Form

My mother recited the ventricles of the heart,

anatomy learned in undergrad biology

sitting in her wheelchair—

lay alone all those nights

room shared with a screaming woman

imposed structure not suitable.

How is my own survival now different than hers

also at the mercy of those unsuited to their professions

like coyotes they stumble in a stink

guiding their charges across a desert.

In the nursing home, her diaper waiting half an hour for the R.A.

where chair, bed, lights, even air flow were determined,

TV cocked at an angle for a woman

who would never have one in her own bedroom,

who would hum to the classical station.

Her brain exploded,

ribbon torn—

and my mother, who loved form—

how could she form words,

electrical impulses bleating

in what was left of her brain.

Yet letters on a page, her handwriting was almost perfect

years of calligraphy instilled.

Survival is studied by scientists

but goes beyond adjustment, speed,

and adrenaline,

beyond fitting pegs in holes.

Saying Goodbye to Al Hackett

The memorial for family friend Al Hackett this past Saturday, December 3rd, took place at the Church by the Side of the Road in Berkeley. As I sat in the row behind the Hackett kids and their mother Dorothy, I thought about how the event was meant for the family. Winston and Marty were tearful. Of course, for me, it brings back memories of losing my father (Sol Benjamin) suddenly in December 1999. And more recently, last year, my Mother, Thelma. So when I weep, it is not only for Al, but the loss of my parents.

Al was as much the fabric of my childhood as my father. They came from different places. Al from Texas, my father from Brooklyn, Al’s father a slave and my father’s father escaping the pogroms as a Russian Jew. When they came of age as young men, they fought for our country-- Al overseas in the Buffalo Soldiers, my father as an aircraft engineer stationed in North Carolina. And because of the war and the G.I. Bill, they both ended up in college, part of their moral compass, Al as a teacher, my father a social worker. Because there was such a thing as a moral compass then, as much as lapels, hats, sport jackets, and pipes—the fabric of men in our society at the time.

Growing up in a multi-cultural neighborhood as I did in Richmond in the 1960s was my normal. The street my family lived on -- Castilla Avenue-- was separated by an alleyway to the street where the Hackett family lived. l spent so much time in that house, as I did with other friends on those blocks, typical for that time. No play dates, just running into each other’s houses. But now I see that neighborhood as a unique environment. People of different ethnicities and origins. Dorothy Hackett pointed out the other day that both blue collar and white collar professions shared the neighborhood, as she alluded to diversity as much as people coming together to build a community. Al and Dorothy and my parents were dedicated to a world their own parents had survived, where they fought for freedoms.

Today, I see the Hacketts fairly regularly. I have always felt comfortable and at home with them. They are my family. At the memorial, what struck me was that other people echoed that feeling. Their family too.

Dear Al, I have been mourning your death, even as I know that at the end you were in discomfort, that you outlived your body and mind, not able to finally speak. You finally passed, the day after receiving your eldest daughter Tish who had come from Michigan to see you. You waited until after your 62nd wedding anniversary. I remember your 50th in 2005, and how you sang to Dorothy in your beautiful tenor voice. And that's how I think of you— at home, playing the piano and singing a jazz standard. Gentle, human, warm, funny, a long-winded story-teller. Your smile welcoming me into your home, saying "Hi, sweet." 

Birth

Mom and Me at my MFA graduation, 2006

On what authority do you leave

this world? This is not my first

experience of death, but a rectangular frame

for my entire life. I cannot

flourish without song, burning

wildly. I weep and I wait.

The precipice that placed you in this

world and me in this afterlife

eases through a vein, while

a sparrow sings in his striped

garment, full of early light.

Different than the owl,

cloaked in a suit of darkness,

green and brown, surprised

for the love of one person.

Both witness loss of breath.

Having borne me, you did not

leave the past behind—

you delved into family history,

discovered cousins, cozied

their feathers in your house.

It rained the first Passover

after Dad died, and I stormed out,

walked the well-knit paths

leading me from one area

to the next. We could not

agree on the niceties—oven temp,

amounts of food—almost like mourning

except we did not talk about

if Dad were still here. And now,

approaching Passover after your death,

I have no one to disagree with,

no one to stand over me

tell me to serve more soup,

clear the bowls,

serve the chicken.

The last fires will eventually

bow, but for now I cannot

raise my arms, numb.

And seeing “Swan Lake,”

music of my childhood, intimate as

your warm generous arms

and dark eyes. On stage

Hungarian costumes dance to

a whimsical beat, and the swans

identical white-clad,

mirrored and multiplied,

move in patterns,

then arms and legs

lay one over the other, long thin ends

at rest. With each tune, I return

to what placed me in this world,

what birthed me and sustained me.

No, there is no easing

through, no light—

only dusk. And pointed toes

carry the swans,

floating above the stage,

feathered white hair-pieces snugly in place,

white tutus flowing as

they mourn being turned from humans,

their lives permanently changed.

Branches Reaching

England, 1955

Ushers wearing white gowns part before the round stage,

brightly lit, ready for take off

glowing like a white snail on the trail of Mount Tam,

curved black line opening out against pearl.

Ravi Shankar sits in the center, Sitar resonating,

waves of sound a hand motioning.

Internal orange, oak tree branches, a brain

making a turn and then another, and

then follow with inner eye, elbows, then

cauliflower leaves emerging.

My mother is examined by Dr. Ravishankar

a woman in her early thirties

who speaks loudly

says you won’t be able to live alone

people have to watch her.

My mother hasn’t slept in two days

since found on her bathroom floor

incoherent, left side bruised

and flacid. And now, like a smudge on a mirror

she is seen as an old woman

the tree with its many branches

reaching incrementally.

Oak outside the hospital

a fifty year old brain against the sky

with roots that tip under a circular pathway.

Branches, metranomic fingers, grow,

pulse regular, blood circulating

late summer leaves a grey green.

The clot waited for this moment

after years of observation from a high balcony seat

opera glasses afloat, absorbing the drama.

Waited until now.

After Passover

Take away the knife

dishes at Passover washed

from the table, like the rocks

we placed on my father’s grave

when we lowered my mother in the ground.

Don’t expect a speech, throat

curled in on inappropriate flowers, throated

tight in someone’s hand, knife-

cut down the hill, not here, the ground

sacred according to the Rabbi, washed

like her body the day she died, grave

waiting without her wedding ring, no rock

but a ten dollar gold band from Brooklyn. Gone the rocking

chair at her father’s third floor walkup and throat

of lace her mother left behind, engraved

before my mother held a knife,

before she moved to London, washed

her hair in a sink when the Underground

stopped working. Maternal lineage grounded

her, the shore of Bremerhaven where a rock

broke open and her parents boarded a ship, washed

away from their deaths. But her own throated

words—what did they carry at the end? A knife

dropped at a dining table, grave

waiting? She knew, saying gravely

she couldn’t go on, leaning in a wheelchair, grounded

all day like a miscreant, no knife,

only fork and spoon, left hand rocking

back and forth, trying to clear her throat

to avoid choking, pureed food washed

in a blender. Before it came to this, she washed

her own hair for the last time, gravely,

the morning the clot throated

her brain. Stoppage of opera, grounded

from reading, where Elizabeth Bennet throws a rock

at her competitor. All the mail, I now open with a knife

though my throat sinks to the ground,

mud-washed in a dirty grave.

I throw rocks, brain open with a knife.

The Whole Person: “Fruitvale Station” by Ryan Coogler (beware Spoiler alert!)

As Ryan Coogler says to interviewer Elvis Mitchell, on “The Treatment,” the idea is to show Oscar Grant as a whole person through the perspectives of those who he cared about—his mother, girlfriend, daughter, and friends. The 22 year-old African American man was many things to many people, and the fact that he did not make it through that night—New Year’s Eve of 2008—is a tragedy we experience intimately as viewers. But this is more than about Grant. It is about all Black men, how once they are arrested and taken to prison, often their lives are over.

The setting of the Bay Area is done realistically with a hand-held camera. In fact, it is hauntingly real for someone such as myself who grew up in the Richmond in a racially mixed neighborhood in the 1960s and has lived here her whole life. And doubly so for someone who teaches at Laney College in the heart of Oakland. Coogler’s hard and straight-forward camera style puts us directly in Grant’s viewpoint, seeing San Francisco from the Oakland side, the “mean” streets of Oakland as Oscar drives with the music turned up, the setting of a Bart train coming in from West Oakland, making the curve, and diving down underground towards Lake Merritt—it is all familiar. And in that, a local viewer is drawn in implicitly, in the sense that we are part of the tension—the East Bay/Bay Area effort to mix and integrate races and cultures amid the racial tension experienced every day. Coogler shows us the best of the Bay and the worst of the Bay. And whether we live here or not, we all become Oscar.

What makes this a work of art rather than a documentary needs to be stated. Coogler accessed court documents and cell phone footage of the shooting, had interviews with Grant’s family and friends. Fictionalized details mix with pieces from the actual day, and the effect is that the elements of good storytelling do not detract from actual events, but instead, build on them. More than the movie trailer shows, this story is not just about the death of Grant, but it is about the mundane events in a day—events which show character and reveal possible points of change.

The one flashback in this film, which the film maker uses to tie together some incidents later on, goes back five years earlier to Oscar’s incarceration in prison. Present day New Year’s Eve, he sits at the water’s edge in Oakland, looking across to San Francisco, a significant day in several ways. Square chunks of concrete jut out instead of rocks near the shore, evoking the East Bay’s industrial past. He remembers his mother’s visit to prison on New Year’s Eve, her birthday. Before coming into the prison visiting room, Oscar has to bend over naked, is searched everywhere, and finally, when he sits down across from his mother, he muses about life outside prison, deflecting her question of “What’s that on your face?” referring to the bruise below his right eye, a small shiner. She tries to get him to admit his guilt towards abandoning his girlfriend, and more importantly, his daughter, by being in prison. She holds him accountable. Finally, exasperated, she says it’s her last visit, and walks away down the hall, as guards restrain a shouting Oscar, upset because she would not hug him goodbye.

After the flashback, we are with Oscar again at the Bay, as he now stands above the water. He takes out the big bag of weed he has stashed under his shirt and pants, his belt holding it in, and turns it upside down and shakes it into the Bay. Clearly a turnaround for someone dealing drugs. Yes, he has lost his job at Farmer Joe’s grocery store. Yes, he feels like a disappointment to his girlfriend, who he admittedly cheated on, and to his mother and even grandmother, both who remind him of little things—don’t use your cell phone while driving, don’t call me while you’re working. He is trying to get it together, but it’s hard. He is playful with his daughter, and wants to please everyone, but he has an image to uphold with his friends, where he is expected to step up and be tough. It’s a tall order. He is just a person.

While the rest of the film is chronological, like many films it opens with frame of the end. In this case, it is from the perspective of a cell phone camera, the footage taken by someone standing inside the Bart train, capturing the activity on the Fruitvale station Bart platform. The cell phone wobbles and shakes, as the car is crowded. In the background we can hear rushes of sound, the horror of the crowd as the scene mounts. Then, the film cuts to the beginning of the day.

This is a single day-in-the-life, the last day of Oscar Grant, from the domestic early morning with his girlfriend and daughter, to Oscar’s dropping his daughter at day care and his girlfriend at her blue collar job, and all the hours in the day he spends driving around. He gets gas, yells at a car speeding away after running over a dog, and holds the dog in his arms as it bleeds to death. He shops for crabs for his mother’s birthday dinner, and we experience that family celebration in lingering shots, from the dinner preparation to the washing up. We see the Bart ride out to the City with Oscar’s friends and girlfriend, the partying on Bart with East Bay folks of different ethnicities—the best of the Bay—and the ride back. There, mayhem comes when a man from Oscar’s prison time recognizes him and they lay into each other among the tightly peopled car. The Bart police arrive.

The train is stopped at Fruitvale, but the story is not halted. It moves painfully forward in a final long camera shot, this one taking its time, through Oscar’s and his friends’ experiences, sitting down on the Bart platform, then pushed, struggling, asking the officers what they are being arrested for, handcuffs, the “nigger-bitch” name calling by one Bart Police officer to Oscar’ inciting Oscar’s temper. Oscar pushed face down on the pavement and held there with the officer’s knee to his throat. The gun shot. The look on Oscar’s face of rotten disbelief. The look on the cop’s face, as he tries to cuff him, senselessly.

Cut to Oscar’s girlfriend downstairs outside the Bart gates hearing the shot, screaming. When Oscar’s friends come down cuffed, led by officers, she yells “Why don’t you tell me what is going on?” A stretcher appears and is hauled up the escalator. Then it comes down with her man on it, bloodied. The ambulance takes off leaving her there. She calls Oscar’s mother, who says, “I’ll come get you,” and they go to Highland hospital, where they learn the external bleeding has been stopped, but the internal bleeding continues. Family and friends gather in the waiting room, pray in a circle. We are praying too, and even though we know the end result, know he will die, we pray because we are invested in this.

When his mother is escorted to her son’s body, she has no choice but to stand gazing through the window at him. It’s a homicide case, she is told. She cannot hug him. We remember how she left him that day in prison five years ago, their differences large. We understand her guilt, her regret. It’s not her fault. We can only be devastated. Torn apart. When he dies, we lose someone we have come to sympathize with and see from the inside. He is not a hero, but just another young Black man who has been in prison, and now, years later, has died from a gun shot wound inflicted by a White man. Whose fault is it? What can we do to stop it?

The Orchestra

She called us partners in crime. She the counselor and me the English instructor, working in this special program together at our college. She was unashamedly disorganized, professed her weaknesses to me as I sang out my fortes. We worked like a badly organized symphony orchestra, where the chimes come in at the wrong moment for their one clang, and the french horns fall flat, noticeable in the exposed section of the third movement.

The first semester, she called one morning.

“Laurel, I’m here—”

I had just gotten out of bed to the ring of the phone and picked it up as she was speaking the beginning of a thought.

“Where are you?” I asked.

She had arrived at school to set up the conference room on the fourth floor for the lunch event.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

I could kill her! I couldn’t believe it.

“The students are helping me set up,” she said.

I could picture the students bringing down bags of supplies from her office to the conference room, pushing tables and chairs around, unpacking the food.

“I thought we hadn’t confirmed it yet. We haven’t even matched the students with the mentors,” I said.

This wasn’t the only mess, as I thought of this event, back in bed that morning, where she would simply throw things together without proper planning. I wouldn’t rush in at the spur of the moment to do a haphazard job, as I imagined people pushed together randomly. I thought, too, of the letters I had the students write that first week in my class to a prospective mentor, and the notes I made at the bottom of each sheet with their interests. She had, somewhere in her office or at home, a stack of forms the mentors had filled out. Twice in our weekly meetings, she had not been ready to do the matching.

She was a real social person. An extrovert. Someone who felt buoyed up by a room-full of people, while the experience drained me. She embraced others literally, with her arms, and also with her open smile and the strong warm lift in her voice. While I felt crippled in a crowd, she was a flower whose center, exposed, enjoyed the light. So, for her, a disorganized occasion offered no problems. For me, the lack of structure made it impossible to function. I needed it to prop me up.

In these gatherings with students and their mentors from the community who were part of the program, the students would be put on display, either talking about a poster they had made in her class, or reading from something they had written in my class, both allowing them to talk about their hopes and aspirations. Sometimes the mentors would talk about their past experiences, not much different than the challenging road the students were up again, not only because of economics, but also because many of them were “undocumented” Latinos.

She would say, in front of the whole room, “See, you guys! These people aren’t different than you!”

The students recoiled to the I-told-you-so as little kids would respond to a mother chiding. I could only stare in horror.

My role in these events was limited, not only because of the organizational difference between us, but because I had to listen to her say such things. I could lead my own class more easily because I had full power, while this shared effort made me lean on her, as she would open the event and do most of the talking.

After three semesters of working in the program together, we attended a summer training for the program. She had attended it before, having done the program for a few years, and even though I had taught in it for a year and a half, I hadn’t done the training, partly not realizing the value, partly because I wasn’t entirely committed to teaching in it (I inherited the program from another teacher who went out on maternity leave.) After the training, I felt prepared to take more of a roll, confidence instilled from knowing better how to do all the program required.

Then, one morning near the end of the summer session, I entered the administration building before class. The Dean of Humanities, going in the other direction, stopped suddenly in her tracks, as if she had just changed her mind about something.

“Do you have a minute?” she asked, cocking her head.

I shook my head yes.

“Bad news, I’m afraid. The college is putting the program on a planning year.”

I was stunned.

“I’m sorry. I know you like it,” she said, her face sorrowful.

“The program is canceled?” I couldn’t comprehend.

She reached over put her arm on my shoulder.

I started crying uncontrollably.

“You’ve done a great job.” She hugged me.

She said that my partner would not be in the program when it restarted the following fall, after it had been revamped. Apparently, one of the VPs had frowned on a number of my partner’s practices, topped off by the fact that she didn’t get waivers signed by students or their parents before taking them to tour UCLA, a long drive in a few cars—hers and two students’—a two night stay in a motel, and meals out.

I thought of how the program had no support from the college in terms of money for the last couple of years—how my partner did her own fundraising, along with the students, including for this trip down south. I thought, too, of how she had no support from the counseling department: she had been in another program at school, and then got her masters in counseling; when she returned, she was not given the status of “faculty,” thus, being “staff” she had no rights, according to the counseling department, to an office on their floor. Later this would come back to haunt her as the very same people accused her of isolating herself up on the sixth floor, away from their department. Everyone, it seemed, turned against her. We did not work ideally together, but if she had been given her due, and if the program had monetary legs, we would have had a chance to make it work.

When the Dean told me of the dissolution of the program and how my partner would no longer be working in the new version of it, part of me was curious. What would it be like working with someone else? She had defined the roll of counselor and co-coordinator for me, yet I already knew from the summer training that there were plenty of areas that we hadn’t implemented properly, such as not providing a summer orientation for the students about to embark on the year’s worth of classes and commitment to the program. The Dean telling me a few weeks ahead of the fall semester was bad enough, but I was concerned that no one was telling her the program was on hold or that she wasn’t doing the program—whatever their story would be. I emailed my department chairs and they said her  own Dean needed to tell her. I emailed him. No response.

She was always the one who knew things, having worked at the college for decades—who performed which duties, who to go to for advice on a particular issue, which people got a long and which did not. She was an expert on the politics of the college, and knew the community around it as well—where to go to recruit students. She would go to students homes if they were having trouble, and talk to their parents.

Then, right before school was supposed to start, I got a call from her. 

 

 "I have ovarian cancer," she said.

“What stage is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Laurel, and I’m afraid to ask. I guess I just don’t want to know.” Her voice sounded quiet, the “know” curling in on itself at the end of the sentence.

When I visited her after surgery she was lively. As I approached her room, I could see there were three other people in the room, two sitting, one standing. An altar with figurines and pictures had been erected on a shelf. Next to that, vases of flowers made it look like a flower shop, and the myriad cards sat in layers, while others were taped to the wall. One of the friends told me to sit and we all exchanged a few words before they left. They had been there a while already, they said. Then, appearing from the hallway, her mother-figure friend, Ana, stepped out of the room to allow us time alone together. I knew  about Ana—Ana who she had traveled with, arm in arm around the world.

She couldn’t tell me the prognosis, because again, she didn’t want the information. But she was eager to talk about the students.

“Did you hear about Alma? She called the police on Jose, and now they won’t let him on campus. She’s making too much of things, as usual. Will you call him? And talk to Alma. Tell her—”

I promised to get things straightened out, but I knew, really, that only she could do that. She knew the students better than I, having been their counselor, and could talk to them in a way I couldn’t—a way that reached more deeply.

One afternoon in November, I visited her in the hospital after my classes. I had asked her for the chemo schedule.

She had her own room, her bed situated diagonally with a chair to the foot of it. Her eyes were shut and she snored loudly. I moved the chair to the side of the bed, though it scarcely fit. The hospital setting was familiar to me, as my husband Dan and I had attended a cancer support group for over a year at UCSF because of his cancer. However, he had no chemo with his early stage cancer, so this set up was new for me, the bag containing the toxic mixture hung where the subcutaneous fluids should hang, and its tube went into a port in her chest. I knew she also had a port in her abdomen, because she had shown it to me, but the tube didn’t go there today.

A nurse came in and nodded. She whispered to me, “She’s asleep.”

This seemed strange, because wasn’t it obvious that she was sleeping? But her words allowed us to talk, and she asked me if I would like some juice. She went out and brought a small box.

I had come for my friend, my partner at work, yet there was no sign of her waking. I sat for twenty minutes, as a witness to her treatment. Finally, she shorted abruptly and opened her eyes.

“Oh hi, Laurel.” Her voice was muffled, different from its normal clamorous ring.

“How are you?” she asked, a layer of fog clouding the rhythm of her speech. The patient asking the visitor how they are.

“Fine,” I said, and started telling her what was going on at school, not so much to entertain her, as really needing some advice on students.

Then her eyes closed again.

She was the only one who would understand, and she wasn’t awake to hear it. In the year and a half we had worked in the program together, I had the benefit of her counseling expertise on how to handle students’ needs. I was without her at school, my support, her absence showing how valuable our weekly meetings had been, even when she went off on tangents, telling me stories where she always learned something. As I sat there watching her sleep, I remembered one story which involved how she was in a colleague’s office on campus. A former student of hers who had done work study for her was now doing work study for this person. Without thinking, she asked the student to get her a cup of coffee. Her colleague reprimanded her. “I learned something new,” she had told me, her voice a ringing bell, speaking to overstepping her bounds, navigating situations.

Now she was taken to and from the hospital by different people because her friend Ana was away, unavailable. Ana had stayed with her at home for over a month of the beginning of the treatment, while her husband did nothing for her.

Months later, after her final chemo, after celebrating with a vacation to New Orleans with Ana, and taking a few Southern California trips to visit her son and others, she left three phone messages.

I knew. It had returned.

When I called her back, she was in bed, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. It was not like her to be in bed during the day, ever.

“They found cancer cells in my blood test. They need to do a CT scan,” she said, slurring her words.

“I need to put my affairs in order. I’m getting rid of papers in the garage, so when I die, others don’t have to worry about it,” she said.

The words bristled. How could she talk this way? She was looking at the gallows, yet it was hard to hear.

In the wake of her treatment, when we thought it was over and done with, our lunch get togethers in the past few months had been easy social events. Partly talk of school, partly getting to know each other more, we existed together. And now, with the new diagnosis, she was getting ready to die, making her belongings less.

She also did not want to put anything off, including her new plans for work and other interesting endeavors, including working at a college or high school. How could she both live and die? I wondered. She is one of the most energetic people I know, regardless of the cancer.

There are two truths. The external truth: she drove me crazy working with her. The emotional truth: I have grown to appreciate her strengths. She hasn’t changed at all—it’s me who has changed. I don’t want to let go of her. She has taught me how to love and forgive. I want to hold her and keep her here.