012. I know the date because the church was close to Rex Hospital, in whose waiting rooms and bedside chairs I spent innumerable hours in the succeeding four years. As I left the altar after receiving the Holy Eucharist, I stopped at the healing station and asked for prayer on behalf of my husband, who was recovering from one in a long series of medical treatments. Combined with the magnificence of the stthe churchained glass, the organ, and the choir–and the spiritually and intellectually riveting sermon–this priestly laying on of hands led me to believe that I was home. Clearly, that was not the belief with which I set out last Sunday morning. Continue reading
“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment.
“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.
“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, ch. 1
*** Continue reading
Seven years after the Armistice of 1918, Paris-born playwright Maurice Rostand published a three-act play, L’homme qui j’ai tué (The Man I Killed), about a Frenchman seeking forgiveness for killing a German soldier in the trenches of the Great War. Seven years later, Berlin-born Ernst Lubitsch directed an American film version of Rostand’s work, retitled Broken Lullaby to avoid spoiling the open secret of the story’s climax. And now, emerging from the long, century-old shadow of that war, Paris-born François Ozon renames the story yet again and retells it–mostly in German–from the perspective of the family of Frantz, the German pacifist soldier who was killed in Rostand’s title. All these permutations result in Ozon’s 2017 Frantz, whose complexities take full advantage of the developments in film, in politics–and in philosophy–over the past one hundred years. Continue reading
March 16, 1981
Daddy and me | March 24, 1987
Yes, I know the word penultimate. Yes, I have known since reading Strunk and White that one word is always better than three, even when the three are hyphenated. But I received my inspiration for this post from a title I passed over fleetingly in the New Yorker daily feed, and I wanted to preserve the diction: “My Last Conversation and so on.” I actually went back and read it, and it was quite good. No, it was dazzling, in its straightforward and understated way.
I am not a journalist covering wars across the globe. And my father was even further from being a law professor. He was just a copper miner from Globe, Arizona (a crusher repairman and sometimes president of the local Steelworkers union), and I am just . . . well, I have been many small things, but mostly a teacher of writing and thinking. Nor was our second-to-last conversation dazzling in its understated but confusing and not-at-all-straightforward way. Continue reading
More than a year ago, I decided to observe the centenary of World War I by using it as the theme of my English composition classes devoted to writing across the curriculum. To that end, I have immersed myself in a wide assortment of novels and films about the conflict of 1914-1918, about which David Lloyd George quipped, “This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.” Each of these works has offered me new and profound insights into the atrocity and devastation of trench and tunnel warfare, mustard and phosgene gas, shell shock and disfigurement, loss of faith in the future–and in God. Continue reading
Milton B. “Nunie” Nunamaker
Since Just(e) Words made its debut more than a year ago, I have shared in its virtual pages my memories of several formative individuals–including a three-post, 5,000-word homage to my mentor at the University of Arizona. I have also noted more than once the central rôle of music in my life, including a full post, “The Many Gifts of Music,” devoted in part to the people who gave me those gifts. I even called one of those people “the most unforgettable character in my life story” and promised to write an entire post about him.
So why have I never written about Nunie? I have been struggling with that question over the last two weeks, and the closest I can come to an answer is that I simply don’t remember enough to tell a coherent story. I have searched my photo albums from the 1960s and found amazingly few pictures of Nunie. I paged through the Wigwam, our high school yearbook, where few photos even show his face; pictures of Nunie should be pictures of his band, after all. I searched Google and located a written tribute and gravesite photos posted by Christine Marin. I found a few reminiscences on Facebook. And I received permission from fellow Globe High School graduate and band member Robert Cubitto to include his thoroughly researched biography of our shared mentor (see the first comment below). Otherwise, I can offer only a few private glimpses into the life I shared with Nunie. Continue reading
